Chapter Six
Wade
SATURDAY MORNING THE band was at the Pavilion by seven, setting up for tonight.
Boyd had his kit half-assembled. Russ was running cables.
Milo was tuning his Les Paul on the edge of the stage with his legs dangling off and his coffee balanced on an amp, which was going to end badly for the amp or the coffee or both.
I plugged in, played a chord, and let the sound go wide across the open grass.
The stage was open-air, easily twice the size of the bar inside. Tonight there’d be a few hundred people in those folding chair rows and the Hill Country sky over all of it — the biggest show of the week.
Five days ago I’d driven onto this property for a three-show booking. Good gig, good ranch, ninety minutes from home. I was supposed to play the Saloon, close it out here Saturday, get some content, and move on.
I had not planned on any of what had actually taken place, and I was done pretending the setlist was the reason I’d been awake since five.
Milo’s coffee tipped. He caught the mug on the way down but not before half of it hit the monitor speaker, and Boyd rolled his eyes with the weary patience of a man keeping a tally.
“It’s fine,” Milo said. “It’ll dry.”
We ran through the opening four songs while the sun climbed and the heat built. The outdoor sound was wider than the Saloon, the vocals carrying clean but the drums thinning past twenty rows. We’d tighten it at the afternoon run-through.
I headed out after setup. Layla was coming up the path from the Lodge in a pale blue top that turned her eyes gold in the morning light. She spotted me and lit up.
I met her on the path and kissed her. Her palm found my jaw and she smiled against my mouth and tasted like coffee.
“Brought you supplies,” she said, tossing me a water bottle. “You look like you’ve been awake since before the sun.”
“Five a.m.”
“That’s concerning.”
“I was productive.”
“At five a.m., everything feels productive. That’s the lie of early mornings.”
We took the path past the bonfire circle and down toward the river, her shoulder warm on my arm. I had my acoustic slung over my shoulder. She had her camera. Somewhere in the last few days those had stopped being things we hid behind and started being the way we talked to each other.
We found shade under the biggest live oak and sat in the grass, my back to the trunk and Layla tucked into my side.
The morning was already blazing beyond the shade, the air dry and still.
I could smell dust and juniper and the sun on her hair.
My arm settled around her shoulders and her hand rested on my knee, and the ease of it still caught me off guard.
Monday she’d been a name on a crew list.
She turned her camera on me and I let her.
She checked the frame and turned the screen toward me. No stage, no lights. Just a man under a tree with a guitar, looking like someone who belonged here.
“That’s the one,” I said.
She set it down in the grass, leaned up, and kissed the hinge of my jaw. “You’re welcome.”
I picked up the guitar. I’d been working on something new since Tuesday night — not the song she’d helped me fix in the Saloon, the one where she’d told me the bridge wanted to climb.
This was different. It had shown up at two in the morning and demanded to be written, and she was in every line of it.
I played it through. She went still at my side, her grip tightening on my knee.
“That’s new,” she said.
“That’s you.”
She looked up at me. For a second Layla Rigsbee, the woman who always had a comeback, had nothing. Then she said, “Play it again,” and her voice came out rougher than she probably meant it to.
I played it again. When I finished, she turned her face into my neck and stayed there, and I pressed my mouth to her hair and closed my eyes, and the river ran below the bank and neither of us needed to say anything.
“It’s the best thing you’ve written,” she murmured at my throat.
“I know.”
“The modesty continues.”
“I’m just accurate.”
We stayed like that until the sun shifted and the shade got thin. Her fingers traced slow circles on my knee and I ran my thumb along her shoulder and the morning was the quietest good thing I’d had in years.
Crystal found me on the Lodge porch after lunch.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said, settling beside me on the rail with the smooth confidence of a woman reclaiming a seat she considered hers. “About us. About this week. I made a mistake letting you go, Wade, and I think you know that.”
“Crystal.”
“Let me finish.” She put her hand on my arm, light and familiar, the same move she’d used in a hundred press photos. “We were good together. We made sense. The tour, the press, the numbers — all of it worked when it was you and me. And I think if you’re honest with yourself, you miss that.”
