Chapter 14
LAUREL
Later that night, Dean shows up at Mama’s house because she texted him, Your sister is home. Come alone, which is Bellamy shorthand for somebody has fucked up badly enough to make bail a family affair.
He walks into the kitchen smelling like diesel and whatever soap his wife buys in bulk, sees my face, and stops.
Dean is four years older than me, six-four, sun-browned year-round, built like Daddy was before cancer stripped him down to bone and stubbornness.
Grant used to joke that standing between the Bellamy men made him feel like our family had accidentally adopted a quarterback.
Dean loved that joke. He loved Grant, too.
They fished together whenever we visited, and when Daddy got sick and Dean and Monica’s honeymoon fell apart, Grant paid for the replacement trip without letting Dean argue about it.
When people in Savannah started making comments about how often his little sister disappeared behind her famous husband’s name, Dean defended him without hesitation.
I watch every trace of that affection leave his face as Mama gives him the abbreviated version. “He fucked who?”
“Dean.”
“No, I need the name again because my brain has rejected the information as spam.”
“Sloane Avery.”
His jaw works. “The girl whose record you told me to buy Monica for Christmas?”
“That one.”
“The one you introduced onstage?”
“Yep.”
He sits down, stays there for approximately three seconds, then gets back up. “I’m going to Nashville.”
“Sit your ass down.”
“Laurel—”
“You own a business, have two children, and tore your rotator cuff opening a boat motor last spring. What exactly is the plan? Drive eight hours so Grant can have security escort you out while TikTok calls you an unstable hillbilly?”
Dean finally sits, his eyes moving over me, and the anger drains just enough for the grief underneath to show. “Did he hurt you?”
“That question has become difficult to answer without a spreadsheet.”
“You know what I mean.”
“He never hit me.”
Dean nods once, his fingers tightening around the back of the chair. “Okay.” He exhales through his nose. “Saves me from putting that son of a bitch through a wall and explaining it to a judge.”
I should laugh. I can’t.
“I need you to promise me something.”
“Depends.”
“Don’t call him, don’t text him, don’t threaten him, and don’t post anything. If he contacts you, you know nothing.”
Dean looks offended. “I know plenty.”
“For the next few weeks, you have suffered a catastrophic loss of intelligence.”
“Runs in the family.”
I narrow my eyes at him until he finally caves.
“Fine.” He leans forward, forearms resting on his thighs. “But tell me why.”
Yesterday, I would’ve said Evelyn told me to preserve leverage, the audit needs time, public scandal could affect the company’s valuation, and twenty-one percent of a burning building is worth less than twenty-one percent of one still standing. All of that is true. None of it is the whole answer.
“Because Grant thinks he knows how I behave when I’m hurt.
” My voice sounds steadier than I feel. “He expects tears. He expects me to run back to Mama. He expects you to threaten him. He expects me to file for divorce, release a statement, and fight with him over the house. Every predictable thing I do gives him something to prepare for.”
Dean’s face changes. “So what are you doing?”
I look at him, at the brother who has spent his whole life thinking the worst thing he’d ever have to protect me from was a bad boyfriend, a broken heart, or a man stupid enough to hurt his little sister.
“Something else.”
∞∞∞
Daddy’s guitar is still in the back room, exactly where Mama left it after he died, as though moving it would mean admitting the room belongs to a different life now.
It’s a 1971 Martin D-28, the same one with the nick below the bridge from the night twenty-year-old Thomas Bellamy tried to impress a woman at Tybee Island, dropped it off a picnic table, and impressed her so thoroughly she married him after.
I carry it to the old daybed and sit with the guitar across my lap, late-afternoon light slipping through the blinds in thin gold bars, and for a long moment I just run my thumb over the strings.
The first chord hurts, not my fingers, but my throat. I haven’t sung a note yet.
Four years ago, after the last procedure failed to give me more than a few minutes without pain, I stopped picking up guitars unless I was writing for somebody else.
Eventually, I stopped doing that too. People think losing your voice means losing sound, but it’s stranger than that; you lose anticipation, the instinct to hear a melody and wonder what it might feel like in your mouth, the habit of building a chorus around the strongest part of your range because you already know where your voice will open.
You stop reaching for what you can’t have, because wanting the impossible every day is exhausting as fuck.
