Chapter 4
LAUREL
I walk onto the stage with a microphone in my hand as applause rises around me, hundreds of faces turning my way.
It’s been four years since I stood beneath lights this bright with anything other than a speaking cue in front of me, but my body still knows what to do.
Find the mark. Don’t crowd the mic. Keep my eyes moving past the first few rows instead of fixing on one face.
The old instincts come back so fast I get ahead of myself, and I can almost see myself staying here after the introduction, waiting for a band to count me in.
Dr. Mehta’s caution rings through the rush.
A real chance. Not a promise.
I swallow around the difference and look out at a room packed with label executives, radio people, managers, publicists, influencers, and enough familiar Music Row faces to make this feel less like an audience than a very expensive family reunion.
The same email that called this a women supporting women moment also informed me I’m one of the women who helped pave the way for the next generation of country artists. I’m thirty-five. They might as well have told me to start shopping for sensible shoes and a burial plot.
Jokes about my impending old age aside, I said yes because Sloane belongs on this stage. Her lower register is the best I’ve heard come out of Nashville in years.
Grant stands just offstage where I can see him, one hand in his pocket. He gives me a small nod before I refocus on the room as the applause ebbs.
“Every few years, a singer comes along who makes you stop what you’re doing the first time you hear them.
You can build a campaign. Put a face on every billboard in town.
Spend a fortune making sure people know someone’s name.
What you can’t manufacture is the voice that makes them remember it.
” I let that sit for a beat. “Sloane Avery has one.”
The applause starts before I finish saying her name.
Sloane comes up the stage stairs with that bright smile already in place, and I step aside to make room for her.
When she reaches me, I open my arms, but her body goes strangely rigid against mine for a beat before she forces herself to hug me back.
Nerves, I decide.
“Crush it,” I murmur near her ear.
Something flickers across her face when we separate, gone too quickly for me to read. “Thank you.”
“You don’t need to thank me.” I give her arm a squeeze. “You earned the room.”
I hand over the microphone and head for the wings.
“Thank you so much. Nashville’s been too good to me. I grew up singing this one with my mama…”
Grant is waiting when I step offstage. He reaches for me automatically, fingertips finding the small of my back, but his eyes remain fixed on Sloane as she moves to the center mark.
“She’ll be good,” I say.
“Yeah.”
The house lights begin to dim, lowering the room with them one row at a time.
Someone behind us murmurs into a headset.
A guitar sounds from the stage, the first low notes settling over the room as the last conversations fade.
I move closer to Grant and reach for him without looking, the same thoughtless movement I’ve made in dark theaters, backstage tunnels, crowded awards shows, and a hundred other places over the years.
His fingers close around mine with an ease so familiar I barely register it, and I lean a little into him as the room falls quiet.
For one tender second, all the missed dinners and unanswered calls and every later he’s given me lately feel like things we might still find our way back from. I don’t ask for anything more.
Sloane sings the first line. My lungs simply forget their job.
There are songs you hear and songs you know. Then there are songs woven so deeply into your body that hearing them feels like someone reaching through your skin and wrapping a hand around something vital.
I know this chord, the lazy walk down from C to A minor, the breath before the second line because I used to take it there. I know the melody lifting at the end of the phrase. I know what comes next.
My fingers go slack inside Grant’s.
Onstage, she closes her eyes and leans into a song I wrote at twenty-four, in a house with no furniture, during the summer Grant’s career was finally starting to take off.
I wrote it after he found me sitting on our kitchen floor, crying because my final callback had gone to another girl.
I wrote the chorus at two in the morning.
Grant burned the chicken. Mrs. Callahan’s hound barked through half the demo.
I had to start the first verse twice because I forgot my own lyrics and laughed.
Not a single soul has heard that recording except my husband.
When Sloane reaches the chorus someone behind me whispers, “Jesus, Grant knocked this one out of the park.”
The room falls away until the pounding of my heart is the only thing I can hear.
My head turns, and I find Grant looking at me with a strange expression.
For fourteen years, I have known every version of my husband’s face: twenty-five and broke, thirty and terrified before his first arena show, drunk, grieving, furious, half asleep, inside me, laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe, crying into my stomach the night his father died.
I know the tiny line that appears between his eyebrows when he lies to interviewers about enjoying awards ceremonies.
I know which side of his mouth lifts when he is trying not to smile.
I know the look he gets when a song is about to make us rich.
I’ve never seen this one, but a part of me understands it immediately.
“You knew,” I say.
Grant doesn’t answer. He doesn’t have to.
Onstage, Sloane Avery sings my chorus while my husband holds the hand he stole it from.