Where The Mountains Keep Secrets by Emm at Inkitt

1. The Sound of Too Much Silence

The city of London did not change for anyone—not for rain-soaked commuters rushing across bridges, not for night-shift taxis cutting through amber-lit streets, and certainly not for Ethan Williams who, despite being one of the most recognizable voices of his generation, returned to it like a ghost slipping back into a place that had forgotten how to hold him.

The tour had ended two days ago, wrapped in applause that still echoed faintly in his bones, in backstage laughter, in the metallic scent of stage lights cooling down after hours of heat and sound; and yet, the exhaustion that followed him home had nothing to do with singing, nothing to do with the guitar that still sat carefully in its case like a sleeping companion.

No, this exhaustion was quieter, heavier, the kind that didn’t show up on his face in photographs but settled behind his eyes like something that refused to leave.

He let his team disperse with polite nods and tired smiles, barely registering their goodbyes as he climbed into his car, leaned his head against the window, and watched London blur past him in streaks of gray and gold until even that motion felt unnecessary, like the world could have stopped and he wouldn’t have objected.

His bachelor pad was exactly as it always was—minimal, too clean in a way that suggested he didn’t actually live there so much as pass through it; a one-bedroom apartment tucked into a quiet pocket of the city where nobody really looked too closely at who came and went, which suited him just fine because Ethan had learned early that silence was safer than attention when it wasn’t attached to a stage.

He didn’t turn on all the lights.

He never did.

Just the kitchen lamp, soft and warm, spilling into the living room like a weak apology for brightness.

He didn’t even bother removing his jacket properly; it fell somewhere between his shoulders and the couch as he dropped into it, still half-standing, half-sitting, until the weight of everything—travel, schedules, interviews, expectations, the relentless hum of being “on”—finally collapsed him into stillness.

Sleep should have come easily.

It didn’t.

Because sleep, like everything else lately, had begun to require permission he wasn’t sure he had anymore.

And then there was Lila.

Even in silence, she wasn’t absent.

She was everywhere—on his phone, in headlines he never should have clicked but always did anyway, in comments disguised as speculation, in the cruel curiosity of tabloids that had learned how to say her name in ways that made it sound like a story instead of a person.

She was in America again, filming another reality show, smiling for cameras that didn’t know her the way he did, or maybe did know her in ways he didn’t want to imagine.

And then there were the reports.

Always reports.

Her proximity to someone else—this time an A-list Hollywood actor whose name Ethan had stopped bothering to remember after the third article because remembering made it too real, too sharp, too easy to imagine things he didn’t want to.

Four years.

Four years of Lila and Ethan existing in a space that was never fully defined, never fully claimed, like a song stuck in rehearsal that never made it to the final recording.

They were together—yes, of course they were together, there were photographs and whispered confirmations and private moments no one else had access to—but when it came to everything that actually mattered, everything that built a future instead of just a present, Lila always seemed to step just slightly out of reach, like she was standing at the edge of something and waiting for a sign that never arrived.

Marriage.

Engagement.

Stability.

Words that felt too heavy in his mouth when he thought about them alone, but somehow felt necessary when he thought about her.

And he had never once asked her to give up her ambitions, never once tried to pull her away from the life she wanted—he loved her too much for that kind of selfishness—but lately, the question that refused to leave him alone was simpler and far more brutal.

Was she ever going to be ready?

Or was he simply waiting for something that didn’t exist in the timeline she had chosen for herself?

The worst part wasn’t even the uncertainty.

It was the trust.

Because he did trust her.

God, he did.

But trust didn’t stop the stomach-drop feeling that came every time her name was attached to someone else, and it certainly didn’t stop the hollow ache that followed when she laughed it off later, saying it was just PR, just publicity, just the machine doing what it always did.

And maybe it was.

But lately, even “maybe” had started to feel like too much space for doubt to grow in.

Somewhere between the ticking clock on the wall and the dull glow of his phone lighting up for the hundredth time that night, Ethan stopped trying to sleep altogether and simply sat there, staring at the Thames through the distant window of his mind, as if the river could answer questions he hadn’t learned how to ask out loud.

He didn’t know when the night became morning.

Only that it did.

And that sometime just before dawn, when the sky was still unsure whether it wanted to be dark or blue, there came a knock at his door.

Not a hesitant one.

Not a polite one.

A knock that already knew it had the right to be there.

Even before he moved, even before his body fully registered the sound, Ethan knew exactly who it was.

Claire Bennett.

His manager.

His strategist.

His problem-solver.

His unofficial therapist.

His closest thing to family that didn’t come with complicated bloodlines and conditional affection.

He opened the door and didn’t even have time to step aside before she walked in like she owned oxygen itself, which, honestly, she sometimes behaved like she did.

Behind her came chaos.

Three small chaos agents.

Three children, about four years old, give or take a few months of absolute destruction.

They saw him and it was instant.

No hesitation.

No greeting.

Just full-speed collision.

“Ethan!” they screamed in unison, as if his name was a spell they had been saving all night.

