Twenty-four hours ago, I was living in the country and in love with a girl I hoped would come back to me any minute. 

Now I was in the middle of a noisy, clanging city - though I couldn't hear any of the noise because I'd been locked in a soundproof studio with my four siblings since early this morning - and the girl I loved was lost to me. It didn't seem possible that everything could have changed so completely and I could somehow still be the same person. 

But I was. I was still Beau King, the keyboardist for the world-famous King Brothers, now just called The Kings because Claire was currently trying to fit her harmonies into our old songs. 

It wasn't going well. 

"Guys!" The tech flicked on the PA and then noticed Claire glaring at him. "And girls," he amended. "We're way behind schedule here. Should we take five?"

The soundproofed studio was cramped and small and smelled like coffee. Every inhale reminded me of Rachel and her love of the once-forbidden-to-her drink. For all of what we'd seen of the city that never sleeps, we may as well have stayed in the shed on my parents' property, in the studio we'd recorded in as kids. This was ridiculous and I opened my mouth to agree that yeah, we should take five, and maybe more. 

But my brothers beat me. "No!" Jonah and Gabe barked in unison, then looked at each other. Jonah lifted his chin. "We're gonna get it, just..." He rubbed his hand from the back of his head to the front and then back again. "Just, give us a few more minutes to come up with something, okay?"

The tech looked skeptical but obliged by leaning back in his chair and resuming looking bored. I sighed and stared down at the white keys on my keyboard and wished it was a grand piano. 

We'd asked for the rehearsals to be recorded, with the idea that we might get some footage for a possible DVD release in the future. But so far, all we'd gotten was footage of us bickering like a bunch of children.

"I don't know what the problem is," my sister sighed as she picked at her nail in that bad habit of hers she got when she was anxious.  

"I know what it is. You're flat." Jonah sighed heavily. 

"I am not!" Claire was immediately defensive. "This song is in the weirdest fucking key!"

"She's not wrong," Gabe pointed out, waving away her shouts of "See! See!" to go on, "We were all singing this shit back before our balls dropped. I can't hit these fucking notes anymore." He dragged his hand down his suntanned face. His jetlag was showing. He'd met up with us late last night - still on Vietnam time - and was now going on his thirtieth hour without sleep. 

"But it's a fucking reunion show," Jonah said through gritted teeth.

"We're all older. We've all gone and done different things with our lives in the past two and a half years." Finn's temper was flaring. "I know I'm not the same fucking person I was two years ago and if these people show up expecting to see us staying exactly the same, they're fucking crazy. We're not going to be able to sound the same. We're just not." He glared at our oldest brother. "And no amount of you yelling at us is going to change that."

It was a testament to just how right he was about us changing that Jonah listened to all of this without getting defensive.  "Look, I'm trying not to be a micromanager like before," Jonah said as he glanced at Gabe. It was a testament to how much Gabe had changed when he just nodded warily, acknowledging the bad old days between them without bringing them up again. "But the people that show up for this, they're going to expect to hear the old hits," Jonah went on.

"That’s true." Gabe rolled his eyes. "And you know how much it pains me to admit that." Jonah scratched his nose with his middle finger, which made Gabe tackle him. And that's how I knew things hadn't really changed that much at all. 

The familiar sight of my two older brothers wrestling on the ground should have made me laugh like usual. But I sat there at my keyboard and watched them, and couldn't feel a damn thing. Not happiness, not gratitude for the second chance we'd been given, not even irritation that they were wasting the little time we had to rehearse together. The only thing I felt was lost.

Lost. Never to be found. 

Gabe's flailing leg hit my stool right as the lyric sucker punched me in the gut. "Wait!" I shouted over the grunting din. "I have an idea!"

Finn looked at me, already sensing what was coming to me. "New song?"

Gabe slipped out of Jonah's headlock and sat up. "Whaddya got?" he asked.

The snatches of vocals flitted through my head. Amazing Grace, as sung by Rachel, her high, pure voice singing words of grace and healing. It hurt like nothing had ever hurt before to see her sweet face in my mind's eye as she turned her face toward that sunbeam in my living room as I played the piano for her that first day she sang for me. But that hurt was a feeling, unlike the numbness that had weighed me down ever since I'd hung up on Detective Jenkins. "Paper," I said, reaching out my hand. 

"Is this how he gets?" Claire asked as Finn put a piece of paper and a stub of pencil in my hand. 

"Sometimes." Finn sounded excited. "And whenever he gets this way, the shit that comes out is pure fucking gold." 

Gabe leaned over my shoulder, watching as I scrawled a few couplets, then savagely erased them. He wrote the music, then handed it over to Jonah who added the hooky beats and soaring bridges. Jonah then handed it back to Finn who figured out the harmonies around the melody that Gabe had already worked out. This was the way it had always been, and Claire watched with wide eyes as the four of us became one brain. "Open with the chorus?" "Yeah and then the—" "Beat drop, right here." "Fuck, that's sick but wouldn't we—" "Shoot the load too quick, nah man, transpose the key in the last verse." "Doesn't that sound—" "Right, it's got that eighties power ballad feel and—" "Shit, yeah that's fucking gold, what's the hook?" 

"Claire!" Jonah shouted way too loudly. He shoved a piece of paper at her and then plunked out a melody on his guitar. "Sing that. We need a solo female vocal right there." He raised a challenging eyebrow. "You can hit that note, right?"

She scanned the paper quickly and then scoffed. "Stand back, boys." And then my sister belted out an updated version of Rachel's hymn. "Lost and found / how sweet the sound." The sound tech leaned forward, flicking on the cameras as we fell into a rough take. 

Claire glanced at me as she sang the words I'd written, understanding in her eyes. Sympathy too. I had to look away as I played the chords that my heart had chosen. Watching her sing those lyrics that seconds ago I'd barely allowed myself to acknowledge felt too private. I'd written it for Rachel, but it hurt to hear it sung aloud. Because what I'd written?

It sounded a lot like I was saying goodbye. 

I didn’t want to say goodbye. I wasn’t ready to say goodbye.

When the song was over, I squeezed my eyes shut. My siblings were respectfully silent. 

Then the PA clicked on again. "There it is," the tech declared. 

I opened my eyes to see my siblings all nodding. The tech was right. As heartbreaking as it was to play that song, it was also perfect. It sounded like a continuation of the songs we used to sing. Like we'd grown up but were still the same people. It sounded like the Kings. 

"Guys...and girl." This new voice belonged to a label rep. "Listen, I know you said you just wanted to record some new material for a special reunion download, but this is fucking gold. You make a whole album like this? And we're in business again."

He switched off the mic as the five of us looked at each other in amazement. A new album? Getting back together for real? 

Then he switched the mic back on and said my name. "Beau?"

"Yeah?" I snapped out of my stupefied reverie. "What's up?"

"One thing. If we're gonna take you on again, you gotta ditch the lumberjack look."

My siblings burst out laughing. 

That night in the hotel room, I shaved off my beard. As I watched the hair swirl in the drain, it felt like I was watching the past two years drain away. Like they had never happened. Seeing the naked face in the mirror, I could almost believe it. 

But when I fell into bed, exhausted and sad but happy at the same time, my hand reached out to twine into a braid that wasn't there next to me.  And I knew that, as much as I wanted to pretend, those years had happened. And that the song I'd written wasn't a goodbye song. It was a "come-back-to-me" song. As sleep overtook me, I could almost hear her sweet voice singing it in my ear.