The rain came down in relentless, silvery sheets, streaking the large control room window and turning the world outside into a blurred, impressionistic watercolor. The Burbank studio was a high-end, minimalist space—all clean lines, polished concrete floors, and tastefully arranged acoustic paneling. It was pristine, sterile, and utterly silent, a stark, soundproofed vessel designed to contain and capture a perfect sound. Tonight, it would be used to contain an imperfect, chaotic grief.
Alex stood in the center of the control room, the glow from the massive mixing console casting long, distorted shadows on the walls behind him. The three golden gramophones sat on a shelf back in his bedroom, silent testaments to a night that already felt like it had happened to someone else. The euphoria, the shock, the profound, public catharsis—it had all faded, leaving behind the quiet, constant ache that was now the baseline of his existence. The awards hadn't fixed anything. They had just raised the stakes.
Finneas was at the console, his posture a familiar study in focused intensity. But the mood was different tonight. There was no excited experimentation, no playful search for a hook. The atmosphere was somber, heavy with a shared, unspoken purpose. Between them, on the smooth, dark surface of the console, lay a single sheet of printed paper. It was covered in Alex's own handwritten annotations, a chaotic scrawl of red and black ink, arrows, and circled phrases, like a scholar obsessively studying a sacred, cryptic text.
The paper contained the lyrics to a song Alex hadn't written, a song that had existed in the world long before his own tragedy had given it a new, terrible resonance for him. It was a song from the ghost's timeline, one that had haunted him for months. "How to Save a Life."
He had called Finneas two days ago, his voice quiet but unshakeable. "I need to book a studio. A good one. For a week."
And now, here they were.
"This isn't a cover," Alex said, his voice low, the words carefully chosen. He tapped a finger on the lyric sheet. "And it's not another tribute. This has to be a 'what if.' It's the conversation I should have had. The one I will have in my head every night for the rest of my life. The music has to sound like that conversation feels."
Finneas listened, his expression a mixture of deep, fraternal concern and profound artistic respect. He didn't question the premise. He just nodded slowly, his gaze fixed on Alex, ready to receive the blueprint for this strange, painful new architecture.
"It has two voices," Alex continued, his focus narrowing, the ghost producer surfacing not with its usual cool detachment, but with a raw, obsessive intensity. "Two perspectives. The whole thing lives or dies in that duality." He pointed to the first verse.
"Step one, you say, 'We need to talk.'"
"This is me," Alex whispered, his voice barely audible. "This is the friend. The clueless one. The one who sees something is wrong but doesn't know what to do. I need the piano here to be hesitant, like someone walking into a room they're afraid of. Every chord should feel like a question, not a statement. It can't be confident. It has to be… searching."
He moved his finger down the page to the second verse.
"As he begins to raise his voice…"
"Here, it shifts," he said, his voice hardening slightly. "This is the direct address. This is the argument. The plea. The vocal needs to be closer, more intimate. No reverb. Dry. Like I'm whispering it right in his ear, trying to break through the noise. It has to feel desperate."
This was the ghost in its purest form, not just a producer making a song, but a filmmaker scoring a scene that only he could see, a scene that had already played out with a tragic, unchangeable ending. He was trying to rewrite history with sound.
Finneas's role in this was crucial, and impossibly difficult. He was part producer, part therapist, part engineer. He had to translate Alex's abstract, emotional demands into technical execution. He listened, his head tilted, his fingers hovering over the keyboard. He played a simple, unadorned C major chord.
"Too bright," Alex said instantly.
Finneas shifted, his fingers finding a C minor.
"Closer," Alex murmured. "But it's too… sad. It should be more… lost."
Finneas paused, then played the chord again, but this time he suspended it, leaving out the defining third, creating a sound that was hollow, ambiguous, neither happy nor sad. Just… empty.
Alex closed his eyes and nodded slowly. "That's it. That's the feeling."
They spent the next hour just on the piano, deconstructing the song's simple chord progression, stripping it of all its familiar, radio-friendly warmth and rebuilding it as something fragile, uncertain, and broken. The process was grueling, an act of painstaking emotional archaeology.
Then Alex turned his attention to the rhythm. "The kick drum," he said, his eyes still closed. "It should sound like a nervous heartbeat, not a metronome. Muffled. Felt more than heard."
Finneas didn't even try to find a sample. He stood up, walked into the live room, and began adjusting the microphones on the drum kit himself. He draped a heavy blanket over the kick drum, experimenting with mic placement until he had captured the perfect sound: a low, organic, anxious thud. The sound of blood rushing in your ears in a moment of panic.
He returned to the control room. "What else?" he asked quietly.
"There's a third voice in the conversation," Alex said, his gaze distant. "The one that's not speaking. The sadness in the room itself. It needs an instrument."
Finneas thought for a moment, his producer's mind working. "A cello," he suggested. "A single, mournful cello line. Not playing a melody, just… holding long, sustained notes. Breathing in the spaces."
Alex's eyes lit up with a flicker of recognition. "Yes. Exactly. It's the voice of everything that's not being said."
The session became a slow, repetitive, almost torturous process. They brought in a session cellist, a woman with kind, sad eyes who seemed to understand the gravity of the project without needing an explanation. Alex made her play the same sustained note a dozen times.
"No," he would say, his voice gentle but firm, cutting through the silence from the control room. "That's too beautiful. It sounds like weeping. It should sound like… questioning."
He made Finneas re-record the simple piano part over and over, not because of musical errors, but because of emotional ones. "It's too confident there." "That chord change is too smooth, it should feel more awkward." "It sounds like you know where you're going. I didn't. I don't."
He was chasing a feeling, a specific, painful authenticity that was almost impossible to articulate, but that he would recognize the instant he heard it. He was chipping away at the song, stripping it of everything that felt like a performance, until only the raw, wounded truth remained.
Finally, after hours of painstaking work on the instrumentation, it was time for the vocal.
"Turn the lights down in the booth," he said to Finneas. "All the way."
He stepped into the vocal booth, the heavy door sealing him in near-total darkness. The only light was the faint glow from the lyric sheet on the music stand. He closed his eyes, took a deep, shuddering breath, and he was no longer in a pristine Burbank studio. He was back in the loud, chaotic, fluorescent-lit hell of the school cafeteria. He could see Leo's slumped shoulders, the untouched food, the flicker of pain in his eyes.
Finneas cued the track. The hesitant, questioning piano chords filled his headphones.
He began to sing the first verse, his voice a fragile, searching thing, full of the confusion of a friend who knows something is wrong but doesn't have the language to fix it.
On the second verse, he leaned in closer to the microphone, the metal cool against his lips. His voice dropped to an intimate, desperate whisper, the reverb completely gone, as if he were trying to speak directly into Leo's ear, through time and space and regret.
"And I would have stayed up with you all night, had I known how to save a life."
He sang through the bridge, his voice building, the quiet desperation giving way to a rising tide of anguish. He was no longer just singing a song; he was living out the conversation he never had, the one that would haunt him forever.
Then he hit the final, pleading crescendo of the song, the question that was the source of all his pain.
"Where did I go wrong? I lost a friend…"
His voice finally cracked. Not a technical flaw, but a structural failure, the sound of a voice breaking under the sheer, crushing weight of an unbearable emotion. He pushed through it, forcing the final words out, his breath hitching.
He finished the take, the final piano chord hanging in the air. He was breathing heavily, his body trembling with the aftershocks of the performance. He leaned forward and rested his forehead against the cool, thick glass of the booth, completely, utterly spent. The conversation was over. The verdict was in. And he was still alone.