“I don’t.”
“And when the week ends? You go back to your life and she goes back to hers. She’s a ranch photographer, Wade. I’m the one who understands what your life actually looks like.”
“I don’t miss any version of my life that had you in it.” I moved my arm out from under her grip. “We’re done. We’ve been done. And the fact that you drove three hundred miles to try this again tells me you already knew that.”
Her expression dropped. For half a second the charm disappeared and I saw the calculation underneath, the rapid resorting of options. Then the smile was back, glossy and smooth.
“Well,” she said. “Good luck tonight.” She turned and walked toward the Lodge.
Milo was leaning on the porch rail. He’d been eating an apple the entire time with the conspicuous focus of a man who was absolutely eavesdropping.
“That go how you wanted?” he asked.
“It went how it was always going to go.”
“She’ll recover. Tour bus, three million followers. I give it a week before she’s posting about her restful Hill Country getaway.” He bit into the apple. “Meanwhile, you’ve got a show to play and a woman who can actually sing.”
“That I do.”
“Try not to stare at her onstage tonight. It was obvious on Wednesday and it was worse on Friday.”
“I don’t stare.”
“Wade. You stop playing. You literally stop playing and watch her sing. Russ had to cover your last chord on Friday because you forgot it existed.”
I took the apple out of his hand, bit into it, and gave it back. “Sound check’s at two. Don’t be late.”
“I’ve never been late,” Milo said. He had been late to every call time since 2019, and we both knew it, and I was grinning when I walked off that porch.
The afternoon sound check ran clean. Full band, full monitors, the outdoor mix tighter than I’d expected.
Milo arrived twelve minutes late, Les Paul in hand, as if he’d been there all along.
We ran the whole set twice. Layla joined for the second run, her voice strong in the monitors, her rhythm fills covering what Kirby would have handled.
She missed one entry in the fourth song and corrected herself before the next bar.
The sun dropped. The heat eased from brutal to merely warm. Ranch staff strung the last of the lights, tested the generators, laid programs on the folding chairs.
By seven-thirty the meadow was filling. Ranch guests took the front rows.
Locals from Saddlehorn filled the middle — families, couples, a group of older women in matching turquoise shirts who’d claimed an entire row and were having the time of their lives before we’d hit a single note.
A cluster of teenagers gathered near the side speakers, phones out, filming each other and the stage with the urgent energy of people who were going to post about this immediately.
The string lights came on in loops around the stage and the cedar posts, bright against the darkening sky.
Backstage was a roped-off square with two benches and a cooler. Layla sat on the far bench with her Martin across her knees, tuning a string that was already in tune.
I sat next to her and started picking through the opening riff, low, just to keep my hands busy alongside hers.
“I’m fine,” she said, before I opened my mouth. “Completely fine. Very calm. Deeply relaxed.”
“You’ve tuned that string nine times.”
“It’s a perfectionist string.”
Milo dropped onto the bench on her other side. “Quick strategy session. If you forget the words tonight, just harmonize with full confidence and nobody will know. I’ve been doing it for eight years.”
“That is the opposite of reassuring,” she said, but her mouth was fighting a smile.
“Ask Boyd. He forgot an entire song in Amarillo and just played louder. The audience went crazy.”
Boyd passed behind us with a pair of drumsticks. “Different arrangement,” he said, without stopping.
Layla laughed, short at first, then full, and she stopped tuning and laid her hands flat on the strings and breathed.
Russ set his bass case down and gave her a nod. That was the speech.
The sky was going dark, the crowd noise building, and the band had that loose, still focus they got right before a show. Layla sat in the middle of it, one of us.
I settled my hat and hit the first chord.
The whole band came in behind me, the speakers pushing the sound across the meadow toward the far ridge.
The crowd was in from the opening number — I could feel the lean, the rising noise between songs, hands clapping before I’d finished the last chord.
Four songs in I was drenched in sweat. The stars were thick overhead and phone screens flickered through the crowd.
