CHAPTER TWENTY
TOWNES
The awards ceremony fell on a Tuesday night in late autumn, a mid-tier industry event but a real one, the kind that mattered to people inside the business even if most of the country never watched the broadcast, and "The Light She Left On" was up for Song of the Year against four other tracks that had all had a real shot at the title.
I hadn't wanted to go. Deb had insisted, telling me that skipping it entirely would read as strange, maybe even as an admission of something worse than what had actually happened, and that showing up and behaving with some dignity would do more for the long, slow work of rebuilding my reputation than staying home ever could.
I went, in a suit that felt stiffer than it should have, and sat near the back of the room instead of at a table up front, and I watched the categories move past one by one, feeling less and less like the man who had wanted this exact moment more than almost anything a year earlier.
Marisol Vega was there, two tables over, up for a different award entirely, and our eyes met once across the room in a moment that felt heavier than it should have for two people who barely knew each other.
She hadn't spoken to me since the deal fell through, and I didn't blame her.
Whatever I owed Larkin, I also owed Marisol something I hadn't fully reckoned with yet, a lost opportunity handed to her and then yanked away for reasons I'd never been able to explain.
I made a note to reach out to her properly once the season settled, to offer what honest account I could without breaking the promise I'd made to keep Larkin's story out of anyone else's hands, even in apology.
Rhett found me before the ceremony started, resplendent in a jacket that probably cost more than my truck, and he squeezed my shoulder the way he always did, warm, easy, genuinely fond.
"However tonight goes," he said, "I want you to know I'm proud of the way you've handled the last few months.
Not everybody could take that kind of hit and come out the other side more solid instead of less. "
"I don't feel especially solid," I said.
"Solid doesn't mean feeling certain," Rhett said. "Solid means doing the right thing even while you're wobbling. I've watched you do that for months now."
I thought about his words while the earlier categories moved past, one after another, and by the time they finally called the title of my own song, I had almost forgotten to be nervous, caught up instead in watching other people's names get called, other people's careers taking their own small steps forward or backward in a room that had once felt like the entire point of my existence and now felt, strangely, like just one room among many I'd have to walk through on the way to becoming whoever I was actually trying to become.
They called the song's title, and then mine, and the room applauded, and I walked up to the stage with my heart going harder than it had any right to for an award this size, because I knew exactly what was waiting for me at the podium.
A microphone. An audience. A moment built for exactly the kind of speech I used to be so good at giving, the kind with a shape and a rhythm, the kind Larkin had told me to stop giving her on Ruthie's porch.
I stood at the podium and looked out at a room full of people I half-recognized, executives and artists and journalists, all of them waiting to hear the story behind the song, because that was what these moments were for, the mythology, the confession, the little piece of a songwriter's soul handed over for public consumption in exchange for a trophy and a moment of applause.
"Thank you," I said. "I'm grateful for this, and I'm grateful to Rhett Callahan for singing it the way it needed to be sung."
I paused, and I felt the room lean in slightly, waiting for the part where I told them what the song was really about, where it came from, whose pain had made it possible, the part every acceptance speech like this one was supposed to contain.
"I'm not going to tell you the story behind this song," I said instead.
"I know that's usually the moment. I know people want to hear where something like this comes from, and I understand why, because that's part of what makes a song feel true.
But this one came from somebody else's life as much as mine, somebody who never asked to have her private pain turned into art for other people to feel their own heartbreak through.
I owe her more respect than turning tonight into another chapter of that story.
So instead I'm just going to say thank you, and step down, and let the song speak for whatever it's going to speak for without me adding another layer on top of it. "
I stepped away from the podium into a silence that lasted a beat longer than applause usually took to start, and then the room did applaud, a little uncertain at first, then warmer, and I made my way back to my seat without stopping to talk to anyone, aware of Deb watching me from a nearby table with an expression I couldn't quite read.
Marisol found me at the bar during the reception afterward, before I had the chance to seek her out myself, and she studied me for a moment with an expression that wasn't quite forgiveness but wasn't hostility either.
"That was a strange thing to watch," she said. "Most men in this business would have used that moment for exactly the opposite reason. I've been trying to figure out for months whether I should be angrier at you than I am."
"You'd have every right to be," I said. "I never explained myself properly, and I know that cost you something real. I'm sorry for that, even though I still can't tell you the whole reason."
"I gathered as much," she said. "Watching that speech, I think I understand more than I did an hour ago, even without the details. Whoever she is, I hope she knows what she's worth to you."
I thanked her, and she moved on into the crowd, and I stood there for a moment feeling something settle in my chest that had been unsettled since the day I'd pulled her deal, a debt I hadn't been able to repay in full but had at least, finally, acknowledged out loud to the person it was owed to.
She found me afterward in the lobby. "That's not the speech I expected," she said.
"I know."
"For what it's worth, I think it played better than the usual version would have," she said. "People in this town are tired of the same confession every time. But I don't think that's why you did it."
"No," I said. "It's not."
She studied me for a second. "You've changed something in the last few months," she said. "I don't fully understand what, but I can see it. I hope it's worth whatever it's costing you."
I told her I hoped so too, and I meant it, and I drove home that night without stopping anywhere, past the billboard on the interstate still advertising the song months after it had gone number one, my own name in smaller print beneath Rhett's, and for the first time since the whole thing started, I looked at that billboard and felt something closer to grief than pride, grief for the year it had taken me to understand what the song had actually cost somebody else to make possible.
I texted Larkin that night, one line, no flourish. Didn't tell them the story. Wanted you to know.
She didn't respond right away, and I didn't expect her to, and I went to bed in an empty house that had started, slowly, to feel less like a place I was waiting in and more like a place I was actually learning how to live.