Ignored by Her Rockstar Husband (You Chose Her. Now Grovel. #17)

Chapter 1

The demo was finished by ten, and Jenna played it back four times anyway.

The barn held the morning the way it always did.

Cool in the corners, warm along the east wall where the sun came through the high window and lit up twenty years of dust. The old board hummed under her hands.

Outside, the redbuds had gone the deep rust color they turned in late September, and the gravel drive ran down through them toward the road and the rest of the world.

She had written the song in three days. It was good. She knew it was good the way she knew her own handwriting, without pride and without much interest in arguing about it.

She played it a fifth time and then made herself stop.

There was a sleeve of saltines in the drawer under the patch bay, behind the spare cables. She ate two of them standing up, slowly, the way she had learned to that week. Her body had opinions now. They arrived around eleven in the morning and stayed until she ate something beige.

On the shelf above the tape machine sat a row of empty reel boxes, labeled in Shane's handwriting from years when he still labeled things.

The third one from the left held nothing but a folded piece of glossy paper.

She had put it there Tuesday. It was the safest place on the property.

Nobody had opened those boxes in a decade, including her, and she had checked it four times since Tuesday, which she knew was not a reasonable way to behave.

Seven weeks. The woman at the clinic had said it like a weather report.

Jenna had driven home with the printout on the passenger seat and the radio off and had not told a single person.

Not Jill, who would have been in the car within four hours.

Not her doctor's front desk, beyond what they already knew.

Not Shane, because Shane had been in California since June and this was not a thing you said into a phone at midnight while somebody's air conditioner ran on the other end.

He landed at six. She had a chicken in the refrigerator and a plan and a level of nerves she had not felt since she was nineteen years old.

Thirteen years married. Twenty since the first night in this room. She was going to tell her husband he was going to be a father and she had rehearsed it in the truck like a girl.

He had called at eight that morning from a car on the 405.

"Say something smart," he said. "I've been in a van with Hal for forty minutes."

"Come home."

"That's not smart, that's just correct." A horn somewhere. "Six o'clock. Did you get the thing about Friday?"

"What thing about Friday?"

"Atlanta. Hal sent it."

"Hal didn't send it."

"Hal — " He said something away from the phone, and there was a pause, and then he was back and rolling. "Okay. He'll send it. Listen, it's going to be a week. It's going to be an actual week, Jenna."

There had been a time when she would have asked what that meant and he would have told her every single thing, in order, twice, until she made him stop.

"I've got something to tell you at dinner," she said.

The pause was about half a second long and had nothing in it.

"Yeah?" he said. "Good or bad?"

"Good."

"Alright." Traffic. Somebody talking in the car. "Alright, hang on, I've got — Jenna, I've got to take this, it's the label. Six o'clock."

"Six o'clock."

"Hey." Right before he went. "Big day."

She had sat in the barn afterward and looked at the phone for a second and thought, without any real weight to it, that she could not remember the last time he had asked her a follow-up question.

Not in a wounded way. It was just an observation, the kind you file.

He was busy. It was the record. It had been the record for a while.

Twenty years ago he could not get out of a room without asking her four things.

She'd made a joke of it once, a couple of years back, at somebody's kitchen island — he doesn't ask questions anymore, he just makes announcements — and everybody had laughed and Shane had laughed loudest, and she had watched the joke go by without landing anywhere, and had not made it again.

The barn door scraped.

"You decent?"

"Depends who's asking."

Micah Wells came in sideways, the way he came into every room, like the door might change its mind. He had a snare case in one hand. He set it down inside the door and did not come any farther.

"Shane wanted the Ludwig sent out," he said.

"He can want."

"That's what I said."

She turned in the chair. Micah looked the way he always looked — unhurried, sun-lined, the calmest man in any room that had Shane in it. But he stayed by the door. He had never once in twenty years stayed by the door.

"You want coffee," she said. It wasn't a question. It was the standing arrangement.

"I'm alright."

"Micah."

"I'm alright, Jenna."

