CHAPTER FOURTEEN
LARKIN
Josie Calhoun's tour opened in Knoxville, and Denise talked me into driving the three hours to see the first show, mostly because Josie herself had asked for me specifically, wanting me backstage in case anything needed a last-minute fix.
Nothing needed fixing, as it turned out.
The denim jacket held through two encores and a costume change that had Josie diving behind a curtain and back out in under ninety seconds, and I stood in the wings watching people scream the words to songs I'd never heard before that week, watching Josie move in clothes I'd built with my own hands, feeling something I hadn't expected to feel this soon after everything with Townes.
Pride. Clean, uncomplicated pride, with nothing underneath it waiting to curdle.
I noticed something else too, standing in those wings, that I hadn't expected.
Josie's songs were personal, some of them clearly drawn from real heartbreak, real friendships gone wrong, a real falling out with a sister that she introduced from the stage with tears in her eyes before singing about it.
The crowd ate it up the same way crowds had eaten up "The Light She Left On," hungry for the specificity of somebody else's real pain rendered into something they could sing along to.
The difference struck me clean through, standing there watching.
Josie had written this herself, about her own life, her own choices to expose.
Nobody had reached into her private history and extracted something without asking.
Whatever this song cost her, she had chosen the cost herself, stood on a stage and paid it willingly, in front of thousands of people, because it was hers to spend.
That was the whole distinction I'd been trying to explain to Townes for months, laid out plainly in front of me by two women who had never met each other.
A story a person chooses to tell about herself is a gift.
A story taken from her without asking is something else entirely, no matter how beautifully it's told.
Josie found me after the show, sweaty and glowing, and hugged me hard enough to lift me off my feet a little. "The jacket," she said. "Did you see them? People were losing it over the jacket."
"I saw," I said, and I let myself smile all the way, without checking first whether it was safe to.
Her manager, a woman named Priya who ran three other developing acts out of the same small office, cornered me near the merch table before I left.
"Josie won't stop talking about your work," Priya said.
"I've got two other artists who need exactly this kind of eye.
Real pieces, not costume-shop stuff. Would you be interested in taking on more of this, formally?
I could put some real money behind it if you wanted to build it into an actual business instead of a side project. "
I told her I'd think about it, which was true, and I drove back to Ruthie's that night turning the offer over in my mind, feeling the outline of a life I hadn't let myself imagine in longer than I wanted to admit. A life that had a center of its own instead of orbiting somebody else's.
Somewhere on that drive, a man at a gas station recognized my last name off my card when I paid for gas, and asked, in the friendly, thoughtless way strangers sometimes did, if I was any relation to the Townes Barrett, and when I said I was his wife, his whole face lit up like I'd handed him something valuable.
"That man can write," he said. "That song about the lamp, man. Broke my heart clean in half. You must be so proud of him."
I said something polite and got back in my car, and I sat in the parking lot for a minute afterward, feeling the old, familiar tug of being defined by proximity to Townes even here, three hours from home, at a gas station where nobody knew a single true thing about my actual life except the surname on a credit card.
That was the moment I understood, clearly, why the work with Josie mattered as much as it did.
It wasn't just satisfying, or good money, or a way to fill the hours.
It was the first thing in years that people knew about me without knowing about him first. Josie hadn't hired Townes Barrett's wife.
She'd hired the woman who could take a torn denim jacket and make it hold through two encores.
I called Priya back two days later and told her yes, I wanted to take it on formally, and we spent an hour on the phone talking through what that could look like, a small studio space, maybe eventually an assistant, a real rate structure instead of favors and flat fees.
It wasn't going to make me famous. I didn't want it to.
I wanted it to make me solid, the way Townes's career had once made him solid, except this time the solidity would be entirely mine, built by my own hands, owed to nobody.
I told Ruthie about it that night over dinner, and she raised her glass of iced tea in a small toast.
"To your own thing," she said.
"To my own thing," I said back, and it felt like the truest sentence I'd said out loud in months.
I spent the next several weeks building the actual structure of it, the unglamorous work nobody sees behind a business that looks, from the outside, like it simply appeared out of talent alone.
I researched rates other stylists in town charged and priced my own work fairly instead of underselling it out of habit, the same habit that had let me spend six years underselling my own presence in my marriage.
I opened a business account separate from anything Townes and I shared, a small, private act that felt disproportionately significant the first time I deposited a check into it.
I bought a proper steamer, a dress form, good scissors that held an edge instead of the household ones I'd been making do with, small investments that added up to something that looked, increasingly, like a real business instead of a favor I did for people I happened to know.
Priya introduced me to two more artists that month, both smaller acts still finding their footing, both grateful for the kind of attention I could give a project that a bigger stylist working six clients at once simply couldn't match.
I turned one of them down, gently, because the timeline didn't work with the volume of alterations Josie's tour still needed from me, and something in that refusal, the simple fact that I now had enough work to be selective about, sat in my chest like a small, private victory nobody else would ever fully understand the size of.
Ruthie watched all of it unfold with the quiet pride of an older sister who had spent years worrying about me without saying so directly, and one night, over the dinner where we toasted my own thing, she told me something I hadn't expected.
"I used to lie awake sometimes," she said, "wondering if you'd ever get back something that was just yours. You gave so much of yourself to that marriage, Lark, for so long, that I started to worry you'd forgotten what it felt like to want something purely for you. I'm glad I was wrong to worry."
"You weren't wrong," I said. "I had forgotten. I'm only just remembering now."