CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
LARKIN
Imoved back in on a Saturday in late winter, six months almost to the day after I'd packed a bag and driven to Ruthie's with my sewing box on the passenger seat and my mother's last words ringing in my ears from a song I'd never asked to hear.
We didn't make it a ceremony. There was no grand welcome-home dinner, no speech, no gesture designed to mark the occasion as anything other than what it was, which was a woman bringing her things back into a house she'd chosen to trust again, carefully, with her eyes open.
Townes helped me carry boxes in from the car, and when we got to the sewing box, the same one that had never once ended up as material in any of his songs, he held it for a second before setting it down on the kitchen counter, in the spot where it had never actually lived before, always tucked away somewhere out of sight in our old life.
"I thought maybe it could live here now," he said. "Where you can see it. Where it's not something you have to hide away."
I didn't say anything for a moment, just looked at the box sitting there on the counter in plain view, the one thing that had always been entirely mine, and something settled in my chest at the sight of it claiming space in our shared kitchen instead of staying tucked in a closet the way it always had.
"I like that," I said.
We built new rules into our marriage over the months that followed, rules that had never existed in the years before, because we'd never needed them, because I'd never imagined I'd need to ask my husband to ask permission before turning our life into something for public consumption.
He kept his word about the songwriting. Every so often, over dinner or in the car or on a slow Sunday morning, he'd mention that something from our life had occurred to him as a possible song, and every single time he asked, plainly, whether I minded, and more than once I told him no, actually, that one's fine, go ahead, because I'd learned that the asking itself had become the thing that mattered, more than any particular answer.
My business kept growing steadily through that year.
I took on a real studio space of my own by summer, something separate from the shop, something with my name on the lease instead of Denise's, and Ines became a full partner in the work rather than an assistant, and between the two of us we built something solid enough that people started calling us by name instead of asking whether I was Townes Barrett's wife first.
Townes still wrote, more than ever, actually, once he found his footing in the different muscle he'd talked about, the kind of writing that built truth out of careful invention instead of excavation.
Some of it was good. Some of it, he told me honestly, felt thinner than the work that had come from mining our life together, and he said it without complaint, like a man who had simply decided the trade was worth making and didn't need to be praised for making it.
Rhett and Savannah had us over for dinner one evening in early fall, and somewhere over dessert Savannah caught my eye across the table with a small, knowing smile, the same look she'd given me at that first party, months and months earlier, before either of us had said the real thing out loud to each other.
"You look different," she said. "Lighter."
"I feel different," I said, and it was true.
Caroline joined us for coffee after dessert, Hayes having stayed home with a cold. Near the kitchen, she told me her label had finally put a serious tour offer in front of her, the biggest opportunity of her career so far.
"That's wonderful," I said.
"It is," she said, but her smile faded almost as soon as it appeared. "The dates overlap with Hayes's tour. Almost exactly."
I waited.
"I haven't told him yet," she admitted. "He keeps talking about this summer like my being there is already decided. And maybe it is. I've always been the one who moved things around."
"What do you want?" I asked.
Caroline looked toward the dining room where Savannah and Rhett were laughing over something, then back at me.
"I think I need to figure that out before I tell him.
" She squeezed my hand and went to refill her coffee, leaving the question where it belonged, with her.
I did not follow her or offer an answer.
Some decisions had to become a person's own before anybody else could understand what they would cost.
On a Thursday evening near the end of that first full year back together, I found Townes in the writing room with his guitar, the door open the way it always stayed open now, an unspoken agreement neither of us had needed to negotiate out loud.
He was working through something quiet, unfamiliar, not a melody I recognized, and I stood in the doorway for a moment before he noticed me there.
"New song?" I asked.
"For somebody else's record," he said. "Not us. Nothing about us in it, I promise."
"I believe you," I said, and I did, easily, the way I hadn't been able to for a long time.
He set the guitar down against the wall instead of continuing to play, and he came over and pulled me into a hug, simple and unhurried, no performance in it anywhere, and I felt his heartbeat against my ear, ordinary and entirely his own.
"I love you," he said, plain, no metaphor attached to it, no bridge building toward anything bigger.
"I love you too," I said.
We stood there for a long moment in the doorway of the room that had once been the site of the worst betrayal of our marriage and had slowly, carefully, become something else instead, an ordinary room in an ordinary house where a man wrote songs for other people's lives and kept the truest parts of his own life exactly where they belonged, between the two of us, unwritten, unsold, entirely ours.
Later that night, we sat together on the back porch he'd painted the color I'd always wanted, and neither of us reached for anything more than the quiet, and it occurred to me, watching the last light go down over the yard, that this was what he'd finally learned to give me.
Not a song. Not a speech. Just this, an evening, unremarkable and entirely real, the two of us together, saying nothing in particular, because for the first time in longer than I could remember, nothing needed saying to be believed.
THE END