CHAPTER EIGHT
TOWNES
Istood in the hallway for a long time after her taillights disappeared down the street, long enough that the motion-sensor porch light clicked off and left me standing in the dark like an idiot, waiting for something that wasn't going to happen, which was Larkin's car turning around and coming back.
The house made a different kind of sound once she was gone. Not louder. Quieter, in a way that pressed against my ears.
I told myself this was like the other times.
We'd had bad fights before, not many, but enough that I knew how they usually went: something got said that couldn't be unsaid, she needed a night to cool off, she went to her sister's or I went to a hotel, and by the next evening one of us called the other and we found our way back to something workable.
I stood in the hallway and told myself this was that, just a bigger version of that, and I almost believed it long enough to go to bed.
Then I went back into the writing room to shut off the computer, and I saw her sewing box was gone from the shelf by the window.
The box of buttons and thread she used for mending, the one thing in the house that had never once shown up in a song of mine because I'd never once thought to ask her about it, because some private part of her had kept it separate from me on purpose, and she'd taken it with her.
That was when I understood this wasn't a night. She hadn't grabbed an overnight bag. She'd taken the one thing in our house that belonged entirely to her.
I called her twice. Both times it rang through to voicemail without her picking up, and I didn't leave a message either time, because I didn't have a first sentence that felt honest enough to say out loud into an empty phone line at midnight.
I sat down at the kitchen table where she used to do the books, years ago, and I thought about the argument in a way I hadn't let myself think about it while it was happening, when I was too busy trying to defend myself to actually hear what she was telling me.
You've spent years telling me you don't know how to say what you feel out loud, and I believed you.
She was right that I could say things to Rhett.
To the label. To a room full of strangers at a party who wanted to know what inspired the song.
I could stand up on a stage in front of thousands of people and sing about heartbreak with more clarity than I had ever once managed at our own kitchen table.
I sat there for a long time turning that over, trying to find the flaw in it, some argument that would let me feel less like the worst version of myself, and I couldn't find one. She'd named something true, and it had taken her leaving for me to actually hold still long enough to look at it.
I didn't sleep that night, not really, and somewhere around three in the morning I found myself picking up the guitar out of pure habit, the same reflex that had carried me through every hard night since I was a teenager, reaching for the instrument the way another man might reach for a drink.
I sat with it in my lap for a long time without playing anything, and eventually I understood that the reflex itself was part of what Larkin had been trying to show me.
Even now, even with her gone and the wreckage of what I'd done spread out plainly in front of me, my first instinct was still to turn the pain into something shaped, something with a melody, instead of simply sitting inside it and letting it be exactly as ugly and unresolved as it actually was.
I set the guitar down without playing a note, and that felt, strangely, like the first honest thing I'd done all night.
In the morning I called Deb before I called anybody else, because some things you have to do in order, and the professional damage was the part I could actually start fixing.
"I need to pull Blue Room," I said.
There was a pause on the line long enough that I could hear her setting her coffee down. "Pull it. Townes, we have a signed deal memo. Vega's team is already talking about it as her lead single."
"I need to pull it," I said again. "All the way. Not shelved, not reworked. Gone."
"Do you understand what that costs," she said, not unkindly, more like she was making sure I'd actually thought it through.
"You'll owe back the advance. You'll probably lose the option on the next two songs in that deal.
Vega's people are not going to be quiet about this, Townes, this isn't the kind of thing artists forget. "
"I understand," I said.
"Can I ask why?"
I stood in my kitchen with the morning light coming in over the counter where Larkin used to leave my dinner, and I thought about every way I could answer that question that wouldn't hand Deb something that belonged to Larkin and not to me.
"It's personal," I said. "It's not right to release it. That's all I can tell you."
Deb sighed, the particular sigh of someone who has seen artists make expensive emotional decisions before and knows better than to argue with the ones who mean it. "Okay," she said. "I'll make some calls. This is going to be a mess, Townes. I want you to know that going in."
"I know," I said.
It was a mess. Over the next two days I learned exactly how much of one.
Vega's manager called me directly, furious in a way that came through even over the phone's small speaker, telling me artists didn't build careers on songs that got yanked at the last minute over some vague personal reason nobody would explain, telling me I was burning a relationship that had taken years to build, telling me this would follow me.
The label's legal team sent an email outlining exactly what pulling the song after a signed deal memo would cost, in numbers that made my stomach turn even though I'd known roughly what to expect.
Deb told me, gently, that this was probably going to cost me the option Beau Whitaker's people had been talking about too, since word traveled fast in a town this size and nobody wanted to be next in line behind an artist who killed his own hit songs.
I did it anyway. I signed everything they put in front of me, agreed to repay the advance, agreed to a kill fee that ate most of what "The Light She Left On" had earned me so far, and I didn't argue about any of it, because arguing would have meant explaining, and explaining would have meant doing to Larkin exactly what I'd already done to her once.
When it was finally done, three days after she left, I drove to her sister's house because calling hadn't worked and texting felt like the coward's version of the same thing.
She came out onto the porch instead of letting me inside, arms crossed against the evening chill, and something in the set of her shoulders told me this conversation would happen on her terms or not at all.
"It's dead," I said. "Blue Room. I pulled it. All the way, not just delayed. It's not coming out, not with Vega, not with anyone, not ever."
I waited for something. I don't know what exactly. Relief, maybe. Some sign that this had mattered, that it had cost me the way it needed to cost me and she could see that and it meant something.
"Good," she said.
That was all. Good. She didn't come closer. She didn't say thank you, or I appreciate that, or anything that might have suggested a door opening even a crack.
"Lark . . ."
"I'm glad you did the right thing," she said.
"I want you to hear me say that. But you not selling my mother's last words to a record label isn't a grand gesture, Townes.
It's the floor. It's the absolute least a person owes somebody they love.
I'm not coming home because you finally cleared the lowest bar there is. "
"Then what do I do," I said, and I heard how raw it came out, how much closer to honest than I usually let myself get.
"I don't know yet," she said. "I need time. I need to figure out if I even know how to trust you with anything again, and that's not something you can fix by pulling one song, no matter how much it cost you."
She went back inside before I could say anything else, and I stood on her sister's porch in the dark for a minute before I made myself walk back to the truck, and the drive home felt longer than it had ever felt before, every mile of it quiet in a way that had nothing to do with the radio being off.