Ainsley North

Matt Usher woke up one day to his silent, empty house. This was not an unusual occurrence. Over the past fifteen years, when Matt Usher woke up, it was usually to silence and emptiness.

What was unusual was that, on this day, Matt had nothing to do.

More often than not, over the past few months, Matt’s days had been busy whirlwinds of activity, serving as a mentor and coach and judge on the reality show Who Can Sing the Best? After years of aimlessness, the opportunity had taken him by surprise, as had the fact that it turned out he liked being busy. Now that the show was done filming and he was faced with all this empty silence all around him, a day stretching out in front of him in which nobody wanted him for anything, he felt…twitchy.

He got himself out of bed and sat at his piano and looked out over the California coastline. It was a perfect view of sea and sky that he had paid a lot of money for at one point, because it was supposed to have indicated that he had Made It. Now Matt could no longer remember exactly what he had made it for, or even what the “it” was that he had made.

Matt looked at the half-written songs he had scrawled over sheet music all over the piano, some of them songs he’d started working on literally years ago, because that was how long it had been since he had finished a song. Whenever he sat down to write a song, he inevitably remembered how easily he used to write songs, how they used to flow right out of him, how he would write multiple songs a week and they would all be top ten hits.

Of course, then he hadn’t been alone, he’d had…

Matt walked away from the piano. That seemed like definitely the wisest course of action. Better to walk away than to get mired all over again in everything he’d lost, everything he no longer was.

This was why Who Can Sing the Best? had been so great. It had, for the first time in a long time, given him somewhere to live that wasn’t the past. He’d had a present he was enjoying and it seemed like it had been so long since he had enjoyed his present.

How could he keep that going?

It took some hunting for Matt to find his cell phone because he never could remember where he left his cell phone. When he found it, he ignored all the texts because those would all be from people wanting to hitch onto his suddenly gleaming-again star: come out clubbing or go to a restaurant opening or be seen shopping in the right store. Matt knew all of these texts by heart, he’d lived all of them the first time around with his fame. The thought of going through all of them again – alone, this time – was not appealing.