Chapter 2
She turned on every light in the house.
Not for effect. She wanted to be able to see him, and she wanted there to be nowhere in the room that was soft.
The kitchen, the hall, the front room, the lamp on the stairs that nobody ever used.
The porch light. By the time she was done the house was lit up like a boat, and from the road it would have looked like a party.
She put the laptop on the kitchen table and turned it to face the door.
Then she sat down and waited, and while she waited she did a thing she would think about for a long time afterward. She put her hand flat on her stomach, under the table, where nobody could see, and she said, quietly, out loud, "It's okay."
It was the last thing she said in that house that she believed.
The truck came up the drive at twenty past eight.
She heard the door, and then the tailgate, and then his boots on the porch, and then Shane Bishop came into his kitchen the way he came into everything, sideways through the doorframe with too much in his arms and his phone lit up in his hand.
"Number one on two of them," he said. "Two. Hal called me on the tarmac. The tarmac, Jenna." He set a duffel on the floor and a bag on the counter and turned around with his arms out and his whole face open. "We did it."
She sat where she was.
He had been gone since June. He looked good and he looked tired, and there was gray coming in at his temple in a way she had always liked, and for one second — a second she would be ashamed of and would also forgive herself for — she wanted to get up and go to him.
"Hey," he said. "Hey. Where's my — "
"Sit down."
He stopped. He was very good at rooms. He had been reading rooms for money since he was twenty-five and he read this one in about a second and a half, and she watched him decide to try charm first anyway, because that was the whole of him in one motion.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. But first — " He got the bag off the counter. "Don't say anything. Melrose. I saw it and I thought, that's her."
The box was small and matte and expensive.
In twenty years he had never once given her jewelry she had worn. It sat in a drawer upstairs, all of it, a small quiet drawer of somebody else's taste. She had never told him. That had seemed, at the time, like being kind.
He came around the counter to her, because he had not read the room as well as he thought, or because twenty years is twenty years.
He put his hand on the back of her neck, the way he had done ten thousand times, thumb along the hairline, and her whole body did what it had been trained to do before her mind got a vote.
Her shoulders dropped. She leaned. It took her a full second to get it back, and she was going to be angry about that second for months.
She stood up and stepped out from under his hand.
"Whoa," he said. "Okay."
"Sit down, Shane."
"Is it your mother?"
"No."
"Is it — " He looked at her properly for the first time since the porch, and something moved behind his face, and she watched him decide it was nothing. "Okay. Okay. But first — "
"Put it down," she said.
"Jenna."
"Put it down, Shane."
He put it down.
She turned the laptop around.
She hit play on a file dated the second week of April.
His own voice came out of the speakers into his own kitchen. A guitar. A room with hard walls. A young woman laughing at something, and then a line landing, and then Shane saying, warm and quick and delighted, there she is.
She let it run to the end. It was two minutes. It is a long time, two minutes.
She watched his face the whole way through, and what she saw was not guilt arriving. Guilt was already there. What she watched was a man doing arithmetic — how much, how far, what she had, what she didn't.
The file ended.
"Okay," he said.
"That's not a word."
"Jenna — "
"Whose song is on the radio?"
"It's — "
"Say the name on it."
He put both hands on the back of the chair across from her. He did not sit. "Mine and hers," he said. "And it's not what you think it is."
"Tell me what I think it is."
"You think I've been sleeping with a twenty-seven-year-old."
"Have you?"
"No." He said it fast and flat and she believed him instantly, which was its own kind of injury, because it meant she had not even had the mercy of doubt. "No. Jesus, Jenna. No. We never touched each other."
"Okay."
"Not one time. Not once." He came around the chair. "That's the truth, and I'll say it in front of anybody. Nothing happened."
She looked at him.
"Say that again," she said.
"Nothing happened."
"No. The other one."
"We never touched each other."
"Right," Jenna said. "That's the sentence you brought home."
She opened the folder.
She did it slowly, so he could watch it happen. Four hundred files. The dates in a column. January, February, March, April, May, June. The hours. 3:12. 2:47. 1:58. 4:04. She scrolled and let him look at his own life arranged by time.
"Those are the hours," she said.