Dr. Mehta’s folder lies open beside me. Boston. More imaging. A procedure with a name long enough to take up half a line. Months of therapy if I’m eligible. No guarantee, no promise that any of it will give me back what I lost.
I look down at Daddy’s guitar, at the worn places where his hands rested thousands of times, and think about how many years I spent believing this part of me was over. Daddy used to say nobody ever feels ready for the first note; you sing it before cowardice finishes making its case.
So I do.
I take a breath and give the opening verse of Magnolia Rain less volume than a confession.
You came home with the midnight on you,
dust along your boots,
three hours through a summer storm
because you said you missed me too.
The sound comes out rough, frayed at the edges, thinner than I remember, so small the old Laurel would’ve stopped before finishing the word. I don’t. I let the note exist, let it tremble into the quiet, and finish the line.
We were young and reckless,
with more dreams than we could name,
a borrowed car, a battered guitar,
and a thousand roads to take.
The note fades, and I wait for the pain I’ve spent four years learning to expect. My throat prickles, a faint scrape passing through it, and then there’s nothing.
I sing again, softer this time, letting the melody carry me back to the girl who wrote it.
Let the magnolia rain fall down,
let it wash the whole world away,
let a thousand stars burn above us
while I love you in the rain.
My eyes sting as the memory rises, sudden and painfully clear.
I wrote those words believing love could make the whole world disappear, believing forever was simply a place two people decided to go together.
I used to hear that chorus and see the life ahead of us—the little house, the impossible dreams, the years we were certain would belong to us because we wanted them badly enough.
If forever is a place somewhere,
I hope it looks like this—
summer breathing through the trees,
rain falling from the sky,
your mouth finding mine
like we were always meant to kiss.
The last word leaves my mouth almost as a whisper, and for the first time in years, I don’t hear my voice as something I lost.
I hear it as something that might still be mine.
Mama appears in the doorway, tears brimming in her eyes, and I smile at her through the haze of my own. “My doctor called yesterday.”
She steps into the room. “What doctor?”
“Mehta.” Her expression changes, worry creasing her dark brows. “There’s a procedure.”
Her hand comes up to cover her mouth. “Baby.”
I swallow the lump in my throat and shake my head, the words catching for a second before I manage to get them out. “They think there might be a chance.”
She sits beside me on the daybed, close enough that her knee presses against mine.
A few quiet breaths pass between us, neither of us saying a word.
Daddy’s guitar rests across my thighs, warm from my hands, and the house feels strangely quiet around us, the familiar creaks and distant hum fading until all I can hear is the soft rhythm of our breathing and the faint rasp of my fingertips brushing the strings.
Mama reaches out and touches the wood near the bridge. “Does Grant know?”
“No. But he was the first person I tried to tell.”
Mama closes her eyes, and when they open again, I see a million things floating in them—relief, heartbreak, pride, and all the years she has spent loving me through things I never knew how to say. She cradles my face between her hands, her thumbs brushing off my eyes.
“Oh, baby,” she whispers. “You were never meant to spend the rest of your life grieving the girl you used to be. I’m so proud of you for singing today. So proud. But I need you to know something. I was proud of you long before you ever had a voice worth hearing.”
Tears roll down her cheeks, her mouth trembling as she tries to hold herself together, and whatever restraint I have left breaks with her. A sob tears out of me, my body shaking as I fold into her hands, crying so hard my throat aches.
“You were my girl before you were anybody’s wife, before the world learned your name. And whatever happens next, you’re still her.” Her thumbs sweep away my tears, though hers keep falling. “So if that voice comes back to you, sweetheart, I want you to use it for yourself this time.”
∞∞∞
Beckett calls after dinner, right in the middle of the family chaos.
Dean’s children have taken over the downstairs, Owen is in the middle of explaining to Mama why bath time violates his constitutional rights, and Dean has reached the stage of fatherhood where confiscating every electronic device under this roof feels like a sane response to six-year-old rebellion.
I slip onto the back porch with my phone, closing the door behind me as the cicadas roar from the trees, their chorus filling the dark yard while the humidity settles over my skin like a damp hand.
“Hey.”
There’s a pause on the other end, brief but deliberate. “You sound different.”