Connecticut came at him through a veil of gray winter light, a hard contrast to the West and its long horizons. In Danbury the world seemed to tighten. The streets were narrower than he'd imagined, and the lack of sidewalks let the asphalt press right up against the porches, house after house, turning every block into a corridor. Cars threaded past one another in a constant, low-speed negotiation, each driver giving up inches as if it cost something.
When he found the duplex, Quinn pulled into the driveway and left his hands on the wheel. He studied the narrow space and the way it pinched in around the building, calculating where he might be allowed to put the car, what would count as being in the way, before he finally shut the engine off. The silence that followed filled with the rhythmic, metallic clicks of the hood cooling down after three thousand miles of strain.
Darren and Riley came out the front door almost at once. A rush of hugs, then Riley's familiar kiss on his cheek, pushed three thousand miles of isolation back behind him. Darren produced a camera and started filming and photographing with the concentration of a director, turning Quinn's muddy car and hollowed-out face into evidence, as if the arrival mattered enough to preserve.
The noise drew the landlord and his wife from the adjacent door. They stepped into the driveway and joined them for a few photos, everyone smiling and standing close in the thin winter air. Quinn wasn't dressed for the drop in temperature, the last few hours spent insulated by the car's heater. Riley noticed the way he braced against the breeze and produced a small tube of chapstick with the practiced efficiency of a medic. She offered it the way you'd offer gum, casual and assumed, and said his lips were already starting to crack. He hesitated, looking at the tube as if it were a social trap. The shared wax felt like an intimate bridge he wasn't going to cross. Riley laughed at his stiffness and told him she didn't have cooties, that the balm was a necessary layer of protection against salt and frost. The cloying, artificial scent of cherries reached him before he could refuse. A quiet seal against an environment he hadn't come prepared to handle.
The landlord seemed hospitable at first, but there was a physical intensity in him that never softened. He looked like a man built for weekends of masonry or for walking a neighborhood line and calling it his. He was tall, dense with athletic muscle, his face anchored by a thick mustache. Even when he smiled, his attention stayed fixed in a quiet appraisal that felt less like a greeting than a safety check.
He stood in a heavy, tight-fitting sweatshirt with a bold GAP logo across the chest and carried the unblinking authority of a high school wrestling coach or a plainclothes cop. His friendliness read as conditional, granted only so long as the rules held. He lived in the mirror half of the duplex with his wife and a silent, broad-chested Rottweiler. The dog watched Quinn unload from the porch without moving, its stillness making the scene feel smaller.
The duplex surprised him by being vertical. Two stories, high ceilings, wood floors refinished just enough to make everything bright and echoing. The place amplified itself. Quinn listened the way he always did in a new room, gauging the acoustics before any music started, reading the space as a kind of venue.
His room was modest and functional, tucked into a corner of the layout with a bed, a plain dresser, and a closet that claimed most of one wall. A single window looked onto the narrow street. It faced in a way that promised only a few brief hours of direct sun before the gray Connecticut winter pulled the light back.
The first night went down easy. Shared food, then an easy current of beer and wine that softened the corners of the room. The three of them slipped into conversation with a clean, unnerving continuity, picking up where they had left off in California as if the intervening years had not occurred, as if the failures had been a misunderstanding.
Belonging moved in where Quinn's confidence had thinned. He let himself sink into it. The tension of three thousand miles began to leak out of his body, and his shoulders dropped, for the first time in months, without him noticing it happen.
Later that evening, the landlord came back to the front door with a bottle of wine. The gift carried a rule inside it, delivered in the tone of neighborly advice. He said the duplex walls were thin, smiling wide and practiced, and that while Quinn was here he needed to understand how things worked. He was around most days, he added, as if he kept an office somewhere in the house and could hear the place the way you hear your own name. If the music rose to an intrusive volume, he would give a quick knock on the wall. No anger in it, no threat, only the calm of a rule that had already been agreed to by the people who belonged. In the haze of the first night's celebration, it sounded reasonable.
Their new shared reality took hold at once. Guitars came out as casually as another round of drinks, and the house stayed animated well past midnight. They revisited songs from the California years, melodies still lodged in muscle memory, a bridge back to the version of themselves that had once seemed on its way somewhere.
At one point Darren disappeared into his room and returned with a folder thick with scratch notes. He spread it open on the table and began flipping pages with the pleased urgency of someone finally being taken seriously. There were visual concepts, a curated list of bands to study for stagecraft, and a rough outline of recording gear they would need once they were serious again. They talked about small venues and bars that might take a chance on a loud, theatrical act. Darren sketched character costumes and stage personas and kept coming back to KISS as the benchmark for professional commitment, proof that you could turn volume and devotion into a discipline.
For all the scale of what they were describing, the instruments remained strictly acoustic. The duplex was open and resonant, loud in the wrong ways, and it offered no protection from sound. Footsteps on the stairs carried. Voices drifted cleanly through the walls from the neighboring unit. Electric guitars and amplifiers were out of the question in a place this porous.
On the second night, they drifted back to their guitars the way you drift back to a habit, without announcing it, without making it a plan. Darren reached under the coffee table for a notebook and set it down with a care that felt almost ceremonial, squaring the spine against the edge as if the alignment could make the session official.
During the week Quinn had been crossing the country, Darren had been collecting fragments. Riffs, melodic hooks, small turns of sound that were not yet songs, nothing finished or even stable, only the kind of material that evaporates if you do not catch it in time. He wanted to get them down, to secure them before they slipped away.
Quinn nodded. It had been months since he'd played for more than a few distracted minutes at a time. He let a small, measured silence hold, then said, with a forced lightness, that the voicemail had made it sound like they would be writing together. Darren glanced up from his notes, surprised by the comment but not offended. He explained that he only wanted a starting point, something to keep them from idling while Quinn was still on the road.
The session stretched past the first hour. Quinn's fingertips began to throb. The calluses he used to rely on had gone soft during his time away from the instrument, leaving him exposed to every string. He shifted his pressure by degrees, changing the angle just enough to spare the worst of it without breaking the rhythm. Once he winced, quick and small, meant to pass as nothing. Darren didn't notice. He was carried by the momentum of the work. He poured another glass of wine and moved straight into the next progression as if pain were irrelevant, as if the body were only a tool you kept fed and pointed in the right direction.
A knock landed against the common wall, plain and heavy, the presence of someone asserting himself from the other side. The music died mid-measure. The room held. Riley tilted her head toward the partition and asked if they'd heard it. Darren gave a small, dismissive shrug and whispered that they were fine. For several seconds they waited in the after-ring of the room, listening for a second knock, for footsteps, for anything that would turn the warning into a confrontation. Nothing came.
Quinn restarted the progression, tentative at first. Darren came in hard on the melody, louder than before, as if momentum could outrun whatever had reached through the wall. From the couch, Riley mouthed along to lyrics she knew, soft and off the beat in the way a fan sings from the crowd, her smile lingering.
The knock came again, firmer this time. It traveled through the drywall with a clean vibration that made the building's thinness feel like a shared liability, a reminder that every sound they made belonged to someone else too. No one stopped playing at once, but the joy had gone out of it. They kept going on stubborn momentum, chasing a rhythm that no longer felt true. When Darren finally set his guitar down, the room cooled into a plain awareness of limits. He checked the clock and rubbed a hand over his face, the irritation arriving late and unmistakable. He had work in the morning. Riley made a brief face of disappointment but didn't argue. Quinn stayed where he was. The guitar's warmth still pressed against his leg. In his fingertips, a dull throb kept time with what the night had cost him.