"Those are just — "
"Those are my hours." She kept her voice exactly level. "You called me at three in the morning from a bus in Ohio for years because I was the one who was awake. That's what those are. That's not a schedule, Shane, that's — " She stopped, because her voice had moved, and she was not going to let it.
He said, "It wasn't like that."
"Then tell me what it was like."
"It was work."
"Four hundred files of work."
"Yes."
"At two in the morning."
"That's when writing happens," he said, "you know that better than anybody," and he said it as though it were a compliment he was giving her, and she thought, distantly, that she might actually be sick.
She opened the second folder.
REFS. The photographs came up in a grid, forty little rectangles of her own handwriting, shot on a phone at an angle.
Shane went quiet.
"Page three," she said.
"Jenna."
"February ninth. You were home that week." She scrolled without looking away from him. "You made coffee and you asked me what I was working on. And I said nothing yet."
"I didn't take it to — " He stopped. Started again. "It was a line. It was sitting there."
"It was in my notebook."
"It was lying around," he said. "It was a thing that was lying around, and it was good, and I had it in my head, and by the time it came out in the room I wasn't — " He pushed his hand back through his hair. "I don't know when I stopped knowing it was yours."
"February ninth," Jenna said. "You photographed it. You knew on February ninth."
He didn't answer that. There was no answer to that and they both knew it and he was, whatever else he was, not stupid.
"Did you tell her?"
He looked up. "What?"
"Sadie Kaye. Did you tell her whose those were?"
The silence went on about four seconds too long.
"She thought they were yours," Jenna said.
"She thought it was a co-write."
"With who?"
"With me."
"Right," Jenna said, and for the first and only time that night something in her chest went sideways for a person she had never met.
He talked for a while after that. She let him.
He said the things men say. He said it got away from him.
He said he was going to tell her and then the single tested through the roof and Hal said hold it.
He said Hal's name four times, which she noticed and filed.
He said he'd fix the credit, tomorrow, first thing, he'd call the label tonight if she wanted.
His phone went off on the counter.
He looked at it. That was all. He did not pick it up. He looked at it, and she watched a man in the worst hour of his marriage read a name on a screen and want to answer.
"Take it," she said.
"No."
"Take it, Shane."
"Jenna, it's — "
"It's Hal."
He didn't say anything.
"He's called you three times since you came through that door," she said. "He's not calling about Atlanta. Micah told him I heard it, and he's calling to find out what I know." She looked at the phone until it stopped buzzing and the screen went dark. "How long has he known?"
"Hal doesn't know anything."
"Shane."
He rubbed his face with both hands.
"Since January," he said.
"Since January."
"He set the room up. It was his idea." And then, hearing it, he tried to fix it, and made it worse the way he had been making it worse all night. "That's not — I'm not saying it's on him."
"No," Jenna said. "You're just saying it out loud so it's in the room."
The phone lit up again on the counter, silent this time, the name sitting there in the dark kitchen like a third person leaning in the doorway.
Neither of them touched it.
"You'd fix the credit," she said.
"Yes."
"On the song."
"On the song, on the record, on whatever you want."
"And what about the other thing."
"What other thing?"
And there it was.
She sat in her kitchen with every light on and understood, with a clarity that felt almost peaceful, that her husband had come home believing there was exactly one crime in the room and that it was a paperwork crime.
She tried once to explain it. She would think about that later too — that she had tried, at midnight, in her own kitchen, to teach the man who did it what he had done.
"When did you last ask me a question," she said.
"What?"
"Not a logistics question. Not what's for dinner. A question."
He stared at her. "Jenna, that's not — "
"Because I know when you last asked her one." She kept her voice flat. "April fourteenth. You asked her what she was afraid of. It's on the file. It's two minutes long."
"That's a writing thing. That's how you get a — "
"I know exactly what it is," Jenna said.
"I invented it. That's how you and I wrote every song on every record you have ever made.
You asked me things and I answered them and then I went and made it rhyme.
" She put both hands flat on the table. "You didn't take a woman, Shane.
You took the thing we did. You took it into a room with somebody who'd never heard it before, and you got to be the one who thought of it. "
For about four seconds she thought it had gone in.
Then he said, quietly, "So that's it. I don't get to write."
And that was that.
"You've been saying 'there she is' to a stranger," she said.