9
Mason Knight didn’t give up. Texts kept coming, one after another.
I blocked him, so he switched to different phone numbers, endlessly sending his fake apologies.
He even pressured Mr. and Mrs. Knight to call me and persuade me to return.
But Mr. and Mrs. Knight were decent people; they couldn’t bring themselves to do such a thing.
They only called to apologize to me, never mentioning Mason Knight.
But I never expected him to block my path right at my doorstep.
That day, coming home from work, I saw a figure huddled disconsolately by my door.
Mason Knight, once so vibrant and confident, was now unshaven, his eyes hollow and sunken, reeking of stale alcohol and mildew, like a stray dog abandoned by its master.
He saw me, his eyes instantly lighting up. He stumbled forward, blocking my way.
“Scarlett, I know I was wrong. Can you forgive me?”
His voice was hoarse, on the verge of tears. “I was fooled by that wretched Chloe Davis, too. I’m the biggest victim here!”
I couldn’t be bothered with his rambling. I walked around him to punch in my security code.
8:35 PM
But he grabbed my wrist, his eyes bloodshot, and offered his last desperate plea.
“Think of Echo, our new album, Echo!”
“Scarlett Hayes, if you just come back to me, marry me, Project Echo can be released again! Can you really bear to abandon it? Can you really just give up on our album?”
I paused, slowly turned around, and looked at his face, full of desperate hope. Then I smiled.
“A project as heartless as you are? Why would I miss it?”
Project Echo was never truly mine from the start. After its birth, I was eager to get back to work, spending pitifully little time with it.
Mason Knight, however, always claimed he had time to play with it, to take it out for promotions. In his heart, the singer was always more important than the producer.
Gradually, an invisible chasm grew between us and our creation.
Even when Mason Knight accused me of being unworthy, he sided with his father.
The album I had birthed after ten months of painstaking work looked at me with disgust and contempt, its eyes devoid of any affection, filled only with the hatred of a “thief” that had been instilled in it.
Why would I ever want a project–a project whose father had instigated it to plunge a knife into its producer’s heart–to be born again?
Mason Knight’s face instantly turned ashen. He released my hand, stumbling back a few steps.
“Scarlett Hayes, how can you say that about Echo… it’s *our* album!” His voice trembled, his eyes wide with disbelief.
His last, most cherished bargaining chip was, to me, utterly worthless.
After a long silence, he seemed
Stantly lose all his strength, his once–straight posture collapsing.
