Read Chapter 25: Aftermath: The Empty Stool

The phone rang at half past nine. Mara had been staring at the ceiling since six, listening to the building wake up around her—pipes groaning, a woman shouting for her son two floors down, pigeons scrabbling on the ledge. She answered on the third ring.

“Mara.” Viv’s voice, tight. “He’s not come back.”

Mara sat up. “He’s still gone?”

“Robbie’s bed hasn’t been slept in. Lenny checked the studio, the pub, the bridge where he likes to go when he’s—when he’s off.” A pause, heavy with what she didn’t say. “Dex is in a meeting with the label. He says they’re drawing up a replacement clause.”

“That’s not—”

“I know. That’s why I’m calling you.” Viv’s breath shuddered down the line. “You know where he goes when he disappears. You knew him before any of us. Please, Mara. The weekend press push is in three days.”

Mara pressed her thumb into the hollow of her throat. She didn’t know where Robbie went. That was the terrible truth of it—she’d built her whole role in this band on the illusion of closeness, of shared history, of knowing the man behind the bass. But the places he vanished to were his own. Dark rooms she’d never been invited into.

“I’ll find him,” she said.

She dressed without looking in the mirror. Coat over yesterday’s shirt, boots unlaced, camera bag slung across her body out of habit—though the weight felt different now, the notebook that had started the fight still nestled inside it, Lenny’s surviving roll of film in its tin beside it. She hadn’t developed it. Hadn’t been able to face the darkroom after everything. The roll sat in her bag like a held breath.

She started where she knew he wouldn’t be.

The studio was empty, instruments standing in patient rows, a half-drunk cup of tea gone cold on the amp. She touched the neck of Robbie’s bass, still leaning in its stand. The Valium bottle was in her coat pocket—she’d carried it with her since confiscating it, unsure what to do with it, unwilling to return it to him after his denials. Keeping his secrets in her pockets like stones.

The bridge next. Grey Thames water slapping the pylons, wind cutting through her coat. A few gulls, a man walking his dog, no blonde head bowed over the railing. She stood there a moment, feeling the rawness of the air, and tried to think like him.

Robbie didn’t go where he was known when he was broken. He went where no one would recognize him. Where the anonymous noise of the city could swallow him whole.

She started with the pub near the old rehearsal rooms—the one they’d used in the early days, before the label money. Empty. The barman shook his head before she even asked. She tried two more places, places he’d mentioned in passing, a coffee shop in Soho where he’d once said the light was good, a record shop in Camden where the owner knew him by name. Nothing.

She was losing the afternoon. The winter light was already going amber, bleeding into the grey.

She found him by accident.

Walking past a narrow alley off Wardour Street, she caught a sliver of sound—not music, not conversation. A glass hitting wood. A laugh that was too loud, too brittle. She stepped into the mouth of the alley and saw the door half-open, a hand-painted sign reading only “BAR” in flaking gold letters. No name. No address. The kind of place that existed for people who didn’t want to be found.

Inside, it was dark enough that she stumbled over the threshold, her eyes taking a moment to adjust. A few heads turned—the regulars, who looked at her like a trespasser—and then she saw him.

Robbie sat at the far end of the bar, alone. A stool was pulled up beside him, empty, facing him at an angle, like a conversation he was having with someone who had just left. Someone who had never been there.

He was drunk. She knew it from the way he was holding his glass—too carefully, the way you hold something you’re afraid of dropping—and from the loose, unspooled quality of his voice as he talked to the empty stool.

“…always knew you’d get the last word, didn’t you? Even from wherever you are. Even from nothing. That’s you, Danny. That’s always been you.”

Mara’s chest tightened. She moved closer, quiet, but the barman saw her and raised an eyebrow. She shook her head. She didn’t want him to break the spell.

Robbie lifted his glass, sloshing whiskey over his fingers, and addressed the empty stool again. “I used to think you were the brave one. Out there, doing what I couldn’t. But you’re not brave, are you? You’re just running. Been running your whole life and calling it freedom.”

