I ran inside.
Tyler was standing in the living room, nine years old, holding my guitar by the neck. The body had been slammed against the stone fireplace hard enough that the bridge had torn clean off, the spruce top had split straight down the middle, and the strings had tangled themselves into something like a spiderweb, catching on the jagged edge of the sound hole. For one full second my brain simply refused to process what my eyes were showing it.
My nephew looked at me. Then he laughed. It broke, he said. Your guitar was fake.
Derek stood in the doorway behind him, my brother in law, forty years old, his coffee cup frozen halfway to his mouth, his face gone the color of paper. I walked forward slowly and knelt in front of the wreckage. Pieces of sunburst finish lay scattered across the hardwood like broken glass. A strip of binding had peeled away entirely. One tuning peg had bent sideways. The smell of splintered wood rose up into my face, sharp and resinous. My hands were shaking. Eight thousand dollars, five years of saving, forty recording sessions, all of it gone in the span of two seconds.
