Chapter Seven: Cracks in the Frame
Noah had always thought he was good at compartmentalizing. Keep things in boxes. Push the past behind a locked door and throw away the key. But being back in Edgewater was like living in a house full of broken locks.
Every corner of this town held a memory.
Every street sign, every gas station, every dive bar reminded him of something he didn’t want to remember. Especially now, with Rachel’s warning echoing in his head: She’s here. She’s different. Don’t make this harder than it needs to be.
But Eva’s name wasn’t the only weight on his shoulders.
There were more immediate challenges, more tangible ones.
The house he inherited from his father was falling apart. The foundation was cracked, the water heater had given out, and the kitchen ceiling leaked every time the clouds so much as grumbled. He’d spent the past week trying to fix what he could, which wasn’t much with limited tools and a long-forgotten skill set. He’d been a musician, not a handyman. And yet here he was, elbows deep in drywall and old wiring, like patching the house might somehow patch the holes in himself.
The house was a time capsule of resentment. Framed photos lined the walls—images of his father in his younger years, tight-lipped and proud, shaking hands at community events, always the hero in someone else’s story. But not Noah’s. To Noah, Walter Langston had always been a man who demanded more than he gave, who turned affection into a currency too expensive to earn.
Each time Noah picked up a hammer or stripped a wire, he fought with the version of himself that had walked away years ago, vowing never to return. It was humbling, maddening. And oddly necessary.
But the house wasn’t the only place cracking beneath pressure.
There was Luke.
His younger brother had every right to be angry. After their mother passed, Luke had shouldered most of the responsibility while Noah fled, chasing gigs and ghosting calls. He hadn’t come back when things got hard. He hadn’t come back at all.
Their last conversation had ended in shouting. Noah had accused Luke of selling out, of becoming just like their father. Luke had shot back that Noah was a coward. That he only knew how to leave.
Now, Luke wouldn’t even answer the door.
Noah had tried the shop twice more since their first tense encounter. Both times, the door was locked. Lights on, cars in the bay, but Luke nowhere in sight. Either he was avoiding him, or the message was clear: stay gone.
Noah couldn’t blame him.
And then there was the music—or rather, the absence of it.
He hadn’t written a full song in years. The melodies were there, buried beneath static, but the lyrics wouldn’t come. He’d sit with his guitar late into the night, strumming broken chords and starting lines he couldn’t finish.
One night, frustrated beyond reason, he hurled the notebook across the room. Pages scattered like birds startled from a tree.
He stared at them, breathing hard, then knelt to gather them again. He couldn’t give up. Not yet.
There was something inside him that needed to come out—something raw and half-formed. Maybe it was grief. Maybe it was guilt. Maybe it was her.
But the chords were always off. The words never landed right. And the silence between the notes felt louder than the music itself.
He missed Eva. That was the part he hated admitting the most.
He missed her laughter. Her fire. The way she challenged him when no one else dared. He missed the future they’d planned—the life they were supposed to build together.
But missing someone didn’t fix the past.
He ran then, and running was easy. Staying meant sitting in the middle of everything he broke and figuring out how to rebuild.
He looked around the dim living room, cluttered with tools and old coffee mugs and half-finished repair jobs.
“Start somewhere,” he whispered to himself.
So he did.
He made a list. Clean the gutters. Patch the roof. Call the bank. Text Luke—again.
And write. Every night, no matter how stuck it felt. Even if the words never came, the attempt had to.
Because healing, he realized, wasn’t a decision.
It was a thousand little ones.
One nail. One message. One note at a time