Epilogue #2
He plays the chord from earlier. The new one that is still finding its shape. Then the chord that follows, which he has been working toward all evening, resolves now that it has been given the time it needed.
It is a good chord.
I hum along, freely, without deciding to, with no door between the sound and the air.
Cash builds on what I am humming. Adds to it. We do this sometimes now, the two of us finding a thing together that neither of us had alone, which is its own kind of working language, its own kind of home.
The sound goes out into the April night.
Emmett lifts his head at the fence line.
THE END
And if you loved Saving The Broken Country Star, you’ll LOVE Healing The Damaged Cowboy , book 1 of the Nashville Hearts Series!
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This book is a stand-alone and does not need to be read in order.
I came to Rivera Ridge to heal people with horses.
Not fall for a broken country star hiding from his past.
Hayes Sterling shows up looking for peace.
Just a man, no fame, no pretense.
Someone who sees straight through my walls.
I've always trusted animals over people.
But working the ranch side by side, something shifts.
A stolen glance in the barn. His hand steadying mine.
One kiss under the stars and I fall hard.
He's carrying grief he's never named.
I'm carrying wounds I've never shown.
Just when we start healing…
Nashville calls him back, and I discover he’s a mega country star.
I go with him, determined to make us work.
But his world is my worst nightmare.
Paparazzi. Chaos. Fake smiles everywhere I turn.
Every abandonment issue I've buried comes roaring back.
The machine that made him is swallowing me whole. And Hayes doesn’t see it.
If I leave him now when he needs me most, I could lose him forever.
A grumpy-sunshine country star romance about grief, healing, and choosing love over fear.
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HOLLOW GROUND - CHAPTER 1
HAYES
Nashville — April
The roar of twenty thousand people hasn’t meant anything to me in a long time.
Not literally. The sound is physical—a wall of pressure I feel in my chest and teeth—but the way I used to hear it, with something like reverence, is gone.
It has been gone for longer than I could honestly pinpoint—since the night the truck crossed the center line and took her with it, since the first time applause felt like an accusation instead of a gift.
Nobody's asking.
I move to the front lip of the stage on cue, the way I always do at this point in the set, and the crowd surges forward with the collective momentum of something held back too long.
Bridgestone Arena on a Saturday night—hot, loud, and thick with fog-machine haze and beer.
The air is warm and close up here, thick with the smell of fog-machine chemicals and twenty-two thousand people's worth of heat and beer and anticipation.
Somewhere above my head, twelve tons of rigging holds a lighting rig cycling through the sequence my tour director described as visceral and cinematic.
I signed off on it eight months ago. I have never once watched it from the floor.
The second verse is where I live during a show — the place in the song where I'm technically present and internally somewhere else entirely.
I know this set the way I know how to breathe. Four hundred and thirty-eight shows of the song, tracked on a spreadsheet by my manager, Rex Calloway, who keeps data on things most people don't think to quantify. My hands know the chord changes before my brain does. My mouth knows the words.
I hit the chorus of "Dust and Hollow Ground," and the crowd comes with me.
I traded red dirt roads for neon signs, traded silence for the noise I thought was mine. I chased the dream all the way to the other side — Funny how a hollow thing still echoes when it dies.
They sing the last line back at me. They always do — it's the moment my production team built the whole second act around, the lights dropping from gold to a deep bruised blue, the crowd's phone flashlights rising like twenty thousand small flames in the dark.
It looks, I've been told, like a field of fireflies.
I used to think so, too.
I'm in the bridge when it happens. A single phrase in the third line catches me — words I wrote four years ago that suddenly land differently tonight, like hearing a song you know well played in a different key.
My mouth keeps moving, my hands keep moving, everything trained and automatic and technically flawless, but my mind is eleven hundred miles southwest, in a place that has no fog machines and no phone flashlights and smells of horse and hay and the particular mineral sweetness of a Texas evening cooling after a long hot day.
I hold the penultimate note a half-count too long — long enough that the lighting cue nearly misses, long enough that somewhere in the wings a production manager glances at a monitor and makes a note, long enough that in a business built on precision and timing and multi-million-dollar margins, someone will log it as deviation.