She let it go. She had a chicken and a plan and she was not going to spend the afternoon prying at a drummer.

"Sit down anyway," she said. "The new one's done. You're the only person on earth I trust to tell me if the second verse is too much."

He sat. He listened to the whole thing with his hands on his knees and his head tipped, and at the end he said the second verse was fine and the second verse was better than fine, and he said it in a voice she had heard him use exactly twice, both times at funerals.

Her phone buzzed on the console.

wheels up in 20. tell me you're not working

She wrote back: I'm not working.

Then: liar

Then: big day. don't miss it

She set the phone face down and felt the small warm thing she always felt, the one that had survived a great deal.

"Big day," she said to Micah.

He didn't answer.

The single dropped at three.

She would remember, later, that she had been perfectly happy at 2:58. It seemed important to keep hold of, like the last photograph before something.

They pulled it up on the laptop on the console, because the barn had a hundred thousand dollars of speakers in it and Shane's records always sounded best on the cheap ones. Micah had not left. He had found three different reasons to stay and none of them held water and neither of them had said so.

"He tell you the sequence yet?" Micah said.

"He never tells me the sequence."

That was true, and it had a joke inside it that was twenty years old. She said it the way she always did.

The page loaded. The art was a photograph of a motel window at night, blue and grainy, and across the bottom in small clean letters it said:

BISHOP — "Hold Still" (feat. Sadie Kaye)

Jenna read it twice.

She had written a song called "The Quiet Part" in July and put it in his hands in August, in the kitchen, on paper, the way she had put every song in his hands since she was eighteen.

He had read it standing up and gone quiet and then he had picked her up off the floor, actually off the floor, and said this is the one, this is the whole record, and she had laughed and told him to put her down before he threw his back out again.

"Huh," she said.

She pressed play.

It opened on a guitar figure she didn't know.

That was fine. That happened. Shane could not write a song but he could find the front door of one, and the band changed things, and she had stopped needing to be in the room for every decision a long time ago.

She told herself that in about a second and a half.

Then his voice came in, close and low and beautiful, because it was, because that had never once been the problem.

Then, in the second verse, another voice came in underneath his.

It was a good voice. That was the first thing Jenna thought, and she hated it, and it was true. A young voice with sand in it, sitting just below him, doing the thing she and Shane had spent two decades chasing on record and getting maybe four times.

Micah was looking at the floor.

The song went to the bridge.

You can't hold still and call it staying.

Jenna's hand came off the console.

She had written that line in February, at the kitchen table, at some hour with no name, on the third page of the notebook with the water stain on the cover.

She had never played it for anyone. She had never sung it out loud.

She had written it and looked at it and thought, not yet, and closed the book, because it was true about something and she wasn't ready to know what.

His voice sang it, and then the young voice sang it back to him, and then they sang it together, and then it was the title of the song, and the song was going to be very, very big.

The track ended. The player rolled on to something else and Jenna reached over and stopped it.

The barn was extremely quiet. The board hummed. Out past the open door a truck went by on the road and kept going.

"How long have you known," she said.

Micah didn't move.

"Micah. How long."

"Since spring."

She nodded. She was surprised at how steady she felt. It was not calm. It was the thing that shows up first and leaves last.

"Spring," she said.

"March. Maybe February." He rubbed his palm on his knee. "There's a room out there he goes to. Started as a co-write thing Hal set up, freshen up the record, get somebody young in. Then it was every week. Then it was — " He stopped.

"Say it."

"Then he stopped calling it a co-write."

"Did you ask him?"

"Twice."

"And?"

"He told me it was the first time in fifteen years he'd felt like a writer.

" Micah looked up. His eyes were red at the rims and she understood that he had been carrying this up her driveway all morning.

"I didn't know what was in it, Jenna. The song.

I swear to God. I heard it two hours ago in a parking lot like everybody else. "

"But you knew there was a her."

"I knew there was a room."

She sat with that.

"You should have told me."

"I know it."

"Twenty years, and you should have told me."

"I know it," he said again, and did not defend himself, which was the only reason she did not throw something.