Chapter 1 #2
A publicist she barely knew: Call me before you say anything to anyone.
A booking agent in Fort Worth, no words at all, just a link to the same story.
And near the bottom, sent at 3:52, from an address she had answered a dozen polite questions for over the years:
Savannah — Rennie at Tempo. We ran the tour news off the label's release. Would love a line from you on Deacon's solo project if you're up for it. Deadline's loose.
They had all found out the same way she had. That was the part that kept turning over. Not one of these people had called her that morning to ask a question, because not one of them had thought to check whether the wife knew, and they had been right not to check, because the wife had not known.
She called Deacon.
It rang four times and went to voicemail, and she got his recorded voice in her ear, easy and unhurried, saying leave it at the beep and he'd get back to her. He had recorded that greeting in their kitchen. She could hear the room in it. She could hear the refrigerator.
She didn't leave anything. She hung up and set the phone face down on her knee and looked at the mirror screwed to the wall, at a thirty-four-year-old woman in a man's jacket, and waited to feel the thing she was supposed to feel.
It didn't come. What came instead was a list. That was worse, probably, but it was hers.
She set the guitar in its stand and walked out into the hallway like a woman with an ordinary errand.
Nobody looked at her. Cordelia Hall on a taping day was full of people with their heads down. A runner with a coffee tray against his chest. Two camera assistants arguing about a cable path. A woman from the label on a headset saying no, no, we're holding on that.
Some of them knew. She could tell by which ones didn't look up.
The production office was a folding table and a whiteboard in the room behind the loading dock. Bree, the label runner, was crouched over a printer with her tongue between her teeth.
"Hey," Savannah said. "Can I see the run-of-show?"
"Sure. There's a new one." Bree pulled a warm page out of the tray and handed it over without thinking about it. Then she thought about it, and her face did something small and terrible.
Savannah read it standing up.
Four acts. The Holloways still closed. Fifty minutes. Down in the notes column, somebody had typed: DH avail for press 6:15–6:40. Solo announce embargo lifts 3:30. SH not participating.
SH not participating.
There it was in eight-point type, on a sheet that had gone to every department in the building. Somebody had put her initials in a document and decided what she was and was not doing before one person asked her a single question.
"When did this come around?" Savannah asked.
Bree looked at the floor. "This morning."
"What time this morning?"
"Nine. Maybe before nine."
"Okay." Savannah folded the page in half, and in half again, and put it in her back pocket. "Thank you. This isn't yours."
"Savannah—"
"It isn't yours," she said again, and left before the girl could start crying. If somebody cried in front of her, she was going to lose the cold clear thing holding her upright, and she needed it a while longer.
Wade was at the monitor desk with one ear of his headphones pushed off, running a line check on channel six.
"Hey," she said.
"Hey." He didn't look up. That told her plenty. Wade Pruitt had looked her in the eye through a bomb threat in Tulsa and a night in Bakersfield when the power died in the middle of the second song.
"How long have you known?"
He set the headphones down on the desk. "Since they booked me."
"Booked you for what?"
"The tour." He rubbed his mouth. "Middle of January. Holt's office called about my dates for May through October. I said sure. I figured it was you all."
"And when you found out it wasn't."
"I asked. They said it was a solo record and it wasn't public yet, and I signed the same paper everybody else signed.
" He looked at her then, finally, and he looked sick.
"Savannah, I have three kids and a bus payment.
I thought you knew. I swear to God I thought you knew and just weren't saying, because that's how y'all do. "
That was the thing. That was exactly how they did. Nine years of not saying, and calling it trust.
"Was there a rehearsal?" she asked. "Here?"
"Tuesday. Room B, all afternoon." He said it slowly, the way a man lays something down on a table he can't pick back up. "I ran the mix."
Room B was forty feet from where she was standing.
"Okay," she said. "Thanks for telling me straight."
"I should've—"
"You should've," she said. "But so should about nine other people, and you're the only one who did it to my face."
She walked away before he could answer, past Room B, past its closed door, and did not stop to look at it, because she was not going to give anybody in that building the picture of Savannah Holloway standing in a hallway staring at a door.
Deacon's dressing room was two doors down from the stage, and it was a real one, with a couch and a fruit plate and his name on a card in a brass frame.
He wasn't in it.
His hat sat on the couch. His charger was still in the wall. She stood in the doorway and understood, with no drama at all, that he had left the building.
She checked with the stage manager anyway, because she was not going to be a woman who assumed.
"Car came around fifteen minutes ago," he said, not looking up from his clipboard. "Holt took him out the north door. He's back for the six o'clock."
"Thanks."
She went into the dressing room and shut the door behind her.
She wasn't looking for anything. That was the part she would think about later, driving home with her jaw locked. She had not gone in there to go through her husband's things. In nine years she had never once had a reason to.
The binder was sitting on the counter under a folded newspaper. Three inches thick, black, with a printed label on the spine.
LONG FIELD — TOUR ROUTING v4 — HOLLOWAY / WEXLER
Version four.
She opened it because her hand opened it.
Bus assignments. A production budget with a number at the bottom that made her sit down on the arm of the couch.
A page of hold dates going back to the second week of November, which meant people had been calling arenas about her husband while she was out picking a Christmas tree.
Behind all of it, loose, folded in thirds, was a page off a yellow legal pad.
A lyric sheet. Two hands on it. Deacon's, which she would know anywhere, big and slanted and pressing too hard. And another one — small, round, careful, in blue ink.
The song was called "The Long Field." His hand had the verses.
The blue hand had gone in underneath and moved things.
A word struck out and replaced. A line lifted from the second verse and dropped into the bridge with an arrow drawn to show it.
In the margin, in blue: this one's the true one.
everything before it is you being polite.
Savannah put her fingers flat on the counter.
Nothing had happened between them. She understood that right away, and it did not help even a little.
Whatever this was, it wasn't a hotel room.
It was worse than a hotel room. It was two days at the kitchen table with the coffee going cold.
It was it needs something, and being the one who knew what.
It was the only thing the two of them had ever really had, and he had carried it down the road and handed it to somebody else, and then let a trade magazine be the one to tell her.
Her phone buzzed against the counter.
She turned it over.
Deacon — 4:21 PM we should talk tonight
She looked back at the timestamp on the Tempo alert. 3:41.
Forty minutes. He'd had it for forty minutes, plus the whole ride to wherever Holt was taking him, and what he had come up with was four words with no name on the end.
She read it twice, the way she had read the article twice. Apparently that was who she was today. A woman who needed to see things two times before she would believe them.
"All right," she said to the empty room.
She closed the binder, put it under her arm, and walked out with it.