Recap: Murray shows up, shakes Zack out of his stupor, and leaves him raw. Back with Veronica: in the aftermath of WhisprGate, she opens a blank document and actually begins to write.
Need to catch up? Drop the needle on the chapter index.
Veronica
The morning after the Whispr Incident, I woke up weirdly clear-headed.
Maybe it was the late-night group chat with Mara and Lucy still pinging around my brain, or maybe it was the fact that I’d finally admitted to someone – anyone – that I was quietly losing my grip. Either way, I felt that rare and fleeting thing: a spark.
Not the motivational-poster kind. More like static electricity from a rage-filled hoodie. But still – energy.
I made a coffee, sat at the kitchen table, opened my laptop, and stared at the blinking cursor.
I didn’t want to write another “dear diary” trauma dump. God knows I had enough half-started essays about patriarchy and pelvic floor shame to fill a vault. But something else itched under my skin. Something ridiculous and oddly urgent.
So instead, I queued up an old Midnight Ashes track – one of the loud ones, the kind that always felt like fire in my veins. Zack Salinger’s voice came through like smoke and sex and unapologetic swagger. He didn’t ask for permission. He took up space. The whole song pulsed with defiance and grit.
Zack Salinger, lead singer of Midnight Ashes, had swagger you could smell. Half fire, half performance art. Jasmine Hart, the lead guitarist and vocalist, was all grit and velvet – the kind of woman who could make heartbreak sound like a power anthem. Together, they burned through the late 90s and early 2000s like a fever dream. Their breakup was brutal. Their music? Still tattooed on my bones.
I cranked the volume and danced.
Not gracefully. Not in a “TikTok mum” kind of way, oh no. I flung myself around the kitchen like I was twenty again and someone had just handed me a bottle of vodka and a bad idea. My hair stuck to my forehead. My coffee sloshed. I kicked over the fucking cocky laundry basket and didn’t even apologise.
That’s when the front door slammed.
Lily and Finn stood there in the doorway like a jury. Sizing me up. Silent side-eye conference in progress.
“Not the cringe arc again…” Lily muttered, peeling off her shoes.
Finn cocked his head, one earbud still in. “Is this content or a cry for help?”
“Bit of both,” I called, panting. “Gen X chaos. Let me live.”
They disappeared in a flurry of eye-rolls and door slams, but I didn’t care.
Fire: undiminished.
I collapsed at the kitchen table, still humming, still wired, sweating profusely. Opened my laptop. Stared at the blinking cursor.
I closed my eyes and imagined a woman like me on that stage.
Middle-aged. Unapologetic, as Midnight Ashes had been. Loud. Not graceful or pretty or palatable. Just fucking present. And I thought – what if my main character wanted that? What if she needed it?
Then I started a story.
Chapter One: Kat and the Washing Basket
Kat wasn’t usually a violent woman.
Passive-aggressive? Absolutely. Emotionally repressed? Sure. But not violent. Not until the Tuesday her washing basket staged a coup.
It had been sitting there for five days – overflowing, listing to one side like a capsized boat of unmatched socks and hormonal despair. Kat had walked past it twenty-seven times. She’d counted. Each time, it taunted her. Each time, she promised herself she’d deal with it after just one more spreadsheet, email, child pick-up, power bill, or anxiety spiral.
On the twenty-eighth pass, she snapped.
She raised her boot and kicked it. Hard.
The sound of plastic-on-wall was satisfying. So was the spray of knickers and socks that shot out like confetti.
“FUCK YOU,” she said to the basket, really putting her heart and soul into it.
The basket said nothing. Typical.
Kat stood there, one foot still hovering, chest heaving like a Viking warrior, until her gaze snagged on the corner of the lounge. Her daughter’s electric guitar leaned there, strap tangled, a faint whiff of bubblegum body spray clinging to it.
Before she could talk herself out of it, she picked it up.
The weight was familiar and foreign all at once.
And just like that, she was seventeen again.
Mrs Hynde in the music room, lipstick bleeding into the cracks of her smile, showing a row of girls how to grind out a power chord.
The boys had sniggered — girls playing guitar — but the girls had pressed their fingers harder, turned the amps up louder. The sound had been raw and unapologetic, like setting fire to silence.
Kat shuffled her grip, fingers fumbling over the frets. She slammed down on the strings and out came a single, ragged chord. It buzzed, it rattled the frames on the wall, it rattled her bones.
And for the first time in months, she grinned.
When her teenage daughter poked her head around the corner and asked, “Mum, are you okay?” Kat looked her dead in the eye.
“I am,” she said, calm now. “But I think I might get the band back together.”
I stared at the last line and blinked.
What the fuck had I just written?
And why… did it feel so good?
I read it back three times. It wasn’t polished. It wasn’t profound. But it was funny and weirdly satisfying – and for the first time in months, I didn’t feel like I was drowning.
Kat wasn’t me. But she was. She was every exhausted, perimenopausal, edge-of-snap woman I knew. And maybe she wasn’t going to stay in her house and cry into the laundry. Maybe she was going to get loud. Maybe she’d find others like her. Maybe, together, they’d pick up instruments and scream their way back to life.
Maybe that’s what I needed– not a soapbox. Not a spotlight. Just a story.
I opened Substack. Created a new post. Gave it a title:
“Second Verse: A Midlife Riot”
Then I pasted in Mel’s chapter.
My finger hovered over the button.
I thought about the graveyard of drafts clogging my hard drive, the rants abandoned halfway, the jokes I never let anyone hear. This was different. This was loud.
Click.
It felt less like sharing a story and more like streaking across the internet in nothing but rage and eyeliner.
My heart thundered. My pits flooded. My body clearly hadn’t got the memo that this was fiction and not an emotional undressing in front of the world.
I sat there staring at the screen like I’d just released a small, furious animal into the wild.
Immediately, I regretted everything.
My heart thundered. My pits flooded. My body clearly hadn’t got the memo that this was fiction and not an emotional undressing in front of the internet.
I picked up my phone and messaged Mara.
Me:
“Okay… I just published the first chapter of a story. It’s about a woman who kicks a washing basket and accidentally starts a band. I don’t even know what this is. But it felt good. I think I’m losing it.”
Mara:
“V. That’s not losing it. That’s art. Send me the link.”
I did. Then I shut my laptop, downed my cold coffee, and let the smallest possible smile creep across my face.
It had begun.
What happens when V’s characters get louder than the laundry? Find out in Chapter 7.