CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
TOWNES
Ididn't write anything for four days after that porch conversation, which hadn't happened to me since I was nineteen years old and too broke and too discouraged to pick up the guitar at all.
It wasn't writer's block, not exactly. It was something closer to distrust of my own instincts, a suspicion that every sentence I reached for, even in my own head, arrived pre-shaped into something performable, and I didn't know yet how to catch myself doing it before the shaping happened.
I sat with that discomfort instead of running from it, which felt like its own kind of progress even though nothing about it felt productive in the moment.
On the fifth day I sat down at my desk. I wasn't there to write a song.
I wanted to go through my catalog the way I hadn't let myself do in years, pulling up every file going back a decade, listening to pieces of Larkin in each one the way you'd notice a watermark once somebody pointed it out to you and you could never unsee it again.
It was worse than I expected. A song from four years back about a woman waiting up, built from a night Larkin had actually waited up for me after a bad gig, worried sick, and I'd turned her fear into a tender lyric about devotion without ever once telling her I'd used it.
A verse from a song two years old about grief, drawn from the year her grandmother died and Larkin had cried in my arms for a week straight, grief I'd folded into a bridge about loss in general terms specific enough that anyone who knew us both would recognize exactly whose grandmother it had been.
Smaller things too, a joke she'd made once about her own stubbornness that had become a hook in a song for another artist, a detail about her childhood dog that had shown up, transformed, in a song I'd sold for decent money three years ago without a second thought.
I hadn't remembered doing most of it consciously.
That was the part that scared me most, sitting there with headphones on, cataloging my own theft.
I hadn't set out, most of the time, to take something from her deliberately.
It had simply become how I processed everything, an automatic conversion of lived experience into material, so seamless I'd stopped noticing the seam.
I made a list. Every song, every album, every piece I could find where some real fragment of Larkin's life had gone into the work without her explicit knowledge or consent, going back as far as I could trace it.
By the time I finished, the list ran to eleven songs across three albums and countless smaller placements, more than I wanted to admit out loud to anyone, let alone to her.
I called my lawyer the next morning, not something I did often, and asked what it would actually mean, practically and financially, to give someone control over future licensing and use of material tied to their likeness or private experiences, even retroactively where possible on pieces I still held rights to.
He walked me through the mechanics, some of it more complicated than I expected, some contracts already too far gone to unwind without breaching agreements with labels and artists, others still within reach.
Going through the catalog had taken four full days in total, listening back through a decade of my own work with headphones on and a legal pad beside me, and somewhere around the third day I'd started noticing something I hadn't anticipated when I began.
It wasn't only Larkin's private life scattered through those songs.
It was the absence of my own. Every song I could find that drew from something real, something true, drew from her, her fears, her grief, her stubbornness, her small domestic rituals, and almost none of it drew from anything that had happened only to me.
I had spent a decade writing as though my own interior life wasn't interesting enough to build a song around, as though the only true material available to me was the woman I'd married, and somewhere in that understanding I found something uncomfortable about my own character that had nothing directly to do with the betrayal itself.
I had used her because some part of me had never quite believed my own experience was enough.
It was easier to reach for her pain, already sharpened by years of intimacy into something precise and usable, than to sit with my own uncertain feelings long enough to shape them into anything worth singing.
That was its own kind of cowardice, separate from the more obvious one Larkin had already named, and understanding it didn't excuse anything, but it did clarify what I actually needed to build differently going forward.
Not just a habit of asking permission. A habit of looking inward first, at my own life, before I ever looked at hers.
I called Rhett one evening in the middle of that week, restless with what I'd just understood, needing to say it out loud to somebody who wouldn't let me talk myself out of sitting with it.
"You're describing something a lot of guys in this business never figure out," Rhett said, after I'd explained it as best I could.
"Half the writers I know are running the same play you were running.
Find somebody close enough to bleed for you, write down what comes out, call it honesty.
Took you getting caught to see it. Some guys go their whole careers without ever getting caught, and they never see it either. "
"That's not exactly comforting," I said.
"It's not supposed to be comforting," Rhett said. "It's supposed to be true. You wanted true, right? That's the whole thing you're trying to relearn."
He was right, and I sat with the discomfort of it instead of arguing my way out of it.
I spent the better part of a week putting together something concrete.
Not a speech. Not a gesture designed to be witnessed or praised.
A practical document, plain language, listing every song I could identify with a piece of Larkin's life in it, along with an honest note about which ones I could still pull control over and which ones were already too entangled with other contracts to touch.
I attached a simple proposal. Going forward, before I ever wrote something drawn from our life together, I would ask her first, in words, out loud, and if she said no, that was the end of it, no negotiation, no persuasion, no explaining why the details were different enough to be safe.
I drove it to Ruthie's myself instead of emailing it, because some things needed to be handed over in person even when the handing over was awkward.
Larkin answered the door herself this time, and I held out the folder without a speech attached to it.
"I went through my whole catalog," I said.
"Every song with a piece of you in it that I could find.
It's all in there. What I can still pull control over, what I can't, and going forward, I want you to have the final say on anything I write that touches our life.
I don't think it fixes what happened. It's simply the right way to do this from here on, whether or not you ever come home. "
She took the folder and looked at it, and then looked at me, something careful and searching in her face.
"You did this yourself," she said. "I never asked."
"You shouldn't have to ask," I said. "That was always the problem. I made you the one who had to notice, had to object, had to protect yourself from me. That's backward. It should have been my job the whole time, and I let it be yours instead."
She didn't invite me in, and I didn't expect her to, and I drove home that evening without knowing whether the folder would change anything, only knowing that I'd finally done something that cost me real control instead of just money, and that the cost felt necessary in a way none of the earlier, showier gestures had.
That night I went back to the catalog list one more time, not to change anything about the proposal I'd already given Larkin, but to make myself a private, second list, one she would never see, of everything I owed myself the discipline to build differently going forward.