Paper Heart - Bradley Will Simpson

Prologue.

            February was already well advanced; the evening was cool and it started to snow heavily on the southern Alps. Broken by their day of skiing, the three sisters were relaxing with their favourite songs. The youngest had had to fight with her father to be allowed to take her keyboard with her and the second sister was strumming a few chords on the guitar that was always hanging around in the chalet that their family rented every winter. At the top of the building, the mezzanine under the roof offered the girls a perfect rehearsal room, far from the ears of their parents who did not deserve to put up with the perhaps thousandth version of the medley they had been concocting for several days already. It was the holidays, work for the university would be waiting.

              Like many, the three sisters dreamed of making a breakthrough in music and relied on the magic of the internet to make it happen. They regularly posted covers on social networks and their Faith band's pages already had a few thousand subscribers, making the students extremely proud. In the world of online covers, there were a lot of conscripts and few chosen ones, so the girls would never have expected so much. They were quite clear-sighted: if, deep in their hearts, they still had a tiny dream of glory, they knew that they had little chance of entering the closed world of music, even in the age of the Internet where we like to believe that anything is possible. So, the three sisters were content, between two mid-term exams, to make music for their own pleasure and the one of their subscribers, whom they did not want to disappoint. After all, it was still the first step towards fame. And, who knows, maybe luck would give them a bigger boost...

**

                 In his hotel room, Bradley was strumming a few notes on his guitar, with a music notebook in front of him on the desk. The singer sighed. The tour was almost over, he and the band were already thinking about the next album, but his notebook was desperately empty. With an angry gesture, the young man put his instrument on his bed. Inspiration would not come tonight. Like every night. The band had already been successful for more than seven years and it was always necessary to reinforce this success by always proposing new things that were more elaborate, but this time, Bradley couldn't do it. It was as if he was missing something, a breath of fresh and new to get back to writing. But the singer had absolutely no idea what it could be, or more importantly, where to find it...