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He follows me toward my station, and I’m aware of how normal it feels having him here now. That’s changed since the show too.

We haven’t talked about what happened afterward or tried to put a name on whatever this is. We spent the next morning together, and when he kissed me goodbye on my porch, neither of us treated it like something we needed to explain. Since then, things between us have settled into something easier. Not casual exactly, but not complicated enough that either of us has felt the need to define it.

For now, I’m okay with that.

He follows me to the small worktable near my station while Nell turns her attention back to the computer.

I sit and pull my sketchbook aside. “So, what’s in the folder?”

Zander takes the chair across from me and sets it on the table between us. “Stuff for the new album.”

That gets my attention.

“What kind of stuff?”

“Cover ideas. Lyrics. A few demos. We’ve been talking about what we want the album to look like, and so far, none of it feels right.”

I glance at the folder again. “And you came here because...?”

He looks at me for a second. “Because I want your opinion.”

He opens the folder, and inside are several printed images, lyric sheets covered in handwritten notes, and what looks like a rough track list. Zander pulls the images out first and spreads them across the table.

One has a dark highway disappearing into mountains beneath a washed-out sky. Another is mostly black with a blurred figure standing beneath stage lights. The third uses an ocean horizon with the band name in oversized white lettering.

I pick up the highway concept again and study it more closely. “I can see why these made it this far. They’re polished. The composition works, the type is clean, everything is where it’s supposed to be.”

Zander watches me. “But?”

“But I could change the band name, and this could belong to almost anyone.”

He nods. “That’s exactly what’s been bothering me.”

I spread the other concepts out beside the highway image and look at them again. The stage lights, the ocean, the empty road. They’re all different versions of the same problem.

“There’s nothing here that feels specific to you guys. The road gives you movement, but I don’t know where you’re going or why. The stage one is dark and moody, but that’s about all it says, and the ocean could belong to any band that happens to live near a coast.”

“Which is pretty much where we ended up after staring at them for a week.”

“Who did them?”

“A designer somebody we work with recommended. He’s good. I don’t think the problem is him.” Zander picks up the ocean concept and turns it toward himself. “We gave him a description of the album instead of anything he could actually use.”

I lean back in my chair. “What kind of description?”

“Rock band from Northern California. Just came off six months in Europe. New material is heavier than the last album.” He looks at the page again and shakes his head. “Turns out that gets you dark roads, stages, and dramatic oceans.”

“It would be hard to get much else from that.”

“Exactly.”

I gather the prints into a loose stack. “So, you want another opinion before you go back to him?”

“Not exactly.” There’s something about the way he says it that makes me look up.

Zander rests his forearms on the table. “I want to know if you’d be interested in doing the cover.”

For a second, I’m sure I’ve misunderstood him. “The cover for the album?”