And before he could even process the fact that small humans were now actively climbing him like he was some sort of emotionally exhausted jungle gym, he was on the floor.

Not gracefully.

Not poetically.

Just flat.

With three children sitting on him like they had claimed him in some ancient treaty.

One on his chest.

One somewhere near his stomach.

One aggressively hugging his arm like it had personally betrayed her at some point.

Claire shut the door behind them with the calm of a woman who had seen worse things than a rock star being used as furniture.

“Enough of the mayhem,” she said, already rolling up her sleeves. “Go plop yourselves on the couch while your uncle and I have a ten-minute talk.”

“Awww,” the children chorused, in that deeply unconvincing way children do when they are pretending to be disappointed but are already planning chaos elsewhere.

Still, they obeyed.

Because Claire Bennett’s authority did not require volume.

Only certainty.

Ethan stayed on the floor for a second longer than necessary, staring at the ceiling like it might explain what his life had become.

“I see,” he muttered. “So this is how I die. Flattened by preschoolers.”

Claire didn’t even look at him.

“Technically,” she said, walking straight past him, “you’re still breathing, so try again.”

She picked up his phone from the coffee table before he could react, her eyes flicking across the open tabs, the articles, the notifications, the spiraling digital evidence of a man who had spent the night slowly drowning in information he couldn’t control.

He got up slowly, like a teenager waiting for a lecture he already knew by heart.

Claire looked at him then.

Really looked.

And her expression shifted—not dramatically, not theatrically, but enough that the air in the room changed.

“You’re done,” she said simply.

Ethan blinked. “Done?”

“With this,” she clarified, gesturing vaguely between his phone and his face and everything he was not saying. “Either you keep doing this—this… watching, waiting, bleeding yourself dry over headlines you can’t fix—or you stop.”

He didn’t respond.

So she continued, voice steady, almost too steady.

“You only look alive when you’re on stage or when you’re performing for people who don’t know you,” she said. “The rest of the time, you’re… I don’t know, Ethan, it’s like you’re slowly switching yourself off.”

A pause.

Then, softer but sharper:

“You need a break.”

He let out a breath that sounded like it had been trapped for days.

“I just came off tour.”

“No,” Claire said, already shaking her head. “You came off performing. Not living.”

Silence stretched.

In the background, one of the children was trying to convince the others that the couch was actually a spaceship. Claire ignored it.

“The next four months,” she said firmly, “no tours. No stage commitments. You’re going off-grid.”

Ethan frowned. “Off-grid?”

“You need to write. You need to sleep. You need to remember what your own voice sounds like when it’s not being screamed back at you by fifty thousand people.”

“And Lila?” he asked before he could stop himself.

That name landed between them like a familiar bruise.

Claire didn’t flinch, but her eyes narrowed slightly.

“I’m not starting that conversation right now,” she said. “Because if I do, I won’t stop.”

And somehow, that was worse than anger.

Because Claire didn’t waste anger on things she thought were already obvious.

She walked past him into the kitchen, already opening cabinets like she had lived there longer than he had.

“I’m making pancakes,” she announced.

From the living room, one of the children shouted, “Yay!”

“Yes, again,” Claire replied before Ethan could say no. “Because I am being emotionally blackmailed by four-year-olds and one rock star.”

Ethan, still standing in the middle of his own apartment like a guest in his own life, let out something that almost resembled a laugh.

Almost.

Claire glanced at him over her shoulder.

“You don’t care about the fame,” she said more quietly now, cracking eggs with practiced ease. “You never did. You care about building something that feels like home.”

He didn’t answer.

Because she was right, and that was always more uncomfortable than being wrong.

Claire’s voice softened further, but only slightly.

“You’ve been trying to build a family out of people who don’t know how to stay,” she said. “And you keep forgetting that not everyone is going to learn loyalty just because you’re good at giving it.”

That one hit deeper than anything else.

Because it wasn’t just about Lila.

It was about everything.

His father, gone too early, leaving behind melodies unfinished and lessons half-learned.

His mother, present but distant in ways that never quite softened.

The stepfather who showed up when convenient and disappeared when not.

The half-siblings who remembered him only when they needed something fixed.

And Ethan—Ethan who kept building mansions in other people’s names while living in a one-bedroom apartment that felt more honest than any luxury ever could.

Claire flipped a pancake.

Then another.

Then, as if she had been thinking about this long before she walked through his door, she said, almost casually:

“You should leave London for a while.”

Ethan frowned. “Claire—”

“I’m serious,” she cut in. “Somewhere quiet. Somewhere nobody knows your schedule better than your soul. You write, you breathe, you disappear properly for once instead of just emotionally doing it.”

He leaned against the counter now, watching her.

“And where exactly do I go?” he asked.

Claire smiled slightly.

Not playful.

Not warm.

Strategic.

“I’ve been thinking,” she said.

And there it was.

The shift.

The moment something in the room changed direction without asking permission.

“Ireland,” she said.

Ethan blinked.