10. Madeleine #2
“I will.” She paused. “Can I ask you for one thing first?”
“No.”
“Watch the footage,” she said anyway. “Just once. And then tell me to cut it, and I will, and I’ll never bring it up again.”
“Blake, no.”
“Madeleine.” She said my name so kindly that it was almost unbearable. “You’re asking me to delete something extremely moving from my film. I think you should at least know what it is you’re deleting. That’s all. If you still want it gone after, then it’s gone. My word.”
“Fine.” I sat down.
She turned the monitor toward me, handed me the headphones, and clicked play.
And there was Rhett sitting in a leather chair by the window with the snow coming down behind him, in the sweater I’d seen him in two days ago, looking off-camera at Blake.
“Tell me how you found Madeleine Price,” Blake said behind the camera.
“Oh yeah, that was meant to be.”
He told her about reading a piece on Wyatt Black’s comeback after the stadium shooting and understanding, three paragraphs in, that whoever was steering it wasn’t handling Wyatt like a product.
Instead, they were protecting him. He told her he’d never heard of Madeleine Price and couldn’t get within a mile of her.
“So I waited outside the building where she worked in the rain for two hours like a lunatic and ambushed her on the sidewalk.” He laughed.
“She thought I was unhinged. She was right. But she was just unhinged herself enough to hear me out. We’re two of a kind that way. ”
He told Blake what he’d said to me. “Just come hear my guys. That’s all I’m asking.
Come hear them, and, if you hear what I hear, we’ll make history.
And she came. You know why? I found out years later.
She’d seen Jack win that singing show when she was in college.
Back then, she was nobody, but she never forgot him.
She’d not followed his career after the show, not that there was much of one, but she remembered him. ”
Watching, I put my hand over my mouth as Rhett continued.
“So she comes to this bar. Little dive place, forty people, and Jack and the guys go up and play one set. One. And I’m watching her the whole time because I’ve bet everything on this and I’m dying to know what she thinks.
But her face doesn’t show an ounce of expression.
Like nothing. That’s Madeleine, she doesn’t give you anything.
” He chuckled. “They take a break between sets, and she turns to me, and says—” He stopped, looking away from the camera, pressing the heel of his hand against one eye, before returning his gaze to Blake.
“She says, Jack Wilder’s got the best voice in town and pretty soon everyone will know it.
Knox Hartley is a legend in the making. He’ll be known as the best lead guitarist in the business by the time we’re through.
And Beck? Good lord, that boy can play. She started laughing when she talked about Grant, then said something about how every teen girl was going to have a poster up on their wall of him behind that drum set.
” Rhett shook his head slowly. “I couldn’t believe it.
She saw what I saw. Then she asked me how we all came together and I told her about the months and months I’d spent scouring the bars for musicians worthy of Jack.
She loved that because it’s the kind of thing she’d do.
The two of us just got each other right away. ”
All true.
“And then,” Rhett continued on camera, “four months later, she took the single biggest thing she had, Wyatt Black’s comeback, which was going to make her career and she put it on the table for five guys she’d known a hundred and twenty days.
She went to Wyatt and asked him to take Jack and his band on the road as his opening act.
Take them as they are. Not cleaned up. Not made more commercial.
As they are. And Wyatt got back to her a few days later.
According to Madeleine, Wyatt said, ‘My wife agrees with you, and I can’t say no to her.
’ And that’s it. That’s the moment the world changed for every one of us. ”
Blake’s voice, off-camera, soft: “Why do you think Madeleine Price went to bat for y’all?”
And Rhett looked straight down the lens.
“Because, in addition to being wicked smart, she’s kind and generous.
And she has a passion—for the music—that rivals my own.
All of us—the entire band—that’s what ties us all together.
We love the music. Madeleine has a reputation like a razor blade but the truth is she’s just head over heels in love with country music.
” He rubbed his jaw. “But you know what’s funny?
Do you know what the real story is here?
It’s not the music. Not really. Every one of us had a moment where we could’ve played it safe.
And not one of us did. Not one.” His voice thickened.
“I mailed in a tape to a singing show with the last ten dollars in my pocket. Jack Wilder had the courage at twenty years old to audition and subsequently win. Wyatt Black gave a chance to an untested act. Madeleine Price bet her whole life on a band she’d known four months.
That’s not business. Not the way we all played it.
That’s a miracle. And it only happened because, at every fork in that road, somebody chose to be generous instead of smart. ”
He was quiet a second.
“She made me swear never to tell Jack and the boys,” he said. “I’ve kept it to myself for ten years.”
“Why are you talking about it now?” Blake asked.
“I didn’t actually mean to,” Rhett said, chuckling.
“She’s probably going to kill me with her perfectly manicured hands when she sees this.
But I’m in now, so I may as well keep going.
I want the world to know who she is. What she did for us.
” He looked away, then back. “So put it in your movie. Put all of it in. Let them see her.”
The clip ended. The screen went to black. And in it I could see my own face, reflected. My cheeks were damp and I hadn’t even noticed.
Blake didn’t say anything. She didn’t reach for me, didn’t offer a tissue, didn’t fill the silence, just let me sit. Finally, I took the headphones off and set them on the table with unsteady hands.
“There’s more,” Blake said quietly.
“What?”
“Knox’s interview.” She was watching me very carefully.
“The tour came up. He didn’t know what you’d done all those years ago.
He found out on camera, when I told him.
It’s …” She stopped for a moment, looking up at the ceiling.
“I’ve filmed a lot of people finding out a lot of things, but this was a doozy.
I could tell it shook him to the core. He talked for a long time after. About you.”
Every single cell in my body wanted to grab those headphones and put them on and watch Knox Hartley’s face while he found out what I’d done and hear what he said about me afterward. I have never in my life wanted anything the way I wanted that.
Which is exactly how I knew I couldn’t.
Because if I watched it, and if he sat in that chair and said something that broke me wide open, I’d have no defense left.
None. I would fall in love with him. Which is what could absolutely never, ever happen.
This whole thing was like a speeding train headed for a glacier, and I had to get off before we crashed.
“No,” I said.
Blake didn’t argue. “Okay.” She reached over and closed the laptop, gentle as anything. “It’s not going anywhere. When you want it, it’s here.”
“I won’t want it.”
“Okay,” Blake said, in the voice of a woman who has interviewed a great many liars and is far too polite to say so.
I stood up, legs trembling.
“Tell me what you want me to do with Rhett’s footage,” Blake said gently.
“Leave it in. Leave it all in. Knox too.”
And I hurried out of there before I could change my mind.