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“I’m a visual person.”

“I noticed.”

“And you keep changing the chorus, but every version does the same thing. You make it louder or bigger or add more to it.”

“What would you do?” I ask.

“With the song?”

“Yeah.”

“I don’t know anything about writing music.”

“You’ve listened to me murder this chorus for an hour. You’ve earned an opinion.”

She laughs quietly through the wall. “I’d stop trying to make it the biggest part.”

That answer settles somewhere in my head, and I reach for the guitar again. “Hang on.”

“What?”

I play the verse quietly, then when I reach the chorus, I pull back instead of pushing harder. I drop one of the extra chords I added earlier and let the vocal melody carry through the empty space.

It’s not finished, but for the first time all day, the song breathes.

I stop at the end of the chorus and glance toward the wall. “Better?”

“Yeah. Now it feels like it belongs to the same picture.”

I smile. “Back to colors again?”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

I play it again, changing one more chord near the end, something simpler than what I had before. The transition into the next verse feels cleaner immediately, and a laugh slips out of me.

“What?” Ruby asks.

“You fixed my chorus.”

“I absolutely did not.”

“You kind of did.” I laugh and rest my head back against the wall. For a while, neither of us says anything, and somehow it isn’t awkward.

That might be the strangest part.

There’s a wall between us, but somehow this feels more intimate than sitting across from her. Maybe because she’s hearing the song before I’ve had a chance to clean it up or hide the parts I’m still figuring out.

I usually wait until a song is further along before I play it for anyone outside the band. Early versions are messy. Half-written lyrics, wrong chords, melodies that might disappear the next morning. I’d rather show someone the finished thing than explain what it’s supposed to become.

“You still there?” she asks.

“Yeah.”

I pick out the new chorus again, quieter this time. When I finish, I hear one knock through the wall.

Keep going.

I know what it means now, so I do.