Chapter 1 #2
He offered to stay. He offered twice. He offered to drive to the airport, which was a thing that would have ended a friendship and a band inside of one hour, and she told him no, and then she told him to go home, and he went, slowly, the way a man goes when he is leaving somebody in a building he does not want to leave them in.
The gravel crunched. The truck sound got smaller.
Jenna sat in the chair in the barn where she had written six albums and did not cry, because there was a thing she needed to do first.
She called him.
It went to voicemail on the fourth ring, which meant he had looked at it. She knew his phone the way she knew his handwriting. Four rings was a man glancing at a screen in a room with people in it and deciding it could wait an hour.
She did not leave a message.
She called again. Four rings.
Then she sat with the phone in her lap and did a piece of arithmetic she did not want to do.
He had been in California since June. He had come home three times.
In August she had put a song in his hands in the kitchen and he had picked her up off the floor, and that was fifty days ago, and in fifty days he had not once mentioned it again — not the song, not the title, not where it sat on the record.
She had noticed at the time and had filed it under he's in it, he's deep in it, don't be a wife about it.
He had known in August. He had stood in her kitchen with her song in his hand and he had already spent seven months in a room with somebody else.
She thought about driving to the airport. She got as far as picking up her keys.
Instead she turned off the board, one channel at a time, the way she had every night for twenty years, and stood in the doorway and looked at the room.
It was a good room. She had built half of it herself, physically, with a drill, in the summer she was twenty-two.
Then she turned off the light and walked up the hill.
The house was three hundred yards up the hill and she did not remember most of it.
They kept a shared drive. They had kept one since laptops, and before that a shelf, and before that a shoebox, because for twenty years the work had gone in one place and both of them had the key.
It was not romantic. It was just how it was done.
He put down a voice memo at four in the morning on a bus in Ohio and she opened it in the barn at seven and by Friday it was a song.
She sat at the kitchen table and opened it.
The folders were where they always were. DEMOS 2024. DEMOS 2025. TOUR NOTES. TAXES DO NOT TOUCH. And then, in the same list, in the same plain type as everything else, filed like laundry:
SK — writes
She looked at it for a while.
Then she opened it, because she was not going to be a woman who did not open it.
There were four hundred and some files. She did not count exactly. The oldest was dated in the second week of January.
She played one at random. Shane's voice, a guitar, a room with hard walls. Okay, okay, hang on — no, do the thing you did. A laugh, not his. That. Do that again. The file was two minutes long and he sounded twenty-five years old.
The timestamp said 3:12 a.m.
She played another. 2:47 a.m. Another. 1:58 a.m. She scrolled and the hours went by in a column, all of them belonging to the middle of the night, which was the part of the day that had been hers since she was a teenager, the hours when he used to call her from wherever he was because she was the one who was awake.
She played one from April.
A line landed — she couldn't even tell whose — and Shane said, warm and quick and delighted, there she is.
Jenna put her hand over her mouth.
He had said that to her the first time in this kitchen.
He had said it to her about a hundred times since.
It was not a phrase. It was a thing between two people, the specific sound he made when she found the true line, and she had believed, without ever once examining it, that it belonged to her the way her own name did.
She kept going, because stopping was worse.
There was a calendar in the folder. He had made it himself, which she could tell because it was ugly. Session blocks in gray, and in every week from February a two-day block in a different color with two letters on it.
She counted the colored blocks. There were more of them than there were weeks he had been home.
There was a spreadsheet of flights, the kind Hal's office generated, and she read it the way you read a bad test result.
In March he had told her he was in Los Angeles for nine days.
Two of those days he had been in Nashville.
In May he had told her the label had him in the studio through the weekend and she had said of course they do and hung up and gone and written the second verse of a song he never cut.
She was not, in the end, most upset by the flights. He had not been hiding a hotel room. He had been hiding a room with a piano in it, which cost about six hundred dollars a day and was, by any measure a court would recognize, work.
That was the thing she kept running into, all night, like a table in the dark: none of it was a crime.
She closed the laptop. Then she opened it again, because there was one more folder inside the folder, and it was called REFS, and she already knew.
Photographs. Thirty or forty of them. Pages.
Her pages.
Her handwriting, shot on his phone at an angle, the water stain on the cover of the notebook in the corner of the frame. Page three. February. You can't hold still and call it staying, in her own hand, with the little slash she made through her sevens.
The file was dated the ninth of February. He had been home that week. He had made coffee in this kitchen and asked her what she was working on and she had said nothing yet and he had kissed the top of her head.
Jenna Bishop sat very still at her own kitchen table.
He never touched her. She would find that out later, and later she would learn what it cost and who else it cost, and later still she would learn that it was somehow the worse answer.
But she did not know any of that yet, and it would not have helped if she had, because the thing on the screen in front of her was not a woman.
It was her February. It was her handwriting. It was the sound he made when she was good.
She walked back down the hill in the dark. She didn't remember deciding to. The barn light was still on and the demo was still up on the board, the good one, the one she had played five times that morning like a fool.
She took the third reel box down off the shelf and opened it and unfolded the glossy paper and looked at it for a long time. Seven weeks. A shape like a comma. She had picked out a name in the truck and told nobody.
Her hand went flat on the console.
Headlights swung across the far wall — a car on the road, not the drive, going somewhere else. Her phone buzzed in her jacket.
wheels down. 40 min out.
Then, before she could put it down:
did you hear it?