He laughed, a sound with no joy in it. “And the girl—the girl with the camera. She thinks she can see everything. Puts her eye to the glass and thinks she knows what she’s looking at. But she doesn’t know anything. She hides things. Angry little secrets in a notebook, like flowers pressed between pages.”

Mara stopped breathing.

“She doesn’t want to hurt me. That’s what she’d tell you. That’s what she tells herself. But that’s not it, is it? She wants to be the one who decides what I know. She wants to hold the truth in her hands like it’s hers to give.” He tilted his glass to the empty stool, a toast to an absent judge. “They all want to decide for me. The label. The manager. The girl with the camera. And Danny—Danny who walked out and couldn’t even say why.”

His voice cracked on the name. He set the glass down, missed the bar, and it shattered on the floor. The barman sighed and reached for a cloth.

Mara moved then, crossing the room in three quick strides. She crouched beside his stool, putting her hand over his where it rested on his knee.

“Robbie.”

He blinked at her, slow, like he was surfacing from deep water. His eyes were red-rimmed, his face pale under the cheap yellow light. He stared at her for a long moment, and she watched recognition arrive in him like an unwanted guest.

“Mara.” He said her name flat, stripped of warmth. “I was just talking about you.”

“I know.”

“You were hiding it.” Not an accusation, not quite. A statement of fact, worn smooth by repetition. “Danny’s message. You were going to keep it from me like it was yours to keep.”

“I didn’t want to hurt you.”

“See, that’s what I mean.” He pulled his hand away from hers, slowly, deliberately. “You decided what would hurt me. You decided what I could handle. Like I’m a child. Like I’m someone who can’t hold the truth of his own brother’s voice.”

Mara’s throat ached. “You were falling apart. The album, the pressure—I thought it would break you.”

“Maybe I need to break.” He said it simply, without self-pity. “Maybe breaking is what happens when you carry a thing too long and someone finally tells you the weight is real. Danny’s alive. That’s all I needed to know. Just that he’s alive somewhere. And you had that in your hands. You had it, and you closed your fist around it.”

She could have argued. She could have explained—the fragility she’d seen in him, the Valium, the way his hands shook before every performance, the careful scaffolding of calm the band had built around him. But she was learning something in the dim light of this nameless bar, watching his face: the scaffolding had been her own construction. Her own assumption, dressed up as care.

“I’m sorry,” she said. It was all she had.

Robbie looked at her for a long time. Then he looked at the empty stool beside him, and his mouth twisted.

“You want me to come back,” he said. Not a question.

“The label will replace you if you don’t.”

He laughed—a short, hollow sound. “Of course they will. They always have a replacement. Everyone’s replaceable.” He stood, swaying slightly, and steadied himself on the bar. “Alright. I’ll come back. I’ll play their songs and smile for their cameras. But I don’t trust your style anymore, Mara.”

She felt the words land like a blow to her sternum. “What does that mean?”

“It means you see things, and you decide what to do with them. You keep the frame narrow. You crop reality to fit your story.” He picked up his jacket from the stool, heavy with the weight of his abandonment. “I used to think that was just what photographers did. Now I’m not sure it’s what friends do.”

He walked past her toward the door, and she followed because there was nothing else to do. Outside, the street was fully dark, lit by amber sodium lamps that made everyone look sick. He didn’t look at her. He just walked, hands in his pockets, shoulder slumped, a man carrying the news of his brother’s survival like a stone lodged beneath his ribs.

She stayed a pace behind him, camera heavy at her side, and thought about all the pictures she’d never shown anyone. The ones she’d taken and kept locked in drawers because she feared what they would reveal. She’d always thought it was protection—of her subjects, of herself, of fragile things.

Now she wondered if it was just another kind of control. Another way of deciding who got to see the world as it was.

They walked in silence back toward the studio, and the city hummed around them, indifferent to the small ruins they carried.