Chapter 3
LAUREL
I make it to Mercer Records with minutes to spare, wearing the navy silk Herrera that, according to my ever-loving mother-in-law, takes a good two inches off my waist.
The building didn’t exist when Grant and I met.
Neither did Mercer Records, obviously, unless you count the spiral notebook where he used to write imaginary company names while waiting tables between gigs.
Mercer Music was too obvious. Southbound Records already existed.
Magnolia House sounded, according to Grant, like somewhere rich white women bought decorative soap.
We were twenty-two and twenty-five, sharing a one-bedroom apartment with an air conditioner that leaked into a mixing bowl, and he used to talk about owning a label the way other people talked about winning the lottery—except Grant never made it sound like a dream. To him, it was only a matter of when.
Now his name stretches across the wall behind reception in brushed brass, framed platinum records line the halls, and a photograph of us from the night he won his first CMA hangs beside the entrance to Studio A.
I stop in front of it whenever I come here.
I don’t mean to. Younger Laurel is wearing a green dress I bought on sale because we still had credit-card debt and I couldn’t stomach spending what the stylist suggested.
Younger Grant has both arms around my waist, his forehead pressed to my temple, caught seconds after they announced his name.
My lipstick is smeared. His eyes are wet.
What the photograph doesn’t show is that we spent most of that album huddled together in our little bedroom.
It doesn’t show my notebook open between us, or the nights I sang melodies into his voicemail because my throat hurt too much to repeat them, or how he used to correct interviewers who called him a solo songwriter, back when they still had to ask who I was.
Laurel and I write everything together, he’d say. You’re only putting my face on the cover.
Eventually, he stopped correcting people.
I stopped correcting people, too, whenever they assumed my only connection to Mercer Records was being Grant’s wife.
His name is on the building; mine isn’t, and I rarely come into the office anymore.
I used to be here constantly in the early days, when Mercer was little more than an idea with a bank account and a frightening number of things that could go wrong, but after my injury there was little reason for me to keep making the trip when my role didn’t require a physical presence.
Over time, my absence became ordinary, and with it came the convenient assumption that I had nothing to do with the company beyond being married to the man whose name sits on the door.
Most people have no idea how much of the money that got this place off the ground came from me, or that a substantial portion of the company belongs to me.
I never corrected them. I suppose I was too busy believing I didn’t need to.
Studio A’s double doors are propped open for the showcase, and I step through them into the hum of conversation and the scrape of chairs. Label staff mingle with managers, publicists, and familiar Music Row faces between the rows. The low stage at the far end is already lit.
“Laurel.”
I pivot at the familiar voice. Grant is walking toward me.
And there goes my face, warming like it hasn’t gotten the memo that I’m irritated with him. He hasn’t even said anything yet.
Traitor.
He’s clad in charcoal trousers and a white shirt with the cuffs rolled once, jacket hooked over two fingers.
His dark blond hair is still damp at the temples.
Grant has always liked to shower and change before anything involving cameras, even if changing used to mean swapping one black T-shirt for another in the bathroom of whatever bar we were playing that night.
These days, he has a shower off his office and somebody else worrying about whether the shirt is steamed.
And he is late. Not that anyone around here seems inclined to tell him.
He walks toward me without hurrying, and people shift out of his path almost absently, making room before he ever has to ask for it.
Fame didn’t teach him that. Even when nobody knew his name, Grant walked into rooms like somebody had already saved him a seat at the head of the table.
“I’ve been calling you.” Not exactly the way I’d planned to greet my husband on our anniversary.
A brief crease appears between his brows before he smooths it away. “I know. I saw them.”
My eyebrows rise. “And your thumbs both stopped working?”
He closes the space between us, and the temper I’d worked up starts deserting me the second his hand settles at my waist. “I’m sorry.
Couldn’t get away.” His mouth brushes my temple, and my fingers curl into the front of his shirt like I haven’t spent the last hour wanting to throttle him. “Happy anniversary, baby.”
I pull back as far as his hold allows and look at him. “You remembered, or did my message save you?”
“Of course I remembered.” A calloused palm cups my jaw, his thumb caressing the corner of my mouth. “This showcase just had me tied up all day.”
I study him, but there’s nothing there to call him on. Besides, I’ve said it first every year we’ve been married. Grant coming in second is tradition by now.
