CHAPTER SIXTEEN
LARKIN
Ruthie showed me the article before I found it on my own, sliding her phone across the breakfast table with the headline already pulled up, watching my face while I read it.
I read it twice. The first time for the facts.
The second time for what was underneath them, the careful edges Townes had drawn around every answer, the way he'd protected something without ever naming what it was, the way he'd let a journalist walk away with less than she wanted instead of taking the easier path of giving her a version of the truth that would have looked good on him and cost me something in the process.
I don't think it's fair to her for me to keep letting the industry frame those songs as purely mine when they weren't.
I sat with that sentence for a long time.
"He's trying," Ruthie said carefully, watching me read it a third time. "I'm not telling you what to feel about it. I just want you to know I see it too."
"Trying isn't the same as done," I said, more to myself than to her.
"No," she said. "But it's not nothing either."
I didn't call him. I told myself I wasn't ready, and that was true, but underneath the not-ready there was something else, a stubbornness I didn't examine too closely, a reluctance to let one good interview undo months of carefully built distance.
He showed up at Ruthie's two days later anyway, standing on the porch with his hands in his pockets, looking like a man who'd rehearsed something on the drive over and lost most of it by the time he arrived.
"I read the article," I said, before he could start.
"I meant every word of it," he said. "I wanted you to know that before you heard it from anybody else."
"I believe you," I said, and I did, which surprised me a little, how easily the belief came now compared to how hard it would have been a month earlier.
He stood there for a second, and then he started talking, the way he always talked when he'd been carrying something too long, words spilling out in a rush that had clearly been building since he got in the truck.
"I've thought about nothing but this for weeks," he said.
"About what I took from you, about what it means to actually change instead of just apologize, about how I got here in the first place.
I keep coming back to the same thing. I loved you the whole time, Lark.
I want you to hear that clearly. Even when I was doing the worst version of this, I loved you the whole way through it.
I think that's what scares me most, that a person can love somebody completely and still manage to hollow out the trust between them without ever meaning to.
I think I convinced myself that if I loved you enough, the love would somehow cover for whatever I was taking, like the feeling underneath the songs excused the theft of the details on top.
I know now that's not how it works. I know love doesn't buy back what trust already lost. I've been sitting with that for weeks, turning it over, trying to understand the full measure of what I owe you, and I keep reaching the same conclusion, which is that I owe you more than words, more than a good interview, more than one grand gesture that ties everything up. "
"Stop," I said.
He stopped, startled.
"Stop writing at me," I said. "Do you hear yourself right now? That whole speech. It was beautiful, Townes. It really was. It had a shape to it, and a rhythm, and it built to something. You built me a bridge and a chorus standing on my sister's porch."
He looked stricken, the words draining out of his face as he understood what I meant.
"I didn't mean to . . ."
"I know you didn't mean to," I said, gentler now, because I could see how hard the understanding had hit him.
"That's exactly the problem. You don't even notice anymore when you're doing it.
You reach for beautiful language the way other people reach for a deep breath.
It's automatic. And I need you to understand that when you stand on a porch and give me a speech with a bridge in it, some part of me can't tell the difference anymore between you loving me and you performing loving me, because you've spent so many years being good at the second thing that it's swallowed the first one whole. "
He was quiet for a long moment, and I watched something break open in his face, not dramatically, just a slow crumbling of whatever certainty he'd walked up the porch steps with.
"I don't know how to talk to you without it turning into that," he said finally, and his voice had lost all its polish, all its rhythm, and for the first time in longer than I could remember, he sounded genuinely lost instead of eloquent.
"I've been a songwriter longer than I've been anything else.
It's not a switch I know how to turn off. "
"I'm not asking you to stop being a songwriter," I said.
"I'm asking you to learn there's a difference between the words that go in a song and the words that go to your wife.
Right now I don't think you can tell them apart.
And until you can, every time you open your mouth to tell me something important, some part of me is going to be listening for the craft instead of the truth. "
He nodded, slow, like the words cost him something to accept. "Okay," he said. Just that. No speech. No bridge.
It was the smallest thing he'd said to me in weeks, and it was the first thing that felt entirely his, unpolished, uncomfortable, real in a way none of the beautiful sentences before it had managed to be.
"I have to go back inside," I said. "I'm not angry. I just don't know what to do with what just happened, and I need to sit with it before I say anything else."
"Okay," he said again, and this time there was something almost like relief in it, like he understood, finally, that plain words were allowed to be enough.
I watched him walk back to his truck from the window after I went inside, slower than he'd walked up, and I sat down at Ruthie's kitchen table and put my head in my hands, not crying exactly, just sitting with the enormous, complicated weight of watching somebody start to actually change in real time, and not knowing yet whether it was enough, or whether it was too late, or whether those were even the right questions to be asking.