Entertainment Circle16 min read
He Showed Up with Guitar Strings and Five Boxes of Gifts
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“Where are you?” I typed, then hit send before I could think.
“Sorry,” Daniel Castillo replied. “Something came up. Can we reschedule?”
I stood in front of the city registry office in June heat, my dress sticking to my skin, a paper ring box heavy in my palm and a taxi meter running on my phone. Kids’ nap time at the kindergarten would be over in twenty minutes. I could not wait all day.
“That’s today,” I typed. “We said today.”
“No, I have to—” His message stopped and then a new one came. “My ex flew back. I’m at the hospital. Please, Everlee. Give me a little time.”
I read the line three times and then my chest fell like I had been pushed down a staircase.
Nine years. Nine years of small moves, small sacrifices, late-night texts, and still-practical compromises. High school to college, college to work. He was the safe name I kept in my phone. He was the man I pictured in every tiny future I let myself have.
I called. It rang. Five seconds of his ringtone. Then cut.
I called again. Same. Then he picked up, like nothing was wrong. His voice was calm, tired.
“What is going on?”
“Everlee—” he began.
“I’m standing in front of the courthouse,” I said. “We are supposed to sign, Daniel. Are you on your way? If you’re not coming, tell me now.”
“Isabelle is back,” he said after a pause. “We had a car crash. She’s—she has a concussion. The doctors found something else. They say it’s bad. They say—she might not have much time.”
I heard the apology in his tone the way you hear rain after thunder—soft, inevitable.
“And you went to her?”
“Yes. She asked me to stay. She is alone. She wanted me to be with her.”
“Because she has a diagnosis you decide a different life is easier?” I said. “Because she has pain, you throw away a promise?”
There was silence. Then, “Give me six months. Just six months. I swear I’ll come back and we will marry. I’ll make it up. I’m sorry.”
“Then don’t come back,” I said.
“I can fix this, Everlee—”
“I’m done.” I hung up.
I blocked his number. I blocked him everywhere. My thumb hovered over the screen for a second before the final tap. It felt loud and clean.
A woman with a baby stroller walked past me on the courthouse steps and looked at my wet face. Two newlywed couples laughed behind me. I felt small and too big at the same time.
My phone vibrated with another number. “Miss Baxter? It’s the kindergarten. Two kids brawled. Come, please.”
“On my way,” I said, and left my ring box in the taxi.
*
The afternoon was loud with small feet and small sobs. I patched knees, wiped tears, and smiled like a thin lamp still working. I told the children, “We do not fight. We share.” They listened, in the half-way way that children do. I answered a hundred questions about lunch and colors and where the moon sleeps.
At four, a woman arrived to pick up a boy with a scraped knee. The boy’s mother scolded him hard, then softened when she saw the wound had been dressed. She said, “I’ll sit in the office and wait,” then left.
A minute later, another woman stepped into the teacher’s office—a tall man covered in a hoodie, sunglasses, a cap. He moved like someone used to being watched; his shoulders sat like a stage-light shade. The little girl in my class, Kalani, clung to my leg and hid behind me.
“He’s tall,” Kalani whispered, her voice like a small wind.
“He’s my uncle,” she announced before I could speak. She did not act scared of the man; she acted small before a giant she already knew the shape of.
The man lowered his cap and sunglasses. The room changed. The man was not the person in the rumors and on the cover of glossy magazines; he was a stranger with eyes that watched and lingered, soft like the back of a knife.
“Hello,” he said. His voice was wide and steady. “I’m Nicholas Carney. I’d like to speak about my niece.”
I told him about the fight—about a dream-child who had been woken by another child and the two had gone outside to settle it alone. He listened with a patience that felt like someone setting down a heavy cup carefully.
“I travel a lot,” he said finally. “I’m sorry. I can help. I’ll pay you for evenings. I can hire you to bring Kalani home, teach her, and keep her company when I travel.”
His flat offer surprised me. Most people talk first, then act. He had the kind of quiet authority that made people answer in a short yes or no.
“How much?” I asked.
“Fifteen hundred a day.”
I blinked. “That’s…a lot.”
“It’s enough.” He looked at Kalani and his smile softened. “And she needs a good teacher.”
“Okay.” I surprised myself by agreeing. I told myself I was practical. I needed the money. I had boxes of returned gifts waiting for a courier. I would teach. I would earn money. I would not fall in love again.
