Chapter 13
LAUREL
Mama’s eyes go straight to the hand that no longer wears my wedding ring.
I’m barely through the doorway when I feel the shift in her attention, her gaze moving from my face to my empty ring finger, lingering there for one quiet beat before traveling to the suitcase at my feet and the Martin case hanging from my other hand.
When her eyes return to mine, there’s a question in them so stark I almost wish she’d ask it.
The house smells exactly the way it always does in late summer—lemon cleaner, old wood, whatever Mama has simmering in the kitchen—and the familiarity of it hits me harder than I expect.
I step inside, and the reel of every old version of my life starts playing through these rooms, each frame preserved in details I’d forgotten were still here.
The pencil marks on the laundry-room doorframe are still there, measuring me at eight, eleven, and fifteen, including the one where Daddy wrote She cheated — hair doesn’t count because I stood on my toes and piled my curls on top of my head to beat Dean’s height at the same age.
The porch swing still complains on the left side, the brass knocker sticks every August, and the live oak out front has grown wide enough to shade half the drive, though one branch still carries the pale scar from where sixteen-year-old me backed Daddy’s truck into it and spent three months insisting a hurricane had done the damage, right up until he asked what kind of hurricane left Ford-blue paint on bark.
Nothing here knows I became Laurel Mercer, that Grant’s last arena tour grossed eighty million dollars, that magazines have photographed our kitchen, or that my husband has three Grammys arranged beneath museum lighting while mine live in a box upstairs.
Every award I won started feeling less like an accomplishment and more like evidence from a life I’d misplaced.
These walls know the girl who got suspended for calling the vice principal an illiterate jackass after he corrected irregardless in one of her essays; the girl Daddy taught three chords on a pawnshop guitar because she wouldn’t stop stealing his; the girl who had her first kiss behind the shed with Marshall Devereaux and came inside so horrified by the amount of saliva involved that Mama made peppermint tea and informed me that romance either improved with age or people eventually learned how to lie about it.
I find it comforting.
I set my suitcase beside the entry table, keeping one hand around the Martin case because letting go of it feels harder than it should.
Fourteen years of marriage sit somewhere behind my sternum, heavy and sour, and I don’t have a better name for the feeling yet.
The seven-hour drive from Nashville has settled into every muscle in my body, my shoulders aching, my eyes burning from the endless stretch of highway, but none of that is enough to quiet my mind; my body wants a bed, my brain refuses to let me have one.
Mama closes the door behind me, taking in the exhaustion I’m too tired to hide.
“Are you hungry?”
Emotion clogs my throat, and I almost break down in tears, grateful she isn’t poking at the wounds that brought me here, choosing instead to ask the same question she asked every time I came home from college, every time I drove in after a tour, every time I showed up at this house with a headache, a bad review, or a heart too bruised to explain.
“Not really.”
She studies me for another second, then reaches for my suitcase. “It’s okay. You can eat later.”
We make it three steps down the hallway before she says, very calmly, “That son of a bitch finally did something too large for you to explain on his behalf, didn’t he?”
My throat tightens. I look at the framed photographs along the wall instead of at her—the crooked school picture from seventh grade, Daddy holding a fish nearly as big as I was, me at nineteen with braces and terrible bangs, Mama laughing so hard her eyes disappear.
I swallow hard and force myself to breathe. “I’m fine, Mama.”
Her mouth trembles at one corner, but she gets it under control before it becomes anything resembling a sob. “Get upstairs and put your things down. Then you can tell me exactly what that man did, and I can decide how many sins I’m willing to commit before dinner.”
∞∞∞
Mama waits until I’ve eaten half a chicken sandwich before asking what happened, which is how I know she’s scared.
Vivian Bellamy has never been good at leaving a question alone.
Usually, she wants to know who did what, when they did it, why they thought they could get away with it, and whether their mother knows what kind of child she raised.
Today, she puts a glass of sweet tea in front of me, sits across the table, and lets me chew like she has all the time in the world.
Daddy built this table when I was twelve, back when he believed every woodworking mistake could be fixed with another coat of varnish.
There are knife marks near Dean’s old seat, a pale ring from a hot casserole dish Mama still blames on Aunt Margot, and a dark burn on the far corner from the Christmas Grant proposed, when he set a dish towel too close to a candle while helping Daddy cook.
I’ve looked at that burn a hundred times without thinking about it.
Right now, I can’t seem to look anywhere else.
My eyes stay fixed on that burn when I finally start telling her everything, going all the way back without leaving out a single detail.
Sloane. Six months. The Conrad. Magnolia Rain.
Beckett’s offers. Daniel’s payments. Grant deciding my career belonged to some larger picture only he had the altitude to see.
The words come out in no particular order, but Mama never interrupts to question me, her face giving away almost nothing.
When I finish, she takes my empty plate to the sink and turns on the faucet.
“Say something.”
Water rushes over porcelain.
“I’m deciding which crime I’d be best at.”
“Mama.”
“Poison takes patience. A gunshot brings the police. I’m sixty-three, and I have no intention of spending my retirement learning prison etiquette.”
A laugh escapes me, sharp enough to hurt on the way out. Mama shuts off the water and dries her hands, looking far too pleased with herself for someone who just threatened to commit a felony on my behalf.
“How long did you know?” I ask.
Her shoulders stiffen. “Know what?”
“That something was wrong with him.”
Mama folds the dish towel over once, twice, buying herself a breath. “Those are two different questions.”
She comes back to the table and sits across from me again, her expression softer now, though not by much.
“I knew Grant loved you.” Bitterness laces her words. “I still believe he loved you at first.”
My face twists. “Great. Maybe put that on his headstone.”
“Let me finish.” Her voice cuts clean through mine, carrying the same quiet authority that once made entire classrooms of seventeen-year-olds reconsider their relationship with plagiarism.
“Love doesn’t make a man good. A man can love you and still be selfish, resent what your existence asks him to be, and decide his hunger matters more than your dignity.
” She folds her arms. “Your father loved you enough to bore strangers with stories about you. He also worried about Grant.”
“Daddy loved Grant.”
“He did.” Her eyes drift toward the window, and an old hurt crosses her face, one that has been waiting years for the right question.
“Your father started worrying when Grant stopped saying Laurel’s song and started saying our song.
Later, it became my record. Thomas noticed.
He said, ‘That boy is getting awful comfortable with things he didn’t make. ’”
A fresh wave of pain tightens my chest. “Why didn’t either of you tell me?”
“We did.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Your father asked if you still wanted your own record after Grant’s first album took off.”
Her words pull me straight back into this house, twenty-four years old and furious, locked in the bathroom with tears drying cold on my cheeks because Daddy managed to turn a conversation about my husband’s success into an accusation against our marriage.
Grant’s tour starts in four days. He’s everywhere now—radio interviews, rehearsals, photographs—and I’ve never been prouder of him. When I finally come outside, Daddy is waiting on the porch, his arms folded across his chest, his expression too careful for me to mistake it for anything but concern.
“Baby girl,” he says, “helping somebody climb doesn’t mean you’re supposed to stay at the bottom.”
My stupid self went home and agreed with Grant when he called it insulting. I defended my husband so fiercely I didn’t speak to my father for six days.
God, what have I done?
Mama watches the recognition reach me with a wan smile. “We backed off. You were grown. He was your husband. There’s a line between concern and interference, and your daddy spent the rest of his life afraid he’d crossed it.”
My throat closes. “H-he died thinking I chose this.”
“No.” Her answer comes fast. “He died thinking you were happy.”
I crumble into Mama’s arms and cry, my face pressed into her shoulder as she holds me without saying a word.