CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
LARKIN
Ikept living at Ruthie's for another three weeks after that conversation. Nothing had gone wrong. I had simply learned something about myself in the months since I left, which was that I needed to know I could stand on my own before I trusted myself to stand next to him again.
The business kept growing. Caroline Montgomery's project wrapped beautifully, her debut record dropping to real acclaim, and more than one profile of her mentioned the wardrobe, mentioned my name specifically, a small but real credit that had nothing to do with being anybody's wife.
Priya signed two more clients on the strength of it, and I finally hired a part-time assistant, a young woman named Ines who had a good eye and steadier hands than she gave herself credit for.
Townes and I talked most days, sometimes on the phone, sometimes over coffee at a place halfway between his house and Ruthie's, careful conversations that stayed plain and honest in a way our marriage hadn't managed in years.
He told me about a new project he was working on, songs for a young artist about things that had nothing to do with our life together, and he told me, more than once, how strange it felt to write without that particular well available to him, how much slower the work came, how much more he had to actually invent instead of excavate.
"Is it worse," I asked him once, genuinely curious. "The work, I mean. Without me in it."
"Different," he said, after thinking about it honestly instead of rushing to reassure me.
"Some of it's harder. I used to think the truest thing I could write was something that actually happened.
I'm learning there's a kind of truth in things that didn't happen too, if you build them carefully enough.
It's a different muscle. I'm not as good at it yet. I think I will be, eventually."
I liked that he didn't pretend the change had cost him nothing. I'd have trusted it less if he had.
We started, around that time, a small ritual neither of us named out loud but both of us kept faithfully, meeting for coffee every Wednesday morning at a place called the Grind House, halfway between his part of town and Ruthie's, a neutral space that belonged to neither of our old lives together.
We talked about ordinary things mostly, my business, his new project, a movie one of us had seen, and every so often the conversation would drift toward something harder, and we'd both let it, slowly, testing whether the ground would hold.
One Wednesday he told me about a session that had gone badly, an artist wanting him to punch up a bridge with something more personal, more raw, and how he'd sat there for two hours failing to produce anything that felt honest without reaching for material that wasn't his to use anymore.
"I used to be able to do that in twenty minutes," he said. "Find the raw thing and shape it. Now I sit there feeling like I'm working with one hand tied behind my back."
"Does that scare you," I asked. "Losing the speed."
"It used to," he said. "Now I think the speed was the problem.
I was never actually building anything difficult.
I was just reaching into the same well over and over and calling it craft because it came out sounding pretty.
The slow way is harder, but I think it might actually be the real thing.
I don't know yet. I'm still learning the difference. "
I appreciated that he didn't pretend to have already mastered whatever the new way required. There was something in his willingness to sit inside that uncertainty, visibly uncomfortable with it, that convinced me more than any of his earlier polish ever had.
One evening in early winter, he asked if I'd come by the house, not for a talk this time, just to see something, and when I got there he had his guitar out on the back porch, the same porch with the fence I'd wanted painted for two summers running, freshly done now, warm gray instead of the tired white it had been for years.
"I painted it," he said, a little sheepish. "I didn't think it would fix anything. I just kept thinking about how long you wanted it done and how long I let it sit."
"It looks good," I said, and meant it, and something in the plainness of the gesture, small and unglamorous and entirely unnecessary to any grand narrative, moved me more than the speech at the awards show had.
We sat on the porch steps together, not touching, careful with each other the way people are careful after something has broken and is still being repaired one small honest piece at a time.
"I'm not asking you to move back in tonight," he said. "I want to be clear about that. I know we're not there yet."
"I know," I said. "I appreciate you saying it out loud instead of making me guess."
"I've been thinking about what you said," he went on.
"About trust being built out of a hundred small moments instead of one big one.
I think I understand it differently now than I did the day you said it.
I used to think if I did one thing big enough, it would balance out everything I'd taken.
I don't think that anymore. I think I just have to keep doing the small honest things, for as long as it takes, and trust you'll notice them adding up or you won't, and either way it's the right way to live now, whether or not it wins anything back. "
"That's the most honest thing you've ever said to me," I told him. "And I mean that as the compliment it is."
We sat there a while longer, the evening cooling around us, and I found myself, for the first time in months, imagining a version of our life together that didn't feel like it was standing on a foundation I couldn't trust. Not yet home.
Not yet certain. But closer than I'd let myself believe was possible even a few weeks earlier.
"Can I ask you something," I said, after a while.
"Anything."
"When you're writing now, for other artists, other stories," I said. "Does it feel like enough? I know you said the well runs different. I want to know if it actually satisfies you, or if some part of you resents me for closing off the thing that used to come easiest."
He thought about the question longer than I expected, which I appreciated, because it meant he was actually considering it instead of reaching for the answer that would reassure me fastest.
"Some days it's harder," he admitted. "There are nights I sit at that desk and nothing comes, and some small, ugly part of me thinks about how easy it used to be when I could just reach for something true about us and shape it into whatever I needed.
I won't pretend that part of me is gone.
But I don't resent you for it, Lark. I resent the version of myself who needed you to be raw material in the first place.
That resentment belongs pointed at me, not at you, and I'm trying to keep it aimed the right direction. "
"That's a fair answer," I said. "I wasn't sure you'd give me the honest one."
"I'm trying to only give you the honest ones now," he said. "Even the ones that don't make me look good."
I stood to leave a little while later, and at the bottom of the porch steps I turned back to look at him, still sitting there in the porch light, and something in the plainness of the whole evening, no grand declarations, no bridge, no resolution, felt more hopeful than anything he'd said to me since the night I first found "Blue Room" playing on his computer.