He lifted Kalani up onto the couch and said, “She told me you were her favorite. Thank you.”
That night, when I took the courier to Daniel’s number and taped the boxes shut—bags with logos I had once thought were proof of love—I felt a small bottomless relief. I did not miss him in that tidy hour.
I turned on social—my post was a small vent. “How can someone take a ring and a date and hand them back? How can someone ask for time when promised forever? #outdent” Friends commented. People took sides. Daniel messaged me once, then again, then not. He claimed hospital, crisis, regret. My fingers grew tired of typing replies.
Nicholas texted messages that night asking about the schedule. He sent a transfer the next morning for the first day’s pay. He added me on chat and hesitated on his name at the top until it read simply "bsy," which would later mean nothing and then everything.
That first week, I taught Kalani reading, counting, and ballet. She called me “teacher” in a way my name had never been called by the man who had owned half my plans.
Nicholas watched me with a stillness that made me nervous. Once, I caught him looking at my hands when I laced Kalani’s shoes. He meant nothing by it, I told myself. He was kind, and kind can be a dangerous thing to mistake for wanting.
*
It took him five days to hand me five boxes.
“You need to open them here?” he asked in the doorway. He had returned them to the trunk of his car and carried them in like a man who was trying to be casual and failing.
“No,” I said. “I can’t accept gifts like this.”
“Please.”
“Why are you giving me expensive bags?” I asked. “You heard the story. You saw the post.”
“I heard everything,” he said. “I saw how you looked on the registry steps. I want to give you something that is not a ring and not an apology.” He set the boxes down. “Take one. Keep it till you forgive him, or till you forgive yourself.”
We argued about it with the noise of the dishwasher and Kalani’s whispered cartoons in the other room. He smiled like someone who had lost and then found his teeth.
“Just keep them,” he said. “I will pick them up later.”
I took one box. Then I took another. In the end, I told him to keep them in his house, and I accepted only to make him stop moving in the doorway.
He started coming to dinner sometimes. He sat opposite me at the small table while Kalani flopped with cartoons and homework. He asked me about teachers and stories and the names of my students. He told me about late night studio sessions and guitar strings. He let Kalani sit on his lap and hum tuneless lullabies. He helped with dishes. He took out the trash.
“Why do you help?” my friend Emerie asked over tea one afternoon. “You don’t seem like the sort of man who likes to help with the mop.”
“He does,” I said. “He’s not like the photos.”
“He’s the star,” Emerie said. “Stars are in a bubble. They buy balloons for birthdays, not mop the floor.”
“Maybe he likes floors,” I said. It sounded silly when I said it. But then, kindness often did.
One evening he played a new chord progression on his guitar in the music room. I came to listen, then stayed.
“This is a song?” I asked.
“It’s a piece,” he said. “It’s about someone who waited for a long time and then had to watch.”
“Like me?”
He did not answer that night.
Instead, he asked me to write a few lines—my life, my hunger, the small humiliations of waiting. I wrote for an hour on his couch, the city noise like a fan. My hand felt rough and honest. I wrote about nine years of giving what I had, about the cold of a waiting room. I wrote the truth and then drew a line under it.
He took the paper and, without ceremony, used some of my lines.
“You want the song named?” he asked a week later, when he brought me a cup of tea.
I said something careless, a joke that wanted to sound like we were both bold and joked back. “Call it ‘Lick Dog’,” I said. It was a harsh phrase I had used on nights I had cried in the kitchen. I did not know why I said it. Maybe to make my own hurt ridiculous and manageable.
He laughed so quietly I could hear the surprise in it. “You’re cruel.”
“Call it whatever you want,” I said. “I just don’t want to be a pet.”
A week later he sent me a chord demo and a title: “Lick Dog.” He told me, half-smiling, that if the song was mine in the way the melody was, it was mine in all the blunt, ugly truth I had offered him.
He recorded the demo in his apartment and then played it for me that night. His voice cracked only at the edge of the words. I wanted to turn away, and instead I leaned in like someone learning the shape of a new knife.
“You’re not my type,” he said unexpectedly after the lyrics ended.
“What?” I asked.
“I like people who tell the truth,” he said. “That was honest. Not everyone weaves honesty into a lyric.” He touched the paper where I'd scribbled. “Thank you.”
I laughed, thin and a little sharp. “That’s all? A thank you?”
