Chapter 32
LAUREL
“You look like absolute shit.”
Nora Keene stands on my front porch with two iced coffees in one hand, a paper bag from Loveless Cafe in the other, and twelve years of friendship sitting awkwardly between us because neither of us seems to know if we’re allowed to hug yet.
I haven’t seen her in person in fourteen months. The time before that, six. Before that, almost a year.
There was a period when Nora knew which drawer I kept tampons in and could let herself into my house after midnight because we wrote better songs when one of us was furious.
Eventually, friendship became birthday texts, voice notes I listened to and forgot to answer, promises to get lunch, and photographs we liked on Instagram as proof that affection could survive neglect as long as no one examined it too closely.
She looks almost exactly the same. Short black curls, freckles across her nose, denim cutoffs, a men’s white button-down with the sleeves shoved to her elbows, and so many silver rings TSA probably knows her by name.
Nora has written songs for country girls with rhinestone microphones, pop stars who pronounce Nashville like it’s a skin condition, and several men who publicly took credit for lyrics they couldn’t have written with divine intervention.
She still drives the same battered green Bronco because, according to her, any songwriter who buys a luxury SUV has lost touch with suffering.
“Hello to you too.”
“I considered saying you look beautiful, but your mother threatened to disown me if I enabled bullshit.”
“You spoke to Mama?”
“She called me.”
“Why does everyone have my mother’s number?”
“Because Vivian Bellamy has never met a person she couldn’t adopt or a number she couldn’t get.” Nora lifts the paper bag. “Biscuits. Fried chicken. Hash-brown casserole with enough sodium to preserve us through Christmas.”
I step aside. “You can come in.”
She doesn’t move.
“Listen to you sounding all formal when I’ve literally sat in your bathtub eating cereal while you peed with the door open.”
“I was twenty-four.”
“You were disgusting at twenty-four.”
“At least I wasn’t the one eating cereal in a bathtub.”
“The bowl was clean.”
We look at each other, and the joke runs out before either of us is ready for it to.
Nora’s mouth trembles. Mine follows.
She drops the bag and coffees onto the porch chair and wraps both arms around me.
“You fucking asshole,” she whispers into my hair.
There’s so much love packed inside the insult that I start crying immediately.
“I know.”
“I texted you, called, came to the hospital after your third surgery, and Grant told me you were sleeping.”
I pull back. “I was.”
“I came back the next day.”
“I know.”
Her eyes flash. “Then why the hell didn’t you call me?”
I’ve got no one to blame for this one. Just me.
“Because you were still writing.”
Nora’s anger falters. “What?”
“Every time we talked, you had a session. A cut. Somebody wanted another song. You complained about stupid producers and bad bridges and singers changing pronouns because their boyfriends got insecure, and I loved hearing it.” My throat tightens. “Until I hated it.”
She says nothing.
“You still had the thing I lost.” The admission comes out smaller than the feeling ever was. “And I was jealous.”
Nora stares at me. “You could’ve told me.”
“I know.”
“I would’ve stopped talking about work.”
“That’s exactly why I didn’t tell you.”
Her eyes fill. “Laurel.”
“I didn’t want everyone shrinking their lives to fit around the hole in mine.”
Nora wipes beneath one eye with the heel of her hand. “So instead you disappeared.”
“Yes.”
“Some deeply stupid shit.”
“Also yes.”
She studies me for another second, sniffs once, and reaches past me for one of the coffees. “Good. We’ve established you were an idiot. Feed me.”
∞∞∞
We eat on the floor because my dining table still hasn’t arrived, and the furnished townhouse possesses four bar stools designed by someone with a personal grievance against the human spine.
Nora tells me about a songwriter who walked out of a session after another writer rhymed girl with world three times in the same chorus.
I tell her Dean has installed so much lighting around the townhouse that astronauts may start using Green Hills for navigation.
Her neighbor got arrested for stealing hydrangeas.
Mama and Celia have formed what they’re calling a temporary diplomatic alliance, which makes Nora choke on sweet tea hard enough that I have to thump her between the shoulder blades.
Normal life sneaks back in while neither of us is paying attention.
Laundry hums upstairs. My phone charges beside the sink.
A FedEx driver leaves the throat lozenges Jenna recommended on the porch, and a lawn mower starts somewhere beyond the back fence.
