Chapter 3
The apartment sat over a bike shop on Haywood Road, and by Sunday it had a mattress, a kettle, a folding table, and a milk crate of notebooks.
It was one big room with a bad kitchen at one end and a window at the other that looked down on the street.
The floor sloped. When the shop opened at nine there was a compressor somewhere below that ran for a minute and stopped, ran for a minute and stopped, all morning, and by the second day she had stopped hearing it.
She had money. That was the thing nobody would understand from the outside. She could have had a house on Sunday afternoon if she wanted one. She did not want one. She wanted a room that no one else had ever been in.
She woke at four the first three nights and wrote until the light came up, because that was when she wrote and had been for twenty years, and because it turned out that the only thing worse than four in the morning was lying in it.
Tuesday she threw up in the bike shop's alley and then stood with her hand on the brick for a minute, and a kid in an apron came out with the trash and said, "You alright, ma'am," and she said, "Yeah," and he went back in, and that was the whole of it.
Nobody in this town knew her face. They knew Shane's face.
She had spent thirteen years being the woman standing next to it, which was the most efficient camouflage ever invented.
She was seven weeks and four days. She had an appointment on Biltmore Avenue in October. She had not told anyone.
Jill Sterling came up from Nashville on Monday and was in the doorway by noon.
She looked at the room. She looked at the mattress on the floor. She set her bag down on the folding table and said, "Okay," in a voice that had ended careers.
"Don't," Jenna said.
"I'm not saying anything."
"You're saying it very loud."
Jill went and looked out the window at the street. She was forty next spring and dressed like a woman with three flights to catch, and she had known Jenna since before there was a Shane, which was a thing very few people on earth could say.
"I called Angela Mackey," she said. "She can see you Thursday. She's in Charlotte, she's mean, and she did the Ellisons."
"Jill."
"You don't have to hire her. You have to sit in a room with her for an hour so that when he calls his people, and he has already called his people, you are not the only person in this without a lawyer."
Jenna sat down on the edge of the mattress.
"Okay," she said.
Jill turned around. "Okay?"
"Okay. Thursday."
That was when Jill's face came apart, just for a second, because she had come up the mountain ready for a fight and had not planned for agreement.
She sat down on the floor next to the mattress with her back against the wall, in twelve-hundred-dollar boots, and they sat there together for a while and did not say anything.
"Twenty years," Jill said finally. "He's not fixing this with a necklace."
"He tried."
"I know he tried. I know exactly what store." Jill rubbed her eyes. "Jenna. I have to say one thing and then I'll shut up about it. Are you ready?"
"No."
"He does not deserve you. He has not deserved you since the second record.
Everybody in Nashville knows whose songs those are and everybody has known for a decade and not one of them ever said it out loud where it could cost them a dollar, including me, and I'm going to be angry about that for the rest of my life. "
"Jill."
"I said one thing. That was one thing."
Jenna looked at the ceiling. There was a water stain shaped like Kentucky.
She had not planned to say it. She had planned to be careful about who knew and when, because once a thing like that is out it belongs to everybody, and she had learned that the hard way about smaller things.
"I'm pregnant," she said.
The compressor started up under the floor and ran for a minute and stopped.
"Okay," Jill said, in a completely different voice.
"Seven weeks."
"Does he — "
"No."
"Jenna."
"I had it in my mouth." She was surprised at how steady she was. "Wednesday night. In the kitchen. I had it right there, and then he told me the only place he's felt like himself in twenty years is a room I've never been in."
Jill sat with that.
"Okay," she said. "Then he doesn't know yet. That's all that is. Nobody's owed it on a schedule."
"Everybody's going to say I used it."
"Some people will say that."
"He'll say it."
"He might." Jill reached over and took her hand, which she almost never did. "And you'll still be the one who decides."
Tuesday she spent four hours dismantling a life on a laptop, which is what leaving actually is.
She opened a checking account at a branch on Patton Avenue where a very young man called her ma'am and asked her to confirm her employer, and she sat there for a second and then said, "Self-employed."
"And what is it you do?"
"I write songs."