He looked at me and for the first time the air between us changed shape. “Maybe more than a thank you.”
I did not know what that meant then, but I would learn it like a new season.
*
Work and life became quiet rounds. I came to Nicholas’s place most weekdays. Kalani learned to pronounce long words and write her name. Nicholas wrote. He worked with a producer and rehearsed lines I would never hear. He was a man who kept his head measured, but when he smiled at Kalani, or when he watched me demonstrate a dance step for a tiny besotted audience of one, his face shed something like relief.
We had small rituals. He would prompt me to put my shoes on if I forgot. He would show me chords as I plied my fingers through stories. He would send a text in the quiet hour: “Are you cold?” I would answer like a child.
Those little acts warmed me. I guarded my feelings like cheese behind a knife: useful, not luxurious.
Then one night everything skewed.
Daniel found the boxes.
“You returned everything?” he asked the second his knock startled me open.
He was always dramatic; his face had the neatness of a man who planned his moments.
“Yes,” I said. “I did.”
He planted himself in my small living room as if this were a stage.
“I didn’t ask for this,” he said. “You don’t have to send gifts back. We can still talk. You can still—”
“You asked for time,” I said. “You asked me to wait while you held someone else’s hand.”
He scoffed. “It was for a short time. She’s sick. You know this.”
“What I know,” I said, keeping my voice small and sharp, “is that promises can’t be borrowed or lent. You chose her because her time ended. You chose guilt as a reason to choose her again. Maybe you think that proves you are kind, but kindness is not a reason to break a promise.”
He was livid. Then softer. Then cruel.
“Break up with me?” he said. “You’re mad. You’ll come back. You can’t throw away nine years.”
“I can,” I said. “I already did.”
He stepped closer. “Don’t be petty.”
I pushed him away.
He stumbled on the wet floor and grabbed my arm. I fell on the rug. Our bodies tangled. The lights cut—our building’s circuit tripped.
In the darkness, leaning on me, he tried to coax me back.
“Please,” he said, right in my ear. I smelled hospital soap and something floral and foreign. “Forgive me. It’s only a few months.”
I shoved him. “No.”
He stood, furious and wounded. He accused me of being cruel. He told me I would lose everything—my chances, my face, my name. He said that he could still make things right by buying me things and telling people I was his girl.
When he left, it was with curses like the muffled sound of autumn.
I stood in the dark, breath hot, blood loud in my ears.
Outside, a car idled. Nicholas had waited in his car under the light like a small faithful animal. He drove home slowly, parking under the tree like he was trying not to wake the city. He waited until my front lights clicked back on and then he drove away into the night.
The next morning, he texted, plain and humane.
“Are you all right?”
I sent him an emoji, clumsy, and then typed: “He left.”
He sent back a single line: “Wait. I’ll come over. I have to be sure you’re not broken.”
When he arrived, he did not look at my bruises. He put the kettle on, made tea, and brought an extra blanket like a soldier with small tools.
“Thank you,” I said.
He shrugged. “You’re the one who taught me how to warm milk without burning it.”
We spoke a little. He told me about a childhood memory of being small and hiding in the wings because the lights frightened him. I told him about the first time I saw a child win a stage race in school and how I cried.
He listened like I was a new song.
A month passed and a single idea grew like a seed: he began moving closer. Not by rash actions, not by big declarations, but by small careful things: a coffee when I forgot mine, quiet jokes in a dry tone, a hand to steady me on the stairs. I noticed how many times he chose to be near me.
At a charity night for children, Nicholas bought front row tickets and invited me in a way that asked but did not require. “Sit here,” he said. “And when the singer leaves the stage, don’t leave.”
On stage, he played a song I had once joked should be called “Lick Dog.” He had changed the melody, softened the edges. He walked off the stage and instead of leaving, he turned and pointed at me. The hall fell quiet in the way an office falls when someone plays a trumpet for the first time.
“I need her to hear this,” he said into the mic. Then he began the verse we had written together—my ugly bites shaped into art. The room watched him as if a church watched a miracle. He sang the line that I had written about being tired and waiting and then he stopped and looked straight at me.
“I have a stupid name for this song,” he said. “It’s called ‘Lick Dog’ because sometimes we let ourselves be small for the people we love. But this is not me. I know what love should feel like. I like it when the person I am with is brave.”
