CHAPTER SEVEN
LARKIN
"Larkin," he said again, like my name was the only word he had.
"Who did you sell this to?" I asked a second time, because he hadn't answered, and I needed the answer more than I needed anything else in that moment, more than I needed him to apologize, more than I needed him to explain.
"Marisol Vega," he said. "Her team picked it up last week."
"Last week."
"I was going to tell you."
"When?" I said. "Before or after it came out on the radio and I found out about it the same way I found out about the last one? Standing in a grocery store?"
He came further into the room, hands out a little, the way you'd approach something that might bolt.
"It's not the same as the last one. I changed the details.
The father instead of the mother. The way he left.
Nobody's going to hear that and think of your mom, Lark. Nobody's going to think of you at all."
"I know," I said.
"Then . . ."
"I don't care whether strangers know," I said, and my voice cracked on the word strangers, and I hated it, hated that my body was giving away how close I was to breaking apart when I needed to be clear right now more than I needed anything else.
"I don't care if not one single person on this earth ever connects that song to me.
That was never the thing I was afraid of. "
"Then what . . ."
"You took it," I said. "You took the one thing I have never told another person in my entire life, the thing I told you in the dark four years ago because I trusted you with it more than I trusted anyone, and you turned it into a product and sold it to a record label before you ever said one word to me about it. "
He was quiet for a second, and I watched him try to find his way to an answer, the way he always did, reaching for words the way another man might reach for a weapon or a shield, except his words had always been the thing that made me love him in the first place, and now they were the thing standing between us.
"I changed it," he said finally, quieter. "It's not her story on the page anymore. It's a story."
"You changed who said it," I said. "You didn't change what happened."
He flinched like I'd hit him.
"Nobody could possibly trace it back to you," he said. "That's the whole point of changing the details. Nobody will ever know it's yours."
"I'll know," I said.
The room went silent except for the last fading notes of the demo, still looping quietly on the speaker, that same bridge line about being easy to leave playing under everything we were saying to each other, and I reached over and turned it off myself, my hand steadier than the rest of me.
"You don't get it," I said. "This was never about getting caught.
This is about you deciding, over and over, that anything that happens between us belongs to you to use.
My grief. My mother. The worst night of my life.
You didn't ask me if you could have it. You just took it, the same way you took the lamp and the fight and everything else, because somewhere along the way you stopped seeing the difference between your wife and your material. "
"That's not fair."
"It's exactly fair," I said. "You've spent years telling me you don't know how to say what you feel out loud, and I believed you, I gave you years of grace for that, because I thought it meant you were trying and failing.
But you don't struggle to say things, Townes.
You struggle to say them to me. You have no trouble at all saying them to Rhett Callahan or Marisol Vega or a stadium full of strangers.
You just won't say them to your own wife's face. "
He sat down heavily in the chair by the window, the one Deb had sat in a week earlier listening to the same song with her eyes closed, and he put his head in his hands for a moment before looking back up at me.
"I don't know what you want me to say," he said. "I can't undo writing it. I can't undo selling it. All I can do is fix what's still fixable."
"I want you to understand what you did," I said.
"Not apologize for the parts that are convenient to apologize for.
Understand the full scope of it. You didn't just write a song about a hard childhood, Townes.
You took the exact sentence my mother said to me, the one I have never once repeated to another living person, not my sister, not a therapist, not anyone, and you handed it to a stranger to sing on a record that would be heard by more people than I will ever meet in my whole life.
Do you understand what it feels like to hear your own mother's voice coming out of a woman who doesn't know she exists? "
"I didn't think of it as her voice," he said. "I thought of it as a feeling. A universal one."
"That's exactly the problem," I said, and I felt my voice rising in a way I usually worked hard to keep level, and I let it rise this time, because level had gotten me nowhere for months.
"You didn't think of it as her voice because somewhere along the way you stopped being able to tell the difference between a person and a feeling you could extract from them.
That's not a songwriter's gift, Townes. That's just taking. "
He flinched at the word, visibly, like it had struck something specific.
"I have spent six years watching you turn everything into material," I said, and now that the door was open I couldn't stop the rest of it from coming through.
"The fight we had about money the first year we were married, gone, turned into a bridge on somebody's album two years later.
My grandmother's funeral, gone, turned into a verse about loss so specific I could hear the exact cadence of how I'd described her hands to you.
I used to think it was flattering, the first few times.
I used to think, he loves me so much he can't help but write about me.
It took me years to understand that a man who truly can't help himself doesn't ask permission after the fact either.
He just keeps taking, quietly, telling himself each individual theft is small enough not to count. "
"I never meant for it to feel like theft."
"Intent doesn't change what it is," I said.
"You can genuinely believe you're doing something loving and still be doing something wrong.
Those two things aren't opposites, Townes.
I think that's the part you've never once let yourself sit with.
You get to feel good about your intentions while I get to carry what actually happened. "
He was quiet for a long moment, and something in his face had gone past defensive into something rawer, something closer to actually hearing me, and for one dangerous second I almost softened, almost reached for him the way six years of habit told me to reach for him when he looked like that, and I made myself hold still instead.
"What do you need from me," he said finally, quiet.
"Right now," I said, "I need you to understand that this isn't a conversation we can finish tonight.
I need you to understand that pulling the song, if you even do that, isn't the end of a discussion, it's the very beginning of one.
And I need space to figure out whether I can ever trust you with anything about my own life again, because right now I genuinely don't know the answer. "
He didn't have an answer for that. I watched him not have an answer for it, watched the words fail him for once in his life, and it should have felt like a victory and it didn't feel like anything except exhausted and sad.
"I'm going to stay at my sister's for a while," I said.
"Larkin . . ."
"Did you ever plan to tell me?" I asked. "Before it came out. Before I heard it on the radio the way I heard the last one. Was there ever a version of this where you told me first?"
He opened his mouth, and I watched him consider lying, and then I watched him decide not to, which was somehow worse, because the truth was so plain on his face I didn't need him to say it.
"I don't know," he said. "I kept meaning to. There was never a good time."
"There's never a good time to tell somebody you sold their worst memory to a record label," I said. "That's not a scheduling problem, Townes. That's a conscience problem."
I went upstairs and packed a bag while he stood at the bottom of the stairs, not following me up, not calling out to stop me, and I didn't know if that was because he understood he had no right to or because some part of him was letting me go the way you let something go when you already know you can't hold onto it.
I put in enough clothes for a week, my laptop, the box of vintage buttons and thread I kept for the mending work I did on the side, the only part of my life that had never once ended up in one of his songs.
He was standing in the hallway when I came back down, and for one second I thought he was going to say something that might have actually changed something, and instead he said, "It's not released yet. I can still pull it."
"That's not the point," I said, and I meant it, even though some small stubborn part of me noted that he'd said it at all, that whatever else was true about him, some instinct in him had reached, finally, for the right first move even if it was three years too late in every other respect.
I walked past him to the front door with my bag over my shoulder, and he didn't try to stop me, and I got in my car and drove to my sister's house with the radio off the entire way, because I couldn't risk hearing either one of his songs again that night and I didn't trust myself to know in advance which one would break me.