The Wife He Replaced On Tour (You Chose Her. Now Grovel. #13)

Chapter 1

Cordelia Hall smelled like floor wax and old coffee. Savannah had loved that smell for nine years, which was a strange thing to love. She had stopped apologizing for it around year three.

She sat on a road case in the wings with her guitar across her knee, tuning by ear. The clip-on tuner lied to her in cold rooms, and this room was cold. March had come into Nashville mean. The loading doors had stood open since noon, and backstage ran ten degrees under the stage.

Wade Pruitt crossed behind her with a coil of cable on his shoulder.

"More of him or more of you?" he asked.

"More of him."

"You always say that."

"Because it's always the right answer." She thumbed the low E and bent her ear toward it. "If I can hear myself, I sing over him. If I sing over him, we sound like two people."

"You are two people."

"Not on the record we're not."

Wade laughed and kept walking. Savannah tightened the string a hair and let it ring.

The callus on her left index finger caught the wound wire the way it had since she was a teenager.

Nine years of stages, and she still checked her tuning like a girl at a church potluck, scared to death of being sharp in front of God.

The showcase was a taping. Four acts, one night, cameras on rails, a hundred and forty industry seats, and a livestream that mattered more than the seats did. The Holloways were closing it. They had been closing things for a long time now.

Deacon came up the stage-left stairs with his hat in his hand and his hair flat on one side from the bus.

"They moved us to fifty minutes," he said.

"From forty."

"From forty."

"Then we put 'Ash Creek' back in."

"That's what I told them." He stopped in front of her and looked down. "I said, Savannah's going to say 'Ash Creek.'"

"And you were right, and it cost you nothing."

"It never does." He set his hat on the road case beside her. "You warm?"

"No."

He took off his jacket and dropped it over her shoulders without waiting to be asked, then went out to check his monitors. That was the marriage, mostly. Not the songs. The jacket.

They ran "Ash Creek" first because it was the hardest, and they had learned a long time ago to spend the good voice early.

Savannah stood two feet to his left. That distance had been argued over by three directors and defended by her every time.

Any closer and they read as a man and his backup singer.

Any farther and they read as two soloists sharing a bill.

Two feet was a kitchen table. Two feet was a porch swing.

People bought tickets to look at two feet of empty air and feel something about their own marriages.

Deacon came in a half-beat early on the second verse. He always did, in rehearsal, in that room, off that one drum fill. Savannah heard it coming and hung back a hair so they landed together anyway, and the band never knew there had been a problem.

He cut his eyes at her sideways. She kept hers on the back wall.

"You covered me," he said, off-mic.

"I've built a whole career on it."

"Some career."

"Somebody's got to do it."

They took the bridge again. On the record, that bridge was three stacked harmonies she had built over two days on the floor of the room over the porch, singing into her phone with the door shut.

Deacon had come in on the second afternoon, listened to all of it, and said it needed something.

She had told him what it needed. That was how it worked, always.

He could feel that a thing was wrong. She could hear what it was.

Nobody had ever put that on a credit line. For nine years she had told herself that a credit line was a small, mean thing to want.

They ran the closer last. "Two Chairs." Every night of her life for four years had ended with that song.

It was about a house with two chairs on the porch and only one of them worn out, and it had paid for an actual house with an actual porch, which was a joke they had run into the ground and then kept running.

On the last chorus he turned and sang it at her instead of at the room. He always did. The first hundred times, it had undone her.

It still worked. That was the ordinary, awful truth of nine years. It still worked.

The lights came down. Out in the dark, a director said something about camera four.

A girl with a headset came up the stairs with a clipboard. "Mr. Holloway? They want to confirm your press hold at six fifteen."

"That's fine," Deacon said.

"Both of you, or—"

"That's fine," he said again, a little louder, and gave her the smile he gave people at meet-and-greets, and she went back down the stairs with her question unanswered.

Savannah unhooked her strap. "Press hold for what? Nobody told me there was press."

"It's the network thing. Two questions about the taping and a photo."

"At six fifteen. We're on at eight."

"You know how they are." He was coiling his own cable, which he never did, because there were four people paid to do it. "You don't have to sit through it. Go eat something."

