CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
LARKIN
Iread through the folder alone in Ruthie's guest room with the door shut, taking my time, because it deserved more than a quick skim.
Eleven songs. Some of them I recognized instantly, the grief song about my grandmother, so precisely rendered under its surface disguise that I couldn't believe I hadn't caught it years earlier, too close to it at the time, too trusting to think to look.
Others surprised me, small things I'd forgotten I'd even said, a joke about my own stubbornness turned into a hook that had apparently made somebody else a decent amount of money, a fragment about my childhood dog dying that had become, in someone else's mouth, a metaphor for a different kind of loss entirely.
It hurt more than I expected, reading the full accounting laid out plainly like that, seeing the actual size of what had been happening under the surface of my marriage for years without my knowledge.
It also mattered, in a way I hadn't anticipated, that he'd done the accounting himself, thoroughly, without waiting to see if I'd eventually catch something else on my own and confront him about it.
He'd gone looking for his own guilt instead of waiting to be caught in it again.
I made a pot of tea I didn't drink and read through the list a second time, slower, letting myself feel each entry instead of rushing toward the end.
There was a strange, almost clinical satisfaction in seeing years of low, invisible erosion finally rendered in plain black and white, dated, itemized, undeniable.
I had spent so long wondering if I was overreacting, if the pattern I sensed was really there or if I was simply too sensitive to my own privacy, too precious about details that any reasonable person might consider fair creative territory.
The list answered that question definitively.
Eleven times, at minimum, over six years.
Not a single lapse in judgment. A habit, sustained and largely unexamined, that had shaped the actual architecture of his career.
I thought about calling Ruthie in to read it with me and decided against it, wanting to sit with the full weight of it alone first, the way you sometimes need to hold a hard thing by yourself before you can bear to let anyone else see how heavy it actually was.
The proposal at the back of the folder was simple, almost plain to the point of being unremarkable, which was exactly what made it matter.
No flourish. No argument for why the arrangement was generous.
Just a clear statement of what he was offering to give up, control, and what he was asking for in exchange, permission, sought every single time, without exception.
I called him three days later, not to reconcile, just to talk through the folder directly, and we spent almost two hours on the phone going through it song by song.
Some of it I told him could stay as it was, changes so thorough or so old that I genuinely didn't mind the material existing in the world anymore, water long since gone under that particular bridge.
Others I told him I wanted pulled wherever it was still possible, and he didn't argue with a single one, not even the two that would cost him real money to unwind from existing licensing deals.
"This one," I said, about a song from three years back built partly around an argument we'd had over money in our early marriage, "I actually don't mind. It's changed enough, and honestly, I think it might help somebody else going through the same thing. Leave it."
"Are you sure," he asked. "You don't have to justify keeping any of them. If you want it gone, it's gone."
"I know," I said. "That's exactly why I feel comfortable saying leave it. Because you're actually asking this time instead of deciding for me."
We got to the grandmother song near the end, and I felt my throat tighten even talking about it after all this time. "That one I want pulled everywhere you still have rights to it," I said. "I don't care what it costs."
"Done," he said, no hesitation, and I heard him make a note of it right there on the call.
When we finished going through the list, there was a long silence on the line, neither of us quite ready to hang up.
"Thank you for doing this the right way," I said finally. "I know it wasn't easy, and I know it's costing you more than I probably even understand yet."
"It should have cost me from the start," he said. "I'm not looking for credit for finally doing what I should have been doing all along."
"I'm not giving you credit for it being enough," I said. "I'm giving you credit for doing it thoroughly, and for doing it without me having to ask twice. Those are different things, and I want you to understand I see the difference."
"I'll take that," he said, and something in his voice, tired and plain and unpolished, made me believe, for the first time in weeks, that whatever was happening between us might eventually turn into something real, even if I still had no idea what shape it would take or how long it would take to get there.
After we hung up, I sat at Ruthie's kitchen table for a long while, the folder still open in front of me, and I found myself thinking about the difference between the man who had written those eleven songs and the man who had just spent two hours on the phone asking me, plainly, what I wanted done with each one.
I wasn't ready to call them the same person yet, fused back into something whole and trustworthy.
But I could see, clearly, a man trying to become someone worth trusting again, and I understood that seeing an effort and believing in its permanence were two different things, and that I was only now, finally, allowing myself to hold both at once instead of forcing myself to decide everything in a single sitting.
I called Ines the next morning, mostly to talk through a scheduling question for Josie's next tour leg, and somewhere in the conversation she asked, gently, how things were going with Townes, the way people who cared about me had started asking more directly now that enough time had passed for the question to feel less raw.
"Better," I said, testing the word out loud before I fully committed to it. "Not fixed. But better."
"That's allowed to be the answer," Ines said. "Not everything has to resolve into a clean story."
I thought about that for the rest of the day, turning it over between fittings, and it struck me as one of the truer things anyone had said to me in months.
My whole marriage had been shaped, for years, by a man who needed everything to resolve into a clean story, verse and chorus and bridge, beginning and complication and resolution.
Maybe the real work now was learning to live inside something messier than that, something that didn't promise a tidy ending just because enough time had passed and enough effort had been made.