CHAPTER FIVE
TOWNES
Deb wanted to hear "Blue Room" in person instead of over a file, so I played it for her in the writing room on a Thursday afternoon, just guitar and voice, the way I always played things first before anybody heard them dressed up with a full band.
She didn't say anything for a while after I finished.
She sat in the chair by the window with her eyes closed, and when she opened them there was something in her face I recognized from the day I first played her "The Light She Left On.
" The look of somebody who knew they were holding something that was going to make money.
"That's not a follow-up single," she said. "That's the one that wins you an award."
"You think so."
"Townes, that bridge. Where did that come from."
"Same place the last one came from," I said, which was true and also not an answer, and she didn't push, because in this business nobody ever asked a songwriter to show his work. They just wanted the finished thing and the next one after that.
"Who's it for," she asked. "Callahan again, or do we shop it wider this time?"
I'd thought about that already, more than I wanted to admit.
Rhett had a voice built for exactly this kind of song, low and worn in the right places, but giving him a second one this close to the first one felt like it would tie the two songs together in people's minds in a way that made me uneasy, though I hadn't let myself examine why.
I told Deb I wanted to shop it to somebody new, get a fresh voice on it, keep it separate from the first record.
We decided on Marisol Vega within the week. A rising artist, three years into her career, the kind of voice that could break your heart on a grocery list. Her people loved it after one listen. Deb called it the fastest yes she'd gotten on a song in years.
I met Marisol once, briefly, before the deal was finalized, at a small industry showcase where she was performing a few songs from her existing catalog.
She had a voice that did something unusual to a room, quieting it instead of demanding its attention, and when she sang I understood immediately why Deb had been so certain she was the right choice.
There was an ache in her delivery that felt earned rather than performed, and some part of me, listening, thought uneasily about how well that particular quality would suit a song built out of somebody else's earned ache instead of her own.
I shook her hand after the set and told her I was looking forward to working together, and she thanked me warmly, genuinely excited about the material Deb had described to her, and I remember driving home that night with a knot in my stomach I couldn't fully name, the first real physical warning sign that something about this deal sat wrong in me, arriving well before I let myself examine why.
I should have felt the same lift I'd felt with the first one.
Instead I sat in the writing room that night with the contract details in my inbox and a strange, low static running under everything, the kind of feeling I usually only got when a line in a song wasn't quite right yet and I couldn't say why.
I knew why this time. I just didn't want to look straight at it.
Larkin had told me that story on one of the worst nights of our marriage, four years back, the year her father's business nearly went under and her mother's leaving came roaring back up out of nowhere the way old grief does when a person's already stretched thin.
She'd cried in a way I'd only seen her cry a handful of times, and I'd held her and listened, and at the time it hadn't occurred to me even once that I was gathering something.
I was just her husband, holding his wife.
Somewhere in the years since, I'd started hearing everything that way. Even the tender things. Even the sacred ones.
I told myself the changes made it safe. In the song, it wasn't a mother who left.
It was a father who worked himself out the door slow instead of all at once, moving out in stages so nobody ever had to say the word divorce, and the color of the room wasn't stated outright, just implied in one image, blue light through a curtain, and the line about being easy to leave got reworked into something close but not identical, close enough to carry the same gut-punch, different enough that I could tell myself it wasn't a transcription.
I knew Larkin would recognize it anyway. Some part of me had known that from the first line I wrote.
That was the part I didn't look at directly.
If I looked at it directly I would have had to ask myself why I hadn't told her yet, why I kept finding reasons the timing wasn't right, why the file sat finished on my hard drive for two weeks getting shopped around to labels and artists before I said one word to my own wife about where it had come from.
The honest answer, if I'd let myself say it out loud, was that I already knew what she'd say.
I already knew the answer to the question I hadn't asked her yet was no, had always been no, would have been no from the very first draft if I'd bothered to ask before I started writing instead of after I'd already sold it.
I didn't ask. I kept working the bridge instead, smoothing an edge here, tightening a rhyme there, telling myself craft was the same thing as permission if you did it well enough.
Deb texted me that night. Vega's team wants a deal memo by Monday. This one's going to be enormous, T. Bigger than the first.
I read the message twice in the dark of the writing room, the guitar still warm against my leg, and somewhere under the part of me that lit up at bigger than the first, another part of me thought about Larkin sleeping on her side of the bed, near the edge, the way she'd been sleeping for longer than either of us had said out loud, and I put the phone face down on the desk without answering it.
I told myself I'd tell her soon. I'd been telling myself that for two weeks.
I thought about the night she'd told me the story, trying to remember it honestly instead of through the lens of everything I'd built out of it since.
She'd been sitting on the floor of our bedroom, back against the bed, knees pulled up to her chest, and I'd come in from the writing room to find her already crying, quietly, the kind of crying a person does when they've been holding something in for a long time and it finally overflows without warning.
I'd sat down next to her and asked what was wrong, and the whole story had come out of her slowly, in pieces, her father's failing business circling back around to old grief she thought she'd buried, the paint swatches, the pale blue walls, her mother's hand already on the doorknob.
I remembered holding her. I remembered meaning it, completely, the comfort I offered that night uncomplicated by anything except love.
I did not remember, until much later, the moment my attention had shifted, almost without my noticing, from being present with her pain to observing its shape, its cadence, the particular rhythm of the sentence her mother had used.
I couldn't locate the exact second the shift happened.
That was what disturbed me most when I finally let myself examine it honestly.
It hadn't felt like a decision. It had felt like breathing, automatic, the reflex of a mind that had spent two decades training itself to notice what could become a song.
I sat with that discomfort for a long moment in the dark of the writing room, and then, because sitting with discomfort had never once stopped me from finishing a song I'd already started, I went back to smoothing the bridge, telling myself I'd deal with the larger question later, once the deal was signed, once there was less at stake in admitting what I'd already done.