Milo nailed a solo in the third song that pulled a roar.
Russ held the bottom end steady. Boyd drove the rhythm.
I sang with everything I had, because a Hill Country sky and a few hundred people who came to hear music was the whole reason I picked up an instrument in the first place.
Then it was Layla’s turn.
The band cleared. I set my guitar in the stand and stepped into the wings. Layla walked out alone, took the stool under the single spot, and laid her Martin across her lap. The crowd went quiet.
She strummed her opening chord and the note came out thin. It wavered. I could see the tension in her shoulders from twenty feet away. My chest tightened.
She stopped. Took a breath. Started again.
This time the sound was clear and strong, carrying into the dark. I let out the breath I’d been holding.
She sang three songs. By the second one a woman in the front row put her phone down and just listened.
The teenagers near the speakers stopped filming.
The meadow held still — not polite stillness but the real thing, the quiet that only happens when an audience forgets they’re an audience and just hears.
Her voice filled the open night, and she gave those people every single thing she had.
She finished. The silence held for one long second.
Then the applause broke — loud, real, with whistles and stomping.
The turquoise women were on their feet. Layla stood up from the stool, her grin so wide I could see it from the wings.
She gave a small wave that was half thank-you and half shock, tucked her Martin under her arm, and walked off toward me.
“I did it,” she said. Her hands were trembling.
“Yeah, you did.”
I took the guitar from her, leaned it on the amp, and pulled her in. She pressed her face into my chest and laughed, breathless and shaking, and I held her while the applause carried and the night stayed warm and the best part of my week was in my arms.
We finished the main set, came back for two encores, and by the time the lights came down the meadow was thick with people talking the way people talk after a show that caught them by surprise.
The band broke down. Milo coiled cables, whistling one of our songs, which he’d deny if confronted. Russ cased his bass. Boyd had his kit packed in four minutes flat. People thinned out, voices fading down the path toward the Lodge, and the grounds went still.
I found Layla at the edge of the stage, boots dangling in the grass, face tipped toward the sky. The stars were out, thick and scattered, and the night smelled of dry grass and cooling speakers.
I sat beside her and took my hat off.
“I have a proposition for you,” I said.
She raised an eyebrow. “I’m listening.”
“Come with me.” I said it before I could smooth the edges or make it clever. “Tomorrow, when the bus leaves.”
“Wade.”
“I know how it sounds.”
“It sounds like you’re asking me to leave my whole life and drive off with a man I’ve known for five days.”
“I am.” I held her hand and I didn’t dress it up.
“Because I drove onto this ranch to play some music and go home. And then you showed up with a voice you didn’t trust and a camera that sees everything.
And you looked at me like nobody has since before the fame hit.
” I ran my thumb across her knuckles. “You heard the song before I finished writing it. You saw through every version of me I’ve ever performed, and you wanted the one underneath.
And I am falling in love with you. I know it’s fast. I know five days is nothing.
But I’ve never played music the way I play it next to you, and I’ve never been this honest with another person.
I want a real chance at this. You and me. ”
Her fingers tightened on mine. She didn’t say anything for a long moment.
“You know I spent six years hiding,” she said.
Her voice was steady but her hand was shaking.
“Behind the camera, behind the lens, behind every excuse I could find not to stand in front of anyone and be seen. My whole life I’ve been safer on that side.
” She turned to face me. “And then you put a microphone in my hand and told me I was enough. And I believed you. And it terrifies me how much I believed you.”
“Does that scare you enough to stay?”
“No.” She was looking right at me, and she was smiling, and her eyes were wet. “It terrifies me enough to go. Because I am falling for you too, Wade Bishop, and I’d rather be scared on a tour bus than safe here without you.”
I kissed her with both hands in her hair. Her mouth was warm against mine, and she kissed me back and laughed against my lips. I pulled her closer.
Behind us Milo said “Finally” without looking up from a cable.
Tomorrow there was a bus and a highway and a hundred things to figure out. But she was grinning at me in the dark and I was grinning back, and the figuring out was going to be the best part.