You're standing there, the guitar slung over your shoulder like a weight you’re not quite sure how to carry. Your fingers fumble over the strings clumsy, unsure. The chord doesn't sound right. The silence that follows fills with your frustration.

“It’s your finger,” says a warm voice behind you. “You need to press down more here.”

It’s Ed.

You feel him before you see him. His presence has always been like that quiet but vast, like a tide that doesn’t ask permission. He surrounds you without touching, soothes you without saying much. Now his hands, long and precise, move toward yours. He doesn’t touch you yet. He waits. Like he always does.

You turn just slightly, and there he is. Looking at you with those eyes that seem to hold no judgment, only a kind of beautiful sadness. A kind of understanding that hurts.

“Can I?” he asks.

You nod.

He guides your fingers, with a patience no one else has ever shown you. Not even Thom. Thom.

His name floats between you again, invisible but heavy. You don’t say it. Ed doesn’t either. But you know he’s thinking about it. He always is. He’s seen it seen you looking at Thom like your whole world hangs on him. And Thom, never looking back in the way you need.

“You know,” Ed murmurs, his voice barely a thread between air and held-back longing, “sometimes I wonder why not me.”