My Boyfriend Turned My Grief Into His Hit Songs

The house in the Hollywood Hills was empty. Outside, the night sky was dark and heavy.

Dante was at another industry party down on Sunset. He had texted me at six: *Don't wait up. Huge networking dinner with label heads.*

I waited until midnight.

I stood in the hallway and turned the brass knob to his private studio. The room was soundproofed and freezing. The red standby lights on his mixing console glowed like tiny, watchful eyes.

Dante hated when I came in here. *“This is my sacred creative space, Sylv,”* he had told me once, gently pushing me out the door. *“I need pure isolation to channel the muse.”*

Now, the room just smelled like his cologne and expensive sound foam.

I walked over to the mahogany desk. His heavy silver laptop sat closed in the center. I opened the lid. The screen came alive, casting a blue glow over my face.

A password prompt popped up instantly.

For two years, Dante kept a folder on his desktop labeled *VAULT*. It was locked with heavy encryption. Every time I asked about it, he laughed and said it was rough drafts and terrible voice memos he was too embarrassed to share.

I looked at the cursor blinking against the white bar.

I thought about his arm around Dallas's waist. I thought about the easy way they leaned into each other behind the stage curtains.

Dallas’s birthday was October twenty-fourth. Ten-twenty-four. I knew because Dante had bought her a vintage leather jacket last fall and asked me to wrap it.

My fingers moved over the keys.

*1-0-2-4.*

I pressed Enter.

The lock icon vanished. The folder popped open with a soft chime.

My chest went tight.

I didn't find rough drafts. I didn't find voice memos.

I found a neat list of spreadsheets, scan folders, and PDF files. The main document at the top was titled: *Campaign Narrative & Emotional Core — Q3/Q4 Rollout.*

I double-clicked it.

My heart hammered against my ribs.

The document was an eight-page marketing plan. Every single paragraph was a knife to the throat.

It wasn't just *Ghost in the Garden*. It was everything.

There was a detailed timeline divided into neat rows.

Row one: *Nana’s Passing.* The note next to it was highlighted in yellow: *“Rebrand as Dallas pulling Dante out of isolation after family tragedy. Frame the lyric about hydrangeas around the charm bracelet she gave him. Target: Rolling Stone profile, Sept.”*

Row two: *High School Suicide (Leo).*

I stopped breathing.

Leo was my best friend. He took his life when we were seventeen. I had never spoken his name out loud to anyone except Dante, sobbing into his chest until dawn while he rubbed my back.

On the screen, someone had written notes right across the page: *“Emotional peak for Grammy/Golden Melody push. Pitch as Dallas stopping Dante from his own self-destructive spiral during sophomore year. Dallas suggests saying she sat on his porch all night so he wouldn't do something stupid. Extremely relatable. High tear-jerker value.”*

Attached to the file were scanned pages of my old journals. But Dallas had marked them up in blue ink.

Her handwriting was neat and loopy. She had written in the margins: *Cut the line about the hospital smell, too depressing. Make it punchier. Dante—use the word 'anchor' during the Zane Lowe interview. Fans will lose their minds.*

Below that, Dallas had drawn a little smiley face.

Row three: *Father’s Cancer.*

They had mapped out the next two years. Every tear I ever cried. Every funeral I ever stood at. Every nightmare that woke me up shaking.

They hadn't just stolen my songs. They had mined my dead loved ones for press clips.

My hands began to tremble. A cold, bitter nausea rose in my throat, choking me. I held onto the edge of the heavy desk to keep from falling.

*They built their whole life on my bones.*

I bit the inside of my lip until I tasted copper. The pain pulled me back.

I reached into my coat pocket and pulled out a black USB flash drive. My fingers were shaking so violently that I fumbled the port twice. The metal clicked into place.

I dragged the entire *VAULT* folder into the drive.

A progress bar appeared on the screen.

*Copying 1.4 GB... 45 seconds remaining.*

"Come on," I whispered. My throat was raw. "Come on."

*Thirty seconds.*

A sharp click echoed from the foyer.

The heavy front door swung open.

My blood turned to ice.

A woman's tipsy giggle floated down the hall, loud and bright. Dallas.

"I'm telling you, bro," she slurred happily, her heels clicking across the hardwood floor. "The label guy was totally buying the soulmate thing. He said the award is basically yours."

"Keep it down," Dante's voice followed, low and thick with bourbon. "Sylvia's probably asleep."

*Twenty seconds.*

Footsteps came down the corridor. Fast.

"I just need my vape from the desk," Dallas whined softly. "Then you can tuck your little ghostwriter into bed."

*Ten seconds.*

The studio door swung wide open.

Dante walked in first, his blazer slung over one shoulder. Dallas was right behind him, her arm looped casually through his elbow.

They both stopped dead.

The room went completely, terrifyingly still.

The blue glow of the laptop illuminated my face. On the giant screen behind me, the folder *VAULT* was wide open, glowing bright white. The progress bar showed ninety-eight percent.

The tiny red light on the flash drive blinked in the dark.

*One. Two. Three.*

Dante stared at me. Dallas froze, the drunken smirk vanishing from her face.

Nobody breathed.