For almost forty minutes, Grant’s name never comes up.
I don’t realize how much relief there is in that until Nora sees the divorce papers clipped beneath a medical folder on the counter.
“Are you okay?”
It’s the question people keep asking because polite society has yet to invent an acceptable version of How does it feel when fourteen years of your life catches fire and strangers make reaction videos about the smoke?
I pick at the corner of my napkin. “Some hours.”
“And the other hours?”
“I miss who I used to be.”
Nora nods. “That must piss you off.”
“You have no idea.”
“I probably do.” She settles back against the cabinet. “I never liked what he became.”
My head comes up. “You liked Grant.”
“I did. He used to pick me up from sessions when my car died,” she says. “He drove three hours to get us from Memphis because we missed the last flight. He sat through that horrible open mic where you sang the song about the waitress with the tattoo.”
“That song was good.”
“It was a goddamn felony.”
I throw my napkin at her. Nora catches it against her chest with a grin, but the grin doesn’t last.
“I’m not going to pretend the man you married was always the man you’re divorcing, but being married to him started looking exhausting from the outside.”
I frown. “How?”
She thinks about it. “Like being friends with a country. Everything had to go through customs.”
A laugh almost gets me, but her face stops it.
“He never told me I couldn’t see you. He never banned me from the house or pulled any villain shit, but I’d call and you were tired.
I’d ask you to write and there was always a dinner, a launch, an artist emergency, something Mercer needed.
After your injury, you started cancelling on your own.
And when I did manage to get you out of the house, half the room wanted to know how Grant was doing.
” Her mouth tightens. “People asked about his fucking label before they asked about your throat.”
I look down at the remains of my biscuit.
“I watched you become harder to reach,” she continues. “I told myself you were going through a lot. I should’ve been more annoying.”
“You’re extremely annoying.”
“Thank you.”
“Grant didn’t make me stop calling.”
“I know. He did terrible things. I’m not giving him every shitty thing that ever happened to me just because I know more about him now.”
Nora understands what I mean without making me explain it twice. “Okay.”
“I disappeared because I was ashamed. I couldn’t sing, and I hated being around people who could.
I hated sympathy. I hated walking into rooms where everyone remembered what I used to sound like.
Sometimes somebody would ask when I was coming back and I wanted to fucking bite them.
” I rub my thumb over a crease in the napkin.
“Grant benefited from me getting smaller. I can admit that now. But sometimes I made myself smaller too.”
Nora is quiet long enough that I finally look at her. “Then maybe taking your life back isn’t only about what you take back from him.” Her eyes hold mine. “Maybe some of it is taking your shit back from yourself.”
∞∞∞
Nora gets me out of the house that evening through fraud.
She says we’re going to dinner. Dinner, it turns out, lives in the back room of a tiny listening room off Charlotte Avenue where seventy people are packed around mismatched tables, beer sweating onto coasters, and a handwritten sign beside the stage reads Writers Round — Please shut the hell up during songs, which I respect deeply as public policy.
“You bitch.”
Nora catches my elbow before I can turn around. “You agreed to dinner.”
“This isn’t dinner.”
“They’ve got nachos.”
“A concession stand doesn’t make something dinner.”
“Tell that to baseball.”
I haven’t been inside a writers round since the year after my injury.
Not one like this. I’ve done the industry version since then—galas, showcases, private listening events where everyone wears boots that cost more than my first guitar and pretends not to calculate streaming numbers while shaking hands.
This is different. Four writers on stools beneath bad lighting.
Guitars scarred white around the sound holes.
Beer bottles lined beside chair legs. Nobody gives a shit about production budgets, radio strategy, or what tests well with women twenty-five to thirty-four.
The first guy sings about his grandmother stealing cigarettes from a nursing home. The woman beside him follows with a divorce song funny enough that the entire room laughs through the chorus, then goes dead quiet for the bridge.
My throat tightens.
This is where I started. Rooms like this, where one good line could make seventy strangers lean forward at the same time.
Nora steers me into a booth near the back, slides one of the promised baskets of nachos in front of me, and disappears toward the stage when someone calls her name. It takes me a second to understand why.
I catch her sleeve as she passes. “You’re playing?”
“One song.”
“You said dinner.”
She points toward the basket without breaking stride. “There are nachos.”
“Nora.”
Her grin flashes over her shoulder. “Missed you too.”