Chapter 14 #2
My fingers tighten around the phone. Most people wouldn’t hear it. Grant used to; years ago, he could tell from a single sentence if I had sung that day, if I was tired, or if something had happened in my throat that I wasn’t telling him.
“I’m tired.”
“Mhm. That wasn’t what I meant.”
Of course it wasn’t.
I lean against the porch rail, looking out at the dark shape of Daddy’s old oak. “I tried something.”
“You sang.”
I’d gasp in shock if I didn’t already know the man on the other end of the line has a way of hearing what I don’t say.
“Yes.” I smile despite myself. “I thought I’d try, since you know, the doctor said there might be a procedure.”
“Are you going?”
The question is so immediate that I glance down at the phone, a small smile tugging at my mouth.
“I think so.”
“Good.”
“You don’t even know the odds.”
“They’re your odds.”
I smile into the darkness. “Was that an attempt to motivate me?”
“Don’t spread it around. I have a reputation.”
A laugh slips out of me, soft enough to dissolve into the humid air. “Why did you call?”
“A photographer is shopping pictures of us from this morning.”
My stomach tightens. “Why?”
“Because they think there’s a story. You’re carrying coffee, I’m carrying your guitar, and one of the pictures makes it look like you’re laughing.”
I let out a theatrical gasp. “Scandalous.”
Beckett chuckles. “Nashville may never recover. My people have first refusal, so the choice is yours. What do you want done?”
What do I want?
Grant managed to stop asking it years ago.
“And what do you want?” I ask.
His answer takes longer this time. “That isn’t relevant.”
“Why not?”
“Laurel.” His voice changes, and suddenly the cicadas don’t sound quite so loud. “Tell me what you want, and I’ll get it done.”
My hand closes around the porch rail. I look out over the yard, at the porch light spilling across the steps, at the familiar house behind me and the life I walked out of feeling like I’d left someone else’s life behind.
“Can you make sure the pictures don’t go anywhere?”
“Done.”
“Beckett?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
“Stop thanking me for giving you choices that were already yours.”
He hangs up before I can answer, leaving me alone on the porch with my phone in my hand and my heart beating far too hard for a conversation that should’ve been nothing more than a favor.
I’m about to head inside when a message from an unknown number pops up.
Sloane: Hey. It’s Sloane. Grant told me your marriage was fine.
He told me he loved you and that he was never going to leave you.
I believed him. I stayed anyway, and I know how that looks, so I’m not going to ask you to forgive me.
But there are things you need to know. Things I think you should see before Grant has a chance to get rid of them.
Under it sit twenty-three attachments: screenshots, voice notes, pictures, hotel confirmations, six months of my ex-husband compressed into thumbnails on a screen.
My stomach folds, but I keep scrolling because pain has stopped being persuasive.
Halfway down, I find a recording dated three weeks before yesterday.
I press play, and Grant’s voice fills my father’s back porch.
Grant: She doesn’t need the catalogue, baby.
Laurel hasn’t wanted this life in years.
You know how she is. She likes playing at being an artist when she’s in the mood, but the second there’s actual responsibility attached to it, she folds.
Contracts, money, negotiations, people wanting answers all day?
She doesn’t have the head for that shit.
Never has. That’s why I deal with it. She gets to stay home, write her little songs, and leave the rest to me.
Sloane says something too muffled for me to catch, but it makes Grant laugh.
Grant: Jesus, we’ve been over this. She’s better when somebody else makes the call and leaves her something easy to fuss over.
The minute she has to make a real decision, she gets emotional, starts overthinking, and turns a simple fucking thing into a whole production.
Next thing I know, I’m cleaning up some mess she created because she couldn’t just let me handle it. I’ve been doing that for years.
For a second, I’m twenty-four again, sitting on the floor of that house with my notebook balanced on my knees, writing Magnolia Rain after spending weeks helping Grant finish the single that would change everything for him.
Thirty, wiring my inheritance into Mercer Records.
Thirty-one, learning to speak without wincing after surgery.
Thirty-five, standing onstage and telling an audience that Sloane Avery earned the room.
Sloane’s voice comes through the recording.
Sloane: What happens to her shares if you two ever split?
Grant: She’d never fight me for the company.
The file ends, and silence rushes in around me, ringing in my ears. I replay his last sentence once, then again, letting the words settle into all the places I hadn’t thought to look.
By the third time, I’m smiling. I’d been wondering why Sloane made sure I found out that very day, why she wanted me to know about her and Grant when she could’ve kept sleeping with him in secret, taking whatever he was willing to give her and letting me remain the oblivious wife waiting at home. Now I think I understand.
Grant is right about one thing: the woman he married never would have fought him for Mercer Records.
It’s a shame he killed her.