CHAPTER TEN
TOWNES
Rhett found out before I told him, which I should have expected, because nothing stayed quiet in this town for long and a kill fee on a deal memo that size generated exactly the kind of gossip that traveled through every writers' room in Nashville within a week.
He showed up at my place on a Wednesday evening without calling first, which he never did, and I let him in and we sat on the back porch with two beers neither of us drank much of.
Savannah had come with him, waiting in the truck at first, and after a few minutes she came around back too, hugging her arms against the evening chill, and I could tell from the careful way she settled into the third chair that Rhett had told her something on the drive over, enough for her to understand this wasn't going to be an easy conversation.
"I'll let you two talk," she said, though she made no move to leave.
"You can stay," I said. "I think Larkin would probably want you to hear this too, honestly, given everything."
She looked surprised at that, but she stayed, and something in her staying made the conversation feel less like a confession and more like the beginning of the kind of honesty I was going to owe more people than just my wife before this was over.
"Deb told me you pulled the Vega song," Rhett said. "Whole thing. Not delayed. Dead."
"Yeah."
"You want to tell me why, or should I guess?"
I looked out at the yard, at the fence Larkin had wanted painted for two summers running, at the garden bed she'd started and mostly abandoned once the songwriting took over most of my time and most of the household's attention along with it.
"It came from something private," I said. "Something that belonged to Larkin, not to me. I should have asked her before I wrote it. I didn't. By the time I told her, I'd already sold it."
Rhett didn't say anything right away. He turned the beer bottle slowly in his hands, and I watched something shift behind his eyes, some recalibration.
"The Light She Left On," he said. "Is that one hers too?"
I didn't answer right away, and my silence was the answer, and I watched him understand what I had understood the day Larkin first confronted me, a delayed recognition of something he'd been part of without knowing it.
"I sang that song a hundred times," he said.
"I told interviewers it was the most honest thing I'd ever recorded.
I meant that. I still mean it, about the song itself.
But I didn't know I was singing about your actual marriage, Townes.
I didn't know there was a real woman sitting somewhere hearing strangers praise a song about her worst night without knowing it was hers. "
"I know," I said. "I'm not telling you this to make you feel responsible. You didn't do anything wrong. You recorded a song I gave you and told you was fiction enough to sing."
"Doesn't feel great, knowing that," he said. "Feeling like I was part of something that hurt somebody, even secondhand."
"I'm not asking you to fix it," I said. "I don't think there's a version of this where I get to feel better about what I did. I just wanted you to hear it from me instead of secondhand from Deb or somebody at the label."
Rhett was quiet for a while, and I appreciated that he didn't try to talk me into feeling better about it, didn't offer the kind of reassurance a good friend sometimes offers that ends up being more about making the friend comfortable than about actually helping.
Savannah spoke up for the first time since sitting down.
"I met her once at a party months ago," she said.
"Larkin. She asked me something that night, about whether it ever felt strange watching Rhett sing something so personal that wasn't actually his.
I didn't understand the question at the time. I think I understand it now."
"I'm sorry you got pulled into that too," I said. "It wasn't fair to put you in the position of wondering, even for a minute."
"It's not about me," Savannah said, not unkindly. "I just want you to understand that she was already carrying this alone at that party, months before any of this came out into the open. That's a long time for somebody to carry something like that by herself."
I hadn't known that, and hearing it hit harder than almost anything else said that evening, a small, specific proof of exactly how long Larkin had been managing the weight of what I'd done before I ever gave her the chance to set any of it down.
"Where's Larkin now," Rhett asked finally.
"Her sister's."
"She coming back?"
"I don't know," I said, and saying it out loud made it more real than it had felt even in my own head.
"I don't think pulling the song is enough.
I don't think anything I do quickly is going to be enough.
I think I have to actually become a different kind of husband, and I don't fully know how to do that yet. "
"You know how to write about it," Rhett said, not unkindly, more like he was pointing at something. "Maybe that's not the same as knowing how to be it."
The words sat there between us, plain and true, and I thought about Larkin saying almost the same thing in different language, standing in the writing room with the demo still playing behind her. Two people who loved me, in different ways, both reaching the same conclusion independently.
"Whitaker's people called this afternoon," I said, changing the subject because I didn't have anything else to say to Rhett's observation that wouldn't just be more talk, more words, the exact currency Larkin had accused me of hiding behind.
"They're pulling back from the project. Word travels fast."
"That's a real loss, Townes."
"I know."
"You still going to be all right? Financially, I mean."
"I'll be fine," I said, which was true in the narrow sense he meant it, even though nothing about the last week had felt fine in any other sense.
The kill fee had cost me most of what "The Light She Left On" had earned so far, and losing Whitaker's project on top of it put a real dent in what I'd been counting on for the year, but I had enough saved from years of consistent session work to weather it without panic.
It was the kind of cost that stung without threatening the ground under my feet, which felt, in some strange way, like exactly the size of consequence the situation called for.
Not ruin. Just a real price, paid in full, without complaint.
Rhett finished his beer and stood up to leave, and at the door he turned back with the look of a man deciding whether to say one more thing.
"For what it's worth," he said, "the reason that song hit as hard as it did wasn't the craft, even though the craft's real. It hit because it was true. You just forgot the truth belonged to somebody besides you."
He left, and I sat on the porch by myself until it got too dark to see the fence Larkin had wanted painted, and I thought about the difference between a man who could write the truth beautifully and a man who could actually live inside it honestly, and I understood, maybe for the first time all the way through, that I had spent years being very good at the first thing and had let that convince me I was also good at the second, when the truth was I hadn't even been trying.
I went inside and sat down at the kitchen table with a legal pad, out of habit more than intention, and I found myself writing not a song but something closer to an accounting, a list of every excuse I had ever given myself for using something of Larkin's without asking.
It's not literal. Nobody will know. I changed the details.
It's universal. The list ran longer than I expected, each excuse a variation on the same underlying belief, that craft could substitute for consent if the craft was good enough.
I stared at that list for a long time before I understood what actually disturbed me about it.
Every single excuse on the page was true, in a narrow sense.
I had changed the details. Nobody outside our marriage would ever trace the songs back to her specifically.
The feelings were universal enough that millions of strangers had found themselves in them.
None of that had ever been the question.
The question, the one I had never once let myself ask honestly until Larkin forced it into the open, was whether being technically undetectable made something permissible, and I understood now, sitting alone at that table, that it never had.
I tore the page off the legal pad and folded it into my wallet instead of throwing it away, a strange, private ritual I couldn't fully explain even to myself, except that I wanted the accounting to stay somewhere close, a physical reminder I could reach for the next time craft tempted me toward believing it was the same thing as permission.