Read Chapter 24: A Flash in the Dark

The darkroom clock read half past two when I remembered the notebook. It sat on the workbench beside the developing trays, its spiral binding propped open to my contact sheet notes. I'd been careless. Worse than careless—stupid.

Robbie stood in the doorway with the notebook in his hands.

The red safelight painted his face in bloody tones. His jaw worked slowly, like he was chewing glass. When he finally spoke, his voice came out wrong—low and quiet, the way it got right before he walked onstage.

"Danny."

I set down the tongs. My hands were steady, which surprised me. "Robbie, that's not—"

"'Tell Robbie I'm alive.'" He read the words off the page, each one clipped and precise. "That's what you wrote. That's what he said to you. When?"

I wiped my palms on my jeans. "The Hammersmith show. He was in the crowd."

"You chased him."

"Yes."

"And you didn't tell me." He wasn't asking. The notebook dropped from his fingers and hit the concrete floor with a flat smack. "You watched me play that whole set. You watched me take the Valium you took from me. You stood in the control room and developed Lenny's film with me, and you never said a word."

"I was trying to protect you."

"Protect me." He laughed—a single, hollow note. "From what? From Danny? From knowing my own brother is alive and walking around London while I've been grieving him for four months?"

I stepped toward him. "He's been hiding on purpose. Whatever reason he has for staying away, it's his choice. You were barely holding it together. I didn't want to—"

"You didn't want to deal with it." His eyes were flat, suddenly distant. "You decided what I could handle. You made that call for me."

"That's not fair."

"Fair?" He shook his head, backing out of the doorway. "You've been walking around with that camera like it's armor. Pointing it at everyone except yourself. You don't get to decide what I can handle, Mara. You're not my keeper."

The words hit like a flashbulb going off in a dark room—blinding, then leaving spots. "Robbie, listen to me. I know I should have told you. I made a mistake."

"You took my pills. You hid my brother's message. What's next?" His voice climbed, cracking at the edges. "You going to tell me what to play on the record? What to sing?"

"I would never—"

"Everyone wants a piece of me." He pressed a fist to his sternum. "Dex wants my songs. The label wants my voice. Lenny wanted my time until he got himself killed. And you—" He pointed at my chest. "You want my picture. My pain, framed nice on your wall."

The red light made his eyes look wet. Or maybe they were. "That's not true."

"No?" He laughed again, harder this time. "Then tell me why you're still here. Why you stayed after Dex sold your prints. Why you're developing Lenny's film in some borrowed darkroom at two in the morning instead of going home."

"Because I'm part of this. The band. You."

"The band." He said it like a curse. "The band is a cage, Mara. It's Danny and me in a room that smells like cigarettes and fear, trying to write something that doesn't suck. And now it's just me, with a manager who treats me like inventory and a photographer who thinks she knows what's good for me better than I do."

Robbie grabbed his coat from the hook by the door. The motion was sharp, jerky—wrong angles, like a puppet with tangled strings.

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"Out."

"Robbie, please. It's late. We can talk about this."

"There's nothing to talk about." He stopped in the hallway, backlit by the corridor's single bulb. His silhouette looked thin. "You made your choice. You chose my comfort over my truth. That's not love, Mara. That's control."

He was gone before I could answer.

The outer door slammed and I stood alone in the red glow, listening to my own heartbeat. The notebook lay on the floor. I picked it up and closed it, tucking it into my bag with the surviving roll of Lenny's film, still undeveloped.

I stayed in the darkroom until the light started to change outside the grimy window. Then I went home, alone, and didn't sleep.

---

Two days.

Two days of phone calls that rang and rang. Two days of Dex pacing the studio with a cigarette burned down to his knuckle. Two days of Viv making tea nobody drank. Two days of the label offices buzzing with a new energy—press packets, advance copies, release date confirmations.

The album was done. "Hollow Crown" was real.

And Robbie was gone.

"He'll show up for the sessions," Dex said on the third morning, shuffling papers on his desk. But his hand shook when he lit a fresh cigarette.

I said nothing.

The call came at eleven. Dex's office phone bleated and he grabbed it like a lifeline. His face cycled through relief, confusion, then pale, rigid anger.

"Right," he said into the receiver. "Right. Yes. We'll sort it. Thank you." He hung up and stared at the wall.

"That was the label," he said. "They're moving up the press blitz. There's an interview with NME scheduled for Thursday, a session at Maida Vale on Friday, and a launch party Saturday night at the Marquee. Full media push."

"Robbie doesn't know any of this."

"No." Dex crushed his cigarette. "And the label doesn't care. They say we go live with or without him. They're talking about finding a replacement bassist if he doesn't surface by the weekend."

"Replacement." The word tasted wrong. "You can't replace him. He's the band."

Dex met my eyes. His voice dropped. "We can't release an album called *Hollow Crown* with a lead singer who's vanished, Mara. They'll pull the record. The whole thing goes under."

I thought of the photograph—the one I'd taken of Robbie laughing in the darkroom, unguarded and real. The one that had unsettled him so deeply that he'd looked at me like I'd stolen something.

Maybe I had.

"Let me find him," I said.

Dex raised an eyebrow. "You know where he is?"

"No." I picked up my cheap replacement camera from his desk. The dented Leica sat in my bag, ruined but still mine. "But I know where he goes when he doesn't want to be found."

I didn't, not really. But I had to try.

The weight of Robbie's absence pressed on my chest as I walked out into the gray London morning. His message hidden, his pills confiscated, his brother's secret still tangled between us—all the things I'd done to hold him together had pulled him apart instead.