It's barely anything. Denny taps the hi-hat twice from behind his kit — the signal that means I've got you, steady — I come back, we finish the song, and the crowd erupts with the kind of noise that used to feel like affirmation, and tonight just feels like weather.
I stand at the front of the stage with my arms out and my face doing what my face does at this moment in every show, and think about a wooden fence rail.
A woman with strawberry blonde hair is sitting on a wooden fence rail, one boot hooked on the lower rail, chin tipped slightly as if measuring the distance between us.
There’s a streak of dust along her jeans, catching the last light in the early evening, her arms fold on the top rail, watching me with the calm, assessing patience she uses on horses she hasn't decided about yet.
The thought is not new. It has been with me for seven months, since I came back from Silver Ridge, Texas. Rivera Ridge Rescue. It surfaces at inconvenient times.
I shake it off. I finish the set.
The meet-and-greet is forty-five minutes, efficient, fluorescent, and carefully managed, in a room behind the arena that smells of catering trays and industrial carpet.
It holds fifty fans selected by the label's contest team.
I shake hands and sign things and take photos and say the things I say — Where'd you drive from tonight?
How long have you been a fan? That's incredible, thank you for being here — and I mean most of it.
Fans are the most real part of this machine. They come because the music found them at the right moment and held them there. Whatever else is manufactured, that part is real.
A girl near the back of the line holds out a copy of my first album.
The original pressing — I can tell from the spine, the older font on the track listing, and the corners worn soft from handling.
The kind of copy that has been played until it knows the shape of someone's specific sadness. She's crying before she reaches me.
"This one," she says, and then can't finish.
"I know," I tell her, because I do. I sign the cover. I hold her hand for a moment and tell her I'm glad it found her. She nods and moves on, wiping her face with her sleeve, and I watch her go and think: that is the reason. That has always been the reason, underneath everything else.
It's the closest I come to feeling something real all night.
* * *
Dressing Room - Later
Rex finds me in the dressing room when the last fan has gone. I'm still in my stage clothes, sitting on the couch with a bottle of water and a view of my own reflection in the lit mirror across the room that I'm doing my best to ignore.
He looks like a man who has been waiting to have a specific conversation and has been deciding, in the meantime, exactly how to start it.
"You pulled up on the bridge."
"Half a beat."
"I noticed."
"You notice everything, Rex. It's your most exhausting quality."
Rex doesn’t smile. “It wasn’t the timing.”
I reach for the set list on the counter.
“How was the second chorus lighting cue?” I ask. “Felt late from stage left.”
Rex exhales. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”
“But the crowd was strong,” I respond. “Merch numbers looked good.”
He doesn't take the bait.
He sits across from me and opens the leather portfolio he carries everywhere and slides a printed deck across the table with the quiet deliberateness of a man playing his best card. MGM Grand Garden Arena sits in the top corner. Below it, in clean corporate font:
Hayes Sterling — Las Vegas Residency Proposal, Q1-Q2.
Four-month exclusive engagement. Non-compete clause for all live performances within a three-hundred-mile radius.
First-look option on the next album masters.
Mandatory promotional appearances. Multi-year extension trigger if ticket sales exceed projections.
I don't touch it.
"Thirty-two dates," Rex says. "Same venue all season. No routing, no travel, no load-in logistics. You play, you go home. The hotel is offering a suite for the full run if you'd like one. The money is?—"
"I know what the money is."
A pause. "Then what's the hesitation?"
I look at the proposal on the table between us. The numbers are extraordinary. The logic is airtight. The production photography in the deck shows a stage that makes tonight's setup look modest—the kind of build a certain type of artist would consider the pinnacle of a career.
Thirty-two nights in a controlled environment, the same energy, no red-eyes between cities, the whole machine running as smoothly as it is capable of running.
Outside the dressing room, I can already hear the arena being struck — the deep metallic clang of rigging coming down, the rumble of road cases on concrete, an entire evening's worth of spectacle being dismantled and packed into trucks.
By morning, it will be as if none of it happened. The next city is already being built.