While some radio stations had cushy budgets and their on-air talent didn’t have to load reel-to-reel tapes or handle the production of their own shows, 99.7 K-ROCK was assembled on a shoestring. From the tattered purple velvet sofa in the waiting room to the records housed in the old display donated from the long-closed G. C. Murphy store where she used to go and buy Donna Summer albums with her allowance money, everything looked like it had been patched together. It made you feel that one wobbly old switch could feasibly shut off the station, sending the place into some sort of silent history. Yet there was a faded elegance to the building that Lara admired. Everything had earned its place here. Even her. It was this station that had saved her in her darkest hours.

The day she’d closed on the business, she and Jason had come here together, sitting amid the dust, the faint smell of old antiseptic and drug compounds still clinging to the space. He took out a photo and slid it across the floor to her. It was an old photo of a band—three members. It was a funny pose, like they were preening for an album cover. Even before he’d pointed Peter Beaumont out to her, she’d known who he was. The trio was assembled down near the Kerrigan River against the rocks—but the man crouching in the middle was pulling the photographer’s eye to him. Jason and the third man were neatly assembled around the subject—orbiting him even—but it was clear they were supporting characters. Lara realized just how powerful a photo could be to sum up things that people couldn’t articulate. Her father could have spoken for hours about Peter Beaumont and wouldn’t have been able to explain this. Peter had been the focal point of the band. From the photo, she knew he was talented, too. His shoulder jutted out, just a bit, displaying a type of youthful cockiness that comes with knowing you have talent. He wasn’t as tall as Jason, who hunched a little in the picture, but they looked like they could have been brothers.

“You were lost without him,” she said.

“It just didn’t matter without him,” he said, correcting her. “It had been his dream, not mine. Hell, I’d have probably been a mechanic had I not met him.”

“And now?”

“Some days I feel like an imposter living in his dream. Survivor’s guilt they call it, I think.”

Lara knew that feeling well. “It’s strange, isn’t it? The spaces they leave for you to fill.”

He laughed. “My life has been a poor attempt at trying to live the life he didn’t get to.”

“So you think Peter Beaumont is dead?” They had never discussed it. She knew this was the first time he was able to broach the subject of his former bandmate.