1. Chapter One #2
“I’ve spent a lot of this show looking back,” he said. “This one’s about what happens when somebody reminds you how it feels to have nothing to lose.”
The crowd screamed before Serena appeared.
She walked out from the side of the stage in a silver dress that caught every light. Her waist-length blonde hair fell in a smooth sheet down her back, and her dark eyes stayed fixed on Hunter. She looked young, perfect, and thrilled to be there.
The first clear thought Wendy had was absurdly simple: “He didn’t tell me.”
Serena reached Hunter as the first verse began. Her voice slid under his, sweet at first, then stronger. The song built around empty roads, an empty fuel tank, rain through open windows, and the fearless hunger of being twenty.
Wendy’s fingers tightened around the program.
Those images belonged to a life she knew.
She and Hunter had once driven beyond Aria Springs with almost no gas and less money, laughing while rain came through windows they couldn’t get closed.
He’d used to say that being broke with her felt richer than any future he could imagine.
But Serena was singing the memory now. She turned toward Hunter during the chorus. He turned toward her. Their voices met as the giant screens placed their faces side by side.
“You make me twenty with the windows down,
Two hearts flying past the edge of town.
Running on empty, laughing at the rain,
Loving like forever couldn’t change.
I thought the road had worn the wonder thin,
Thought I’d never feel that wild again,
Then you looked at me, and all the years gave in.
Now I’m reckless, weightless, twenty again.”
The crowd reacted to the last line with a roar.
Wendy tried to make the pieces fit into a harmless shape. It was a surprise duet. A producer had brought him the song. The staging meant nothing. Serena performed closeness because that was what cameras rewarded.
But Hunter had written it. Wendy knew his language.
The crooked humor in the first verse was his.
So was the quiet turn before the chorus, when the music made room for one honest line.
He’d written, finished, arranged, and rehearsed an entire love song without giving her a melody or a rough lyric. Without telling her anything about it.
He’d looked into her eyes in the dressing room and said there was nothing she needed to worry about.
Serena moved closer for the final chorus. Her shoulder brushed Hunter’s arm. He smiled down at her with the roguish ease the campaign had used for months, and she answered with a private-looking smile of her own.
Maybe the song used images from Wendy’s past because Hunter had run out of new ways to describe being alive. Maybe he’d taken the language of their marriage and given it to the woman who made him feel young now.
That thought hurt more than the possibility of a kiss.
Wendy could name the pattern. Deflection, avoidance, triangulation.
She’d helped couples see it in quiet rooms where both people had agreed to tell the truth.
At home, she’d explained it away because naming it clearly would force her to admit that professional knowledge hadn’t protected her.
She’d understood Hunter’s fear, his pressure, his need to keep moving.
She’d been so skilled at hearing the wound behind his choices that she’d stopped asking what those choices were doing to her.
Applause thundered around her as the song ended.
Wendy realized she was still sitting and stood with the rest of the section. Her hand ached from gripping the program. A hard crease ran through Hunter’s photograph.
The host joined Hunter and Serena onstage.
“That,” he said, waiting for the cheers to ease, “didn’t sound like a man living in the past. Where did this new energy come from?”
Serena laughed and touched Hunter’s arm.
“I found a freer version of him hiding under all that legend.”
“She doesn’t let me get comfortable,” Hunter said. “Serena challenges every safe choice I make. She reminded me that music’s supposed to be fun. A little dangerous, even.”
The audience loved that.
Wendy waited for him to add one sentence. The song is for my wife. The memories are ours. Wendy heard it first in every form that mattered.
He said none of them.
“And people are going to hear a lot more of this pairing,” the host said. “Right?”
Hunter glanced at Serena. She was already smiling.
“They’ll be hearing a lot more. Serena’s joining me on the next tour.”
Wendy’s practiced expression nearly broke.
The agreement between her and Hunter had always been simple.
The stage could sell fantasy, but their marriage wouldn’t be used as part of it.
No campaign would suggest he wanted another woman.
Wendy would never be expected to smile through public disrespect.
Major career choices that changed their life would be made together.
A tour changed everything. Where he slept, where she lived, which plans disappeared from her calendar. How many more months she spent arranging herself around the next emergency.
He hadn’t told her.
A woman crouched at the end of Wendy’s row. The headset and black clothes marked her as part of the publicity team.
“Keep smiling,” she whispered. “Camera three’s coming to you.”
“I’m smiling,” Wendy hissed.
“Just keep it warm.”
Wendy looked toward the stage. “Of course.”
Hunter had found her section now. She knew by the slight change in his face. For one dangerous second, hope rose. He would fix it. He would say her name and restore the line between what was performance and what was real.
“And my wife, Wendy,” he said, “thank you for the constant support. None of this happens without you.”
Support.
By calling it support, he’d placed her behind him, holding up the structure while Serena stood beside him inside the light.
The camera’s red signal came on.
Wendy smiled warmly while Hunter pulled Serena against his side and the host promised more surprises after the break. Her face filled both giant screens. The audience applauded her grace. People around her turned to watch the good wife perform being untouched by her own humiliation.
The remembered warmth of Hunter’s mouth still lingered in her palm.
Her phone began to vibrate inside her velvet clutch. Once, then again, then without pause. She shouldn’t have looked, but the broadcast moved to an ad and the publicist was already hurrying away. Wendy took out her phone.
Videos had spread before the concert was over.
HUNTER TRACE UNVEILS LOVE SONG FOR SERENA GENE
COUNTRY’S HOTTEST NEW PAIR IS HEADING ON TOUR
One post showed Hunter and Serena facing each other under gold light. Another used a split screen: Serena smiling at him on one side, Wendy watching from the audience on the other.
The caption under Wendy’s face had already gathered thousands of replies.
“His wife apparently heard the song for the first time, like the rest of us.”
She pressed the clip. On the small screen, her own expression changed by degrees. Pride disappeared, replaced by confusion, then the careful blankness she’d mistaken for control.
Millions of strangers could see the truth before she let herself name it.
Hunter hadn’t merely kept a song from her. He’d created an intimate world with Serena and made his wife an audience member.