The gardenias waiting in the blue vase are proof that, technically, he did remember. He’s had them delivered every anniversary for eleven years, the same white flowers arriving on the same date with such dependable precision that I’ve never needed to wonder if they’ll be there.
I’ve never cared much about flowers or presents anyway.
The first anniversary gift Grant ever bought me was a gas-station snow globe from Kentucky because our van broke down outside Bowling Green and the gas station was the only place open.
It was ridiculous and cheap, with a tiny Kentucky skyline trapped inside the glass, and I loved it because he saw it, thought of me, and bought it. I still have it.
“I have something to tell you,” I say, and the excitement I’ve been sitting on all afternoon comes rushing back. I called Mama on the drive home, but Grant is the one I’ve been itching to tell.
A cautious note edges into his voice. “Good something or I-should-find-a-lawyer something?”
“Good.” I turn my face into the palm still cupping my jaw and kiss it, smiling. “Really good, I think.”
Curiosity replaces the distance I’ve grown used to seeing in my husband’s arctic-blue eyes whenever I try to talk to him about anything serious. I open my mouth, but someone calls his name from across the room. Grant peers over my shoulder.
The soft Georgia lilt in the voice makes me follow it.
Sloane Avery stands near the stage stairs in silver, a half-empty bottle of water dangling from one hand.
I’ve met her twice, and both times she’s left me a little off-kilter, though I couldn’t tell you why. Neither meeting lasted long enough to get past a hug and a few polite sentences.
Our eyes meet, and Sloane’s cherry-red mouth curves into a smile.
I give her one of my own. She’s prettier than I remember.
Her hair falls over her shoulders in loose waves, darker at the roots and almost gold under the lights, and her sun-kissed skin makes her look like she brought some Georgia summer to Nashville with her.
She’s maybe five-seven without the heels, which gives me a good three inches on her.
Her debut record lived in my car for three weeks last year after I came across an interview where she said one of my old live recordings was what made her start writing songs.
I’ll admit that probably made me more invested than I would’ve been otherwise.
But then I heard Jackson County Line and sent Grant a voice note telling him he was an idiot if he didn’t sign her.
I was proud of him.
Fuck, I still am. Even with most of the past year feeling off in ways I can never quite pin down, I’ve gotten good at explaining it away.
Grant gets home after I’m asleep more nights than not, answers emails through dinner when he is home, and later has become his answer every time I try to talk about us.
I tell myself this is what running Mercer looks like.
The company has grown, his schedule has become insane, and some seasons of marriage are simply less romantic than others.
Most days, I can sell myself on that.
This morning almost made it easy. Grant was home when I woke up.
I saw more of him in those quiet hours than I had in weeks, and when we made love, it wasn’t one of the rushed encounters we’d grown accustomed to fitting between his meetings and my writing.
For a little while, he felt like my husband again instead of a man I kept missing while he was standing in the same house.
Other days, I get the oddest sense that I’m half a beat behind my own marriage.
Near the stage, one of Mercer’s publicists gets Grant’s attention and waves him over.
“You should go,” I say, nodding in that direction. I don’t need my husband glued to my side when half the room needs something from him.
He lifts a finger in a silent one sec, then faces me again. “What did you need to tell me?”
“After.”
“Laurel—”
“Go on. They need you.”
I straighten the collar of his shirt without thinking. My fingers pause near his throat. There’s a scent there I don’t recognize—warm, floral, expensive.
I lean closer. “What are you wearing?”
His hand closes around my wrist. Not hard. “What?”
“That scent.”
“Same cologne I always wear.”
“No.” I breathe him in again because I know every bottle on his side of our bathroom. “Something smells different.”
His Adam’s apple bobs with a swallow. “Probably the new soap they put in my office shower.”
I glance at his damp hair. Right. “You smell like somebody’s sexy grandma.”
One corner of his mouth lifts. I haven’t seen that crooked almost-smile much lately, and I hate how badly I want to keep it there. I can miss my husband even when he’s standing right in front of me.
Turns out that’s a particularly shitty kind of lonely.
Grant’s hand slides around the back of my neck, and he kisses me breathless. My fingers bunch in the front of his shirt as his tongue slides into my mouth. The room around us disappears, and for a few seconds, I have my husband back.
When he pulls away, I take a breath.
“After the set,” I tell him. “Five minutes. I mean it.”
“Five minutes.”
“Promise?”
Grant pecks my nose. “Promise, baby.”