Chapter 2
Savannah
Backstage at an award show this size was its own country, with its own citizens and its own laws, and I had spent enough years inside its borders to know how to move through it without drawing attention to myself.
Security walked me to a roped section near the wings where the spouses and the girlfriends and the occasional publicist waited on folding chairs that someone had draped in gold fabric to make them look less like folding chairs.
Lila Whitaker had already saved me a seat.
"You made it," she said, hugging me like we hadn't just talked two days ago on the phone about nothing in particular. "Caroline's around here somewhere hunting down coffee that isn't terrible. This whole building runs on instant sludge they call espresso."
"I'll take my chances," I said, sitting down beside her, grateful for the noise and warmth of her, the easy way she made room for me without making a production of it.
Beau and Hayes were two of the biggest names on the bill besides Rhett, and their wives walked these halls with an ease I had never managed, greeting security by name, waving at other artists like old friends, because nobody backstage had ever once mistaken either of them for staff.
Caroline found us a few minutes later with three cups of coffee balanced against her chest and passed them around without asking who wanted what, because she already knew.
"Rhett's opening with the ballad," I told them, settling into the chair Lila had saved. "He decided this morning."
"Good," Hayes said, appearing behind Caroline with his tie already loosened even though the show hadn't started. "That song's better than the single and everybody in this building knows it, they're just afraid to say so out loud in a meeting."
"He's terrified," I said. "Won't admit it, but he changed the set order three times this week."
"He should be terrified," Beau said, sitting down heavy in the chair beside his wife. "It's the biggest crowd he's played in front of. Terrified means it matters."
"You'd know," Lila said, something dry in her tone that made Beau glance at her, a small private exchange that lasted only a second before Beau turned back to me with a grin that didn't quite reach his eyes.
"I would know," he said. "Every award I've ever won, I've been sure right up until they called the name that it wasn't going to be me."
Caroline nