CHAPTER SIX
LARKIN
Iwent into the writing room on a Saturday afternoon looking for the stapler, which was a small and stupid reason to walk into the one room in our house that had quietly become off-limits without either of us ever saying so out loud.
Townes was out, gone to meet Beau Whitaker about the new project, and the house had that particular kind of quiet that made me feel like a guest in it.
I opened the desk drawer where the stapler usually lived and didn't find it, and I was about to give up and go find tape instead when the computer, still logged in and half asleep, woke up under my hand and a file started playing through the little speaker on the desk.
He must have left something queued to preview. I almost closed it without listening, out of the same instinct that had kept me out of his songs for months, the instinct that said whatever was in there wasn't mine to hear yet and hearing it would only make me feel worse.
Then I heard the phrase blue room, and something in my chest went very still.
I sat down in his chair. I don't remember deciding to sit. My legs did it for me.
The song was slower than "The Light She Left On," quieter, built around a single guitar line that repeated and repeated the way a memory repeats when you can't put it down.
A woman's voice, not one I recognized yet, sang about a room with pale light coming through the curtains, and a father who left in pieces instead of all at once, and I told myself for one full verse that it wasn't what I thought it was, that fathers leaving was a common enough thing to write about, that I was seeing my own life in something that had nothing to do with me.
Then the bridge came.
Some people, the voice sang, are easier to leave than others.
It wasn't word for word. It never was, with him.
But it was close enough that I heard my mother's voice underneath the melody as clearly as if she were standing in the room, seventeen years old me sitting on the edge of my bed with pale blue walls around me, and my mother's hand on the doorknob already, saying the sentence I had never told another living soul except the man who had just turned it into a song and sold it to a stranger.
I don't know how long I sat there after it ended. Long enough that the light through the window had moved. Long enough that my hands had stopped shaking and started again, differently, colder.
The file looped back to the beginning on its own, the way playback does when nobody tells it to stop, and I sat through the whole thing a second time, unable to reach out and end it, the way you can't look away from the moment right after an accident even though every part of you wants to.
The second listen was worse than the first. The first time I'd been searching for confirmation, still half hoping I'd misheard, still holding onto the possibility that grief simply sounds the same in every family and I was projecting my own onto a stranger's careful fiction.
The second time I wasn't searching anymore.
I was cataloging. The pale light through the curtain that matched, almost exactly, the hour of evening my mother had chosen to tell me, because she'd waited, I understood only years later, until the light was soft enough that she wouldn't have to watch my face too clearly while she said it.
The image of a door left open a crack, the sound of somebody's steps not quite decided whether to come back in.
Small things. Devastating in their smallness, because they told me he hadn't just remembered the broad outline of what I'd told him.
He had listened closely enough, that night four years ago, to catalog the details too, tucking them away with the same attention he gave to every lyric he ever wrote, and I had mistaken that attention, at the time, for love.
I thought about the night I told him. I had been so tired that year, tired in a way that went past sleep, my father's business circling a drain none of us could see the bottom of, old grief cracking open under the pressure the way old grief does, patient, waiting for exactly the wrong moment to resurface.
I had cried into Townes's shoulder for what felt like an hour, and somewhere in the middle of it the whole story had come out of me, the paint swatches, the bedroom door, the sentence, all of it, spoken out loud for the first time since I was seventeen years old.
He had held me and rocked me a little, the way you rock someone smaller than yourself, and he had said, I've got you, and I remember believing, with my whole chest, that I had finally handed the heaviest thing I owned to somebody strong enough to carry it alongside me instead of for me.
I understood now, sitting in his chair with the demo looping for a third time, that he had been carrying it in a different sense the whole time.
Not the way a partner carries grief, shouldering half its weight in silence.
The way a craftsman carries raw material back to his workshop, turning it over in his hands, looking for the angle that would let him cut it into something useful.
I finally reached out and stopped the playback myself, my hand steadier than I expected, and I sat there in the quiet that followed, listening to the house settle around me, the refrigerator humming in the kitchen, a car passing on the street outside, ordinary sounds continuing exactly as they always had while something inside me had just come apart at a seam I hadn't known was still holding.
I thought about leaving before he got home.
I thought about pretending I hadn't heard it, giving myself another day, another week, to decide what to do with what I now knew.
I rejected both thoughts almost as quickly as they arrived.
I had spent years giving Townes the benefit of a doubt he hadn't earned, telling myself his distraction was just the cost of a demanding career, telling myself his silences were just how a man loved deeply while expressing it clumsily.
I was done extending that particular grace on credit.
Whatever came next, it was going to happen today, in the light, with both of us looking directly at it instead of around it.
I heard the truck in the driveway before I heard him come in the front door, and I didn't move from the chair, didn't turn off the file, didn't do anything except sit there with my hands folded in my lap and wait.
Townes came down the hallway calling my name, the way he did when he got home and the house felt too quiet, and he stopped in the doorway of the writing room when he saw me sitting at his desk.
"Hey," he said. "What are you doing in here?"
"Looking for the stapler," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt. "I found something else instead."
I watched it hit him. I watched his eyes go to the waveform still sitting open on the screen behind me, silent now, and I watched his face go through something complicated, guilt and fear and a flash of something that looked almost like relief, like part of him had been waiting for this exact moment without knowing it.
"Larkin," he said.
"Who did you sell this to?" I asked.