Married By Mistake

Chapter Twenty-Three: What Aldous Wanted

Jax's POV

I didn't sleep. Sat at my kitchen table with the email still open on my phone, Aldous Reyes's name sitting there like something I could put off answering forever if I just never touched it.

I touched it anyway, around two in the morning, when the apartment was too quiet to keep avoiding it.

Me: This is Jackson. I don't really know what you want to tell me, but I'm listening.

The reply came faster than I expected. He must not have been sleeping either.

Aldous: Thank you for writing back. I've thought about that night more than you probably know. I want to be upfront about why I'm reaching out now, and it's not just guilt, though there's plenty of that too.

Aldous: I'm consulting on a documentary. About prodigies, the ones who made it and the ones who disappeared. Your story keeps coming up in early research. I've been fighting to make sure it's handled with care if it goes forward, but I wanted you to hear it from someone who actually remembers you as a person, not just a headline.

I read it twice. Then a third time, because the words didn't fully land the first two.

Me: A documentary. About me.*

Aldous: Not just you. Several stories. But yours is one of the ones the producers keep circling back to. The Vienna footage still exists. What happened on that stage, it's the kind of moment that gets used whether the person involved wants it used or not.

My hands had gone cold around the phone.

Me: When does it come out?*

Aldous: That's the part I wanted you to know before anyone else told you. Production's further along than you'd think. They're targeting a release in about ten weeks. I've been pushing for them to reach out to you directly, formally, give you a chance to participate or decline on the record. I don't know how much longer I can hold that off.

Ten weeks. I sat with that number, trying to make it mean something smaller than it did.

Me: What happens if I say no. If I don't participate at all.

Aldous: Then they use the archival footage and whatever public information exists, and tell the story without you. Honestly, Jackson, I think that version does more damage. If you're part of it, even a little, you get some control over how it's told.

I set the phone down on the table and put my head in my hands, elbows braced against my knees, trying to breathe through a wave of something that felt exactly like standing on that stage again. The lights. The silence after my hands stopped working. The specific, total humiliation of failing in front of every single person who'd ever believed in me.

Ten weeks. A documentary with or without my consent. A gossip account already circulating my old name. Regina wanting me at a wedding as a story piece. My brother's warning that this was already cracking, faster than I could manage it.

Everything I'd spent six years keeping small and quiet was suddenly, all at once, becoming the opposite of small and quiet, whether I agreed to any of it or not.

I thought about Elena's face tonight when I offered to go to Regina's event. The fear in it, the way she'd said she didn't want this to be the price. I understood now, sitting alone in my kitchen at two in the morning, that the price had already been set in motion long before either of us had any say in it.

I picked the phone back up.

Me: I need some time to think. Can I ask you something first though. Why does the footage still exist. I thought recordings from that competition were never released publicly.

Aldous: They weren't, officially. But someone in the archive leaked a partial clip years ago. It's been circulating in smaller music forums ever since. I assumed you knew.

I didn't know. Six years, and I'd never once searched my own name, never once let myself find out what still existed of that night. I'd built my entire recovery around not looking.

Aldous: There's something else. I probably should have led with this. The clip that's circulating, it's not complete. It cuts off right before the freeze. Most people who've seen it don't actually know what happened next. They just know you stopped playing and walked off.

Aldous: I was in the room, Jackson. I know exactly what happened next. And I don't think you've ever told anyone the full version either, have you.

I stared at that message for a long time, the apartment silent around me, my own hands finally, completely still on the table.

He was right. I hadn't. Not Marcus. Not Elena. Not anyone.

There was a version of that night I'd never said out loud to a single living person, and somehow the one man who actually knew it had just found me, ten weeks before a documentary was going to tell a version of the story that wasn't even the whole truth.