"I always sit through it."

"Then sit through it," he said, and grinned at her, and she let it go, because it was a press hold, and in nine years the only thing that had ever come out of a press hold was a bad photograph.

"Twenty minutes, everybody," the stage manager called.

Deacon's phone buzzed in his back pocket. He looked at the screen and put it away.

"Holt," he said.

"He can wait twenty minutes."

"He really can't." Deacon rubbed the back of his neck, up under the hairline, the way he did when a promoter had shorted him or a radio guy had asked for something ugly. "Five minutes."

"You'll be forty."

"Five." He kissed the side of her head, which was a thing he did instead of saying words, and went down the stairs two at a time.

She thought he looked tired. She stood in the dark in his jacket and thought: he looks tired, I should make him eat something before the six o'clock.

It was the last uncomplicated thought she had for a long while.

The women's dressing room at Cordelia Hall was a storage closet with a mirror screwed to the wall. Savannah didn't mind. She had a chair, a light, and an outlet, and she had worked out of worse.

She sat down with the guitar still on her knee and picked up her phone to set an alarm for the call.

Nineteen notifications.

She read the first one without understanding it, the way you read a road sign in a language you took two years of in high school.

TEMPO ALERT: Deacon Holloway announces first solo arena run — "Long Field Tour," 31 cities — co-written and co-produced with Kinsley Wexler

She looked at it a second and felt nothing at all. Her first clear thought was that Tempo had gotten something wrong, because Tempo got things wrong twice a month. Her second was that she ought to text the publicist before it spread.

Then she opened it.

The story had been up for half an hour. There was a photo of Deacon at the top, one she knew — the Ryman, two years back, hat off, mid-laugh.

She had been standing eight inches out of frame on the left.

Somebody had cropped her out to make it a solo picture, and it had cropped clean, because he had been laughing at something she'd said.

The tour opened in mid-May. Seven weeks out. That meant routing, holds, buses, crew, insurance, a production designer, an advance team. That meant months.

She scrolled.

Ridgeline Records confirmed the run in a statement Tuesday afternoon, calling the project "the fullest expression yet of one of country music's defining voices."

She scrolled.

Wexler, 24, co-wrote nine of the twelve songs on the forthcoming album and shares production credit with Holloway. The two began writing together in October.

October.

She sat very still with the guitar on her knee.

October was the month she rebuilt the whole vocal arrangement of "Two Chairs" so it would sit right in bigger rooms. October ran into Thanksgiving at Pearl's, and the flu he had over New Year's, and the four days in February when the pipes froze at the Harpeth House and they slept in the den under every quilt they owned.

Five months. Five months of Tuesdays when he said he was writing, and she said good, and meant it.

She scrolled to the bottom looking for her husband's name in his own announcement. There was no quote from Deacon anywhere in the piece.

There was a quote from Holt Sennett.

"Deacon's been carrying a certain kind of song for fifteen years, and there's a version of him nobody has heard yet," said longtime manager Holt Sennett. "This record is that version. Kinsley brought something out of him that had been waiting a long time to come out."

She read it three times.

She was not in the article. Not one line. Not Holloway, who has performed with his wife Savannah since. Nothing at all. Whoever wrote it had not been told to leave her out. She simply hadn't been in what they were given, and a writer working off a press packet writes what's in the packet.

Nine years. She had written half the words on every record with his name on the spine.

She had built the harmony on "Ash Creek" note by note at a kitchen table while he made the coffee.

She had stood two feet to his left in front of forty thousand people and made that empty space mean something to strangers.

And he had gone into a room with a twenty-four-year-old for five months and never once said her name out loud in the house.

Her hands were steady. She noticed it with a kind of clinical surprise. She had expected shaking. Instead everything had gone cold and clear and quiet, the way it went right before she caught a bad note in a mix that nobody else in the room had heard.

Somebody laughed down the hall. It wasn't him.

She twisted her wedding ring once around her finger, and then made herself stop.

She went back to the top of her notifications and read them in order, which took a while, because they were not really nineteen separate things. They were one thing, arriving nineteen times.

A session player she'd cut four records with: hey. saw the news. you good?