Chapter Four #2
“I heard about Kirby.” She came down the steps with the smooth confidence of fourteen years in pageant heels.
“Sprained wrist, poor baby. I said to myself, Crystal, you are between tour dates, the least you can do is drive down and help out.” She placed her hand over her heart.
“So I called up my agent, who called up Carl and Lucinda, and now here I am. Free of charge. You know I’d do anything for the band. ”
She hugged me before I could create enough distance to prevent it. Her perfume hit first, heavy, sweet, expensive, and her arms went around my neck with confident ownership. I stepped back as soon as the embrace allowed without making a scene.
Crystal’s gaze shifted to Layla. The assessment took less than a second, a flick of her eyes from Layla’s scarf to her boots, a micro-expression that a stranger would have missed entirely and that I recognized from six months of dating her and two years of watching her work rooms before that. She smiled showing teeth.
“And you must be the photographer. Lucinda mentioned you’ve been sitting in with the band. That is so sweet.” She extended her hand. “Crystal Harmon.”
“Layla.” Layla shook her hand. Her voice was steady, her expression friendly, but the openness from five minutes ago had pulled back behind something careful and polite.
Her gaze flicked to Crystal’s cinched waist, her salon-blown hair, her heels, and then away — fast, like she’d touched something hot.
“We don’t need another singer,” I said. Flat, clear, not inviting discussion.
“Oh, honey, I’m not here to step on toes.
” Crystal waved a manicured hand. “I just figured an extra voice never hurts, especially with the Pavilion show Saturday. That’s a big stage.
” She glanced at Layla and her smile sharpened to a point so fine only someone who knew her would catch it.
“But if y’all have it handled, I’ll just enjoy the ranch. I could use a vacation.”
She swept back inside. The Lodge door closed behind her and the porch was quiet. A horsefly buzzed past. In the lower pasture, Jake whistled sharply at a cow.
I’d spent three years in Nashville and met exactly four hundred versions of Crystal Harmon. She was the only one who’d made it past three dates, which said more about my judgment than hers.
“So,” Layla said, carefully. “Your ex-girlfriend.”
“My ex-girlfriend.” I looked at her. “That was not planned. By me.”
“She seems... enthusiastic.”
“Crystal is a lot of things. I promise you, not one of them is a problem.” I reached for her hand and she let me take it. Her fingers were cooler than before. “Hey. Look at me.”
She looked at me. The easy warmth from the pasture was gone.
“Friday’s show,” I said. “You and me. That’s what matters this week. Not her.”
“I should go process the morning’s photos,” she said. The look she gave me didn’t reach her eyes the way it had ten minutes ago, and she headed toward the employee cabins with her camera bag on her shoulder and her scarf starting to slip sideways.
I turned and made for the Saloon, because I needed to have a conversation with Crystal that was months overdue, and I intended to have it before she could do any more damage.
I found her forty minutes later near the garden wall behind the Lodge.
She was leaning against the limestone in the shade of the live oaks, a huge pair of designer sunglasses perched on her head, scrolling her phone with the performative casualness of someone who’d been timing this encounter.
She looked up when she heard my boots and smiled the private smile, the one that said we have a secret, and I stopped six feet away.
“We need to be clear,” I said. “We’re done, Crystal. We’ve been done since February.”
“You keep saying that.” She pocketed her phone. “And yet you keep looking at me like you’re not entirely sure.”
“I’m entirely sure.”
“Because of that girl.” She said it gently, with the careful warmth of condolences being delivered. “Wade, she’s sweet. She really is. But you and I both know this is a pattern. You play a small venue, you find a sweet local girl, you have a nice week, and then you go home. I’ve watched you do it.”
“You’ve watched nothing, because this is the first time it’s happened.” I kept my voice level. “And you didn’t drive three hundred miles because of Kirby’s wrist.”
Crystal studied me for a long moment. Then she closed the distance and laid her palm flat against my sternum. I wanted to move back. I should have moved back.
“I drove three hundred miles because I made a mistake,” she said, her voice dropping low.
“Because I let go of the best thing that ever happened to my career, to my life, and I want it back.” She tilted her face up toward mine, her other hand closing around my arm, her body angled toward me in the composition she’d perfected across a hundred photographs.
Close, intimate, calculated to a fraction of an inch.
I wrapped my fingers around her wrist to pull her hand off my chest. “Crystal—”
The shutter click came from behind me. Small, sharp, unmistakable.
I turned.
Layla stood at the corner of the garden wall, fifteen feet away. Camera raised. She’d been shooting the rose trellis, the climbing roses against the old stone, and she’d stepped around the corner into a scene that was already over but would never look that way through a lens.
What her camera held: Crystal pressed against me. My hand gripping Crystal’s arm. Crystal’s face tilted toward my mouth. A composition so clean and so devastating that any photographer alive would read it the same way, because it was a perfect photograph of a lie.
Layla lowered her camera.
The look on her face hit me the way a wrong note hits in a silent room. The warmth was gone. The trust was gone. In its place was the stillness I recognized from Monday, from that first rehearsal when she’d been calculating every exit. Every inch of ground I’d covered in four days had vanished.
“Layla, wait—”
She turned and left. Camera at her side, shoulders straight, no running, no scene. Just gone.
Crystal was smiling behind me. I didn’t need to turn around to know it. I could hear it in the quality of her silence, satisfied and contained.
“You set that up,” I said.
“Sweetheart, I was just talking to you.”
“You saw her coming.” I faced Crystal. “You saw her coming around that corner and you stepped into me.”
Crystal slid her sunglasses back into place.
“I think you’re being dramatic. But then, you always were.
” She moved past me in the direction of the Lodge, her heels clicking on the stone path.
I stood in the garden alone with the roses and a wasp circling the nearest bloom and the distant sound of a calf bawling in the lower pasture.
The wasp landed on a rose, considered its options, and flew off toward someone less irritating. Smart wasp.
Then I headed for my cabin. Not after Layla, not yet. Chasing her right now would look like panic, and she’d read panic as exactly what it was — a man scrambling to undo something he’d let happen.
I sat on the porch step and set my hat on the rail.
The sun was dropping and the light was turning warm.
From somewhere near the stables, the barn cat who’d ignored me on Tuesday morning crossed the yard with the self-possessed dignity of an animal who had never needed anyone’s approval.
At least one of us had our life figured out.
The hardest part wasn’t that Layla saw. The hardest part was that Crystal had known exactly which picture would break her.
She’d seen Layla coming around that corner, pressed into me, held the pose just long enough for the shutter to fire.
Crystal understood angles. A whole career spent building them.
And she handed Layla a perfect lie in the one language Layla couldn’t argue with.
I was going to fix it. Tomorrow, first thing, hat off, no charm, just the plain facts. Crystal stepped into me. I was pulling away. The photograph got it wrong.
But tonight I stayed where I was and let myself be angry. Crystal Harmon had walked onto this ranch, and in under two hours found the one weapon that could do real damage — and used it without blinking.
Tomorrow. And Crystal Harmon could go straight to hell.