He typed it in without looking up. It was the first time she had said it out loud to a stranger in about a decade, and it went into a form on a computer in a strip mall, and she thought about that all the way to the truck.
She changed her mailing address. She took herself off two insurance policies and off the board of the foundation they had started in 2016 and had both stopped attending.
She found, in the process, that she had been a signatory on almost nothing, and that the small number of documents with her name on them had her listed as Bishop, Jenna (spouse).
At the grocery store on Haywood a woman about sixty stopped at the end of the aisle with a bag of onions in her hand.
"You're Shane Bishop's wife."
"Yes ma'am."
The woman looked at her, and Jenna watched her decide not to say the thing, and then say it anyway, kindly, which was worse.
"My daughter sent me that song," she said. "I told her it didn't sound like him."
Jenna stood in the produce section of a grocery store and could not think of one word to say.
"You take care of yourself, honey," the woman said, and went on to the registers.
That was the town, then. It had taken five days. By Sunday it would be Nashville, and by the week after that it would be a number under a photograph.
Hal Fitch came on Wednesday morning with two coffees.
He knew which floor. She had told nobody which floor.
"There she is," he said, at the door, and Jenna felt it go through her like a wire, and Hal Fitch had no idea, none at all, because to him it was a greeting.
He came in. Sixty-six years old, soft cardigan, glasses up on his head, a leather folio under one arm. He looked around the room with real warmth, the way you look at a kid's first apartment.
"Oh, honey," he said. "This is grim."
"It's fine."
"It's grim. Let me get you a place." He put a coffee down on the folding table in front of her. Oat milk, one sugar. He had it right. Twenty-two years of having everything right. "There's a house in Montford sitting empty that we — "
"Hal."
He sat down on the only chair, uninvited, comfortable, and opened the folio.
"Alright," he said. "Let's get you taken care of."
And Jenna Bishop, who had been in rooms with this man for twenty-two years and had never once had his full professional attention pointed at her, watched it swing around and land.
He had a statement. He read it out. Jenna and Shane Bishop are navigating a private matter and ask for privacy at this time. Warm, dull, unfalsifiable. He would put it out Friday if she said the word, and not one second before, because — he said this kindly — it was her call.
He had a schedule. Release week, the late-night thing, two festivals in October, the Wheelwright at Christmas. Places she would not be expected. Places it might be nice if she were. A car available either way.
He had a number for a therapist in Asheville he described as "very good with people in the business."
And he had one more document, which he did not read out. He slid it across the folding table with two fingers.
She picked it up.
It was three pages, and it was not an NDA, because Hal Fitch had never in his life handed anybody something that looked like a leash.
It was a communications agreement. Mutual.
Reasonable. Both parties would route public comment through a single office for a period of ninety days, in order to protect both parties from a news cycle neither of them wanted.
There was a paragraph about how much she would be paid for her cooperation with the box set, which she had not known was happening.
Jenna read all three pages twice.
"This is nice paper," she said.
"It's nothing. It's a formality."
"Hal, what is this?"
"It's protection." He leaned forward, and he was sincere, that was the thing she would come back to for months, he was completely sincere.
"Jenna. Listen to me. This is going to be ugly and it is going to be public and you have never once had to be the one out front.
You don't know what that is. I do. I've done it thirty times.
" He tapped the table. "Let me stand out there. That's my whole job."
"Whose job?"
"I'm sorry?"
"You said it's your whole job. Whose job."
Hal Fitch tipped his head, kind and slightly puzzled, a man being asked a question with no meaning in it.
"His," he said. "But this is the same thing."
She put the pages down.
She was not angry. She would be angry later, in the truck, so angry she had to pull over on Patton Avenue. In the room she was something else — she was clear, the way a window is clear.
"Can I ask you something," she said. "You've been in my kitchen. You've had Thanksgiving in my house. You put that girl in a room with my husband in January."
"I put a writer in a room with an artist."
"And in February he started photographing my notebook, and you knew what was in that record before I did."
"I hear you."
"Whose idea was it to take my name off?"
Hal did not flinch. That was the part that stayed with her — not a hesitation, not a flick of the eyes, nothing. He waved a hand, almost fond.
"Sweetheart," he said. "That was a tax thing."