The line burned into my chest. I felt everyone around me inhale.
He stepped off the stage and walked up the aisle. He reached my seat and knelt before me, which felt like a ridiculous movie and also exactly a direct and true thing.
“Everlee,” he said. “You teach little children to be brave. I want to be brave too. Will you let me try, with you?”
The room clapped because the world likes tidy moments. Kalani laughed, delighted that her teacher had been chosen.
I laughed then, not because I cared about applause but because of the absurd courage of the man in front of me—because he had written my words into melody and dared to sing them in public.
He took my hand. His palm was warm. “Say yes so I can stop singing alone.”
I did say yes, but in a low way, like a teacher who tells the class to pay attention. “I’m not yours,” I said. “Not like that. I don’t want to be taken or bought. I want to be chosen.”
“You are.” He looked at me like someone who had learned the grammar of a new language. “Every day. In small things.”
We began slowly. We kept our mornings the same. We kept our own lives. We learned each other’s bad jokes. He showed me the drafts of songs and asked me to cross out lines he was too close to keep. I helped him with phrases a writer should never have to think of twice. We were a clumsy duet learning a harmony.
Once, there was an interview where a tabloid tried to spin us as a cheap romance—“Teacher and Star: Secret Affair?”—and Nicholas faced the cameras with a face like a brick wall and said, “She is my partner. She is not a prop.”
The writers complained that it was too dramatic. His fans loved him for that sentence.
Daniel tried to find me again. He sent flowers addressed as “Please forgive me.” He left messages that mixed soft guilt and the coldness of someone who thought time was a plaything. He did not come to the door. He stayed away like a man who knew when doors were closed for good.
Isabelle posted things—photos from hospital rooms, thankful lines, and then a note like regret wrapped in leaves: “I am sorry. I did not mean—” but she never apologized to me. She apologized to herself. That was different.
Then, the day the industry announced a new award and Nicholas was up for Best Song, it was not the trophy that mattered.
He walked the stage and in a voice both still and raw, he said, “This song is for a woman who taught me to be brave not for her, but with her. She showed me what it means to stand by someone who is not a story or a headline. It is because she told the unglamorous truth that I could make the song real.”
He gave me the credit and then he gave me the first line of a new song, one he would later release with my name in the liner notes.
We moved in together slowly. Kalani already slept sometimes with both of us reading until the small hours. Nicholas cooked for me like he cooked to heal. He found a cheap apartment where we both had space for books and a small corner for the guitar. He let me keep my classroom hours. He would say, “You don’t have to change your life to be with me. You have to live it fully.”
The city learned our shape like it learns the seasons. Fans drew at the edges, but we stayed in our small rooms making tea.
One night, after a late practice, he took my hand and walked me to the edge of a small rooftop behind his building. The city knitted lights below us like stitches.
“I keep a credit on my phone for random texts,” he said, “and just now I looked at the saved voice message you left—half of it was you telling me to make a better chorus and half of it was a line about not being a pet. It’s silly but I listen to that message when I need courage.”
I said nothing. I tilted my head back and watched the moon like I had once watched it beside a man who had asked for time.
“Promise me something.” He curled my fingers around his.
“What?”
“Promise me you will always tell me when I am wrong. Promise me you will tell me when I forget to choose you.”
I searched his face. He looked like a boy who had found a reason to keep growing.
“I promise.” I thought of the ring boxes in the trunk of a courier van and the nights I had spent answering to no one. “But you have to promise to not make me small.”
“I promise,” he said like he meant it.
We had small arguments. The star life thrummed at the edges—publicists, late nights, red carpets. I learned to be honest when I felt invisible. Nicholas learned to text me even when a camera waited at his door. We hurt each other a little, then healed because we were careful like surgeons.
The winter a year later, Daniel’s new marriage collapsed under the weight of truth. The papers found details of a different life he had tried to keep quiet: a double life of excuses and rented smiles. Isabelle had already made a graceful exit. She posted once, “Do not measure a life by another’s mistakes.” The news cycles made Daniel a lesson and then a quiet name.
There was no grand revenge from me. I did not throw his mistakes back in his face. He made them for himself. His reputation faltered, his friends pulled away, and for a while he had fewer people to call worthy of the cold comfort he had banked against moral debt. The world turned quickly and left him on a small island of his own making.
Nicholas and I walked through that winter together. He had a new album coming out and he called me the “muse” in a way that made me blush; he still believed the word mattered, and he still sent tea when I was tired.
On the day his album released, he launched the lead single live. The crowd went wild but when he turned the lights down and the guitars softened, he said, “This is for Everlee.” Then he sang the chorus—my raw line about being tired and ready to stop waiting—and at the end he changed the title.
He looked up, reached the stage edge where I sat, and said, “It’s not ‘Lick Dog.’ It’s ‘Moon Song.’ Because moons guide. They don’t ask you to kneel. They just stay true.”
I laughed, because it was true and ridiculous and tender. He laughed back, quick and honest.
When the world watched, I felt small for a second, but Nicholas’s hand moved in mine like a steady rope. We were two people who had been tired and then found a map that fit us.
That night, we drove home, quiet but full. Kalani slept between us. I cupped Nicholas’s cheek and rested my head on his shoulder.
“You hold stockings of songs and six strings of courage,” I said.
He looked at me with the same old gentle glare he had when he said, “You teach me bravery.” “I hold what you let me hold,” he said. “And I’ll keep asking to be better.”
In the months after, Nicholas talked about moving more of his life into ours. We made plans that felt like folding a paper plane carefully before launching it—deliberate, sure.
The biggest moment did not come with a stage or a microphone. It came on a regular Tuesday. Kalani had a recital. I sat in the third row watching a child who had once kicked another child out in an argument, now tiptoe in a tutu. Nicholas sat beside me, hand folded in mine. After the recital, kids spilled into the lobby bright and proud. Kalani ran to me and hugged my legs. Nicholas picked her up and spun her and she squealed.
“You two,” a mother said when she recognized him, smiling wide and gentle. “You’ve done a good thing.”
He nodded. “She taught me how to stay.”
I looked at him then—the man who had stood like a quiet mountain and then bent when I asked him to—and I saw our life like a line of music: quiet, rising, honest.
“Everlee,” he said, leaning toward me under the fluorescent lobby lights. “Would you marry me in a way that is ours? Not the old idea of rings and big promises pressed by pressure, but with a meal and a paper and a friend to stand with us? Would you sign paper with me when both of us are sure?”
I smiled. He did not say “forever.” He never used the old dumb words that pretend to be safe. He used small words. He used choices made day by day. He used respect.
“Yes,” I said. “But only if we promise the same clean honesty you taught me to want.”
He shook my hand then like it was the most important contract. “Promise.”
We married in a small city hall in spring. Kalani held the flower basket and threw petals like herself into our path. Only a few people watched—friends, a pair of stage crew, a teacher and a photographer. I wore no towering dress. He wore no suit that would take three men to fasten. It was simple and terrible and exactly right.
We did not announce the moment to make headlines. We did not post a thousand photos. We went home, cooked dinner as a team, and folded laundry, and Nicholas hummed a melody under his breath that would later become a soft bridge in his next song.
Some nights, when the city blinked like an eyelid, I would stand on our small balcony while he tuned his guitar. I would think of all the small things—ring boxes, lies, wait-lies, and the kindness that chose to stay—and then of the loud, blinking headlines for other people. I would press my hand to the guitar’s soundboard and feel the hum.
“You held your ground,” he would say, like a piece of news that mattered. “You did not become small.”
“I did not let myself be small,” I would say back.
He would smile, and then he would sing.
And when the song ended, he would look at me and say, “Stay with me?”
“Always,” I would answer, because I meant the truth in a way that was steady and not dramatic. We were not dramatic people. We were tired people who chose each other.
Nicholas never became cruelly protective. He never made me a prize. He never demanded that I be the “moon” he wrote about. He became the kind of man who saved songs for quiet mornings and worked like a hand on the loom of our life.
As for Daniel and Isabelle, the world turned. Daniel’s deals slipped. Isabelle moved away and stopped posting. Time turned them into outlines.
But the music we wrote—the soft and the blunt and the true—stayed. We performed for small charity nights. We danced in empty living rooms. We learned the value of small mercy.
Once, in a late-night studio session, Nicholas turned to me and sang a line he had not written: “You did not become someone’s second act.”
I answered him in jest. “You taught me how to not wait for a man who could never decide.”
He laughed and kissed my cheek. “Then we’ll write a song called ‘Decide For Me, Love,’” he said. “And it will be honest.”
It was honest. And the moon watched us up close.
The End
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