It was one of those rare moments when I wasn’t thinking about my phone or my next gig or my bank account. I was just… there. Present. Quiet. Content.
Then I heard it.
A sharp, sickening crack.
Not a door. Not a branch. Not the deck settling.
Wood splitting.
My body reacted before my brain finished forming the thought. I stood so fast the chair scraped the deck boards. My stomach turned cold, an instant drop like a missed stair.
I ran inside.
The lakehouse always echoed in strange ways, sound bouncing off stone and wood and glass. I could hear my boots thudding on the floor, the screen door slapping shut behind me. The living room came into view in a blur.
Tyler stood there.
My nephew, nine years old, small for his age but wiry and restless, the kind of kid who always looked like he was holding in a laugh. He was in the middle of the living room, in front of the stone fireplace. He held my guitar by the neck with both hands, like it was a toy sword.
The body was smashed against the stone.
The bridge was ripped clean off.
The spruce top, that beautiful shimmering surface, was split down the middle like someone had taken an axe to it.
Strings hung in tangled loops, a spiderweb of metal catching light and trembling slightly, as if even the wreckage still remembered vibration.
For a second I couldn’t breathe.
My mind refused the image. It tried to turn it into something else. A dream. A prank. A hallucination caused by stress and lack of sleep.
Then Tyler looked at me and laughed.
It wasn’t a nervous giggle. It was bright, careless amusement.
“It broke,” he said, and lifted the neck slightly as if to show me proof. “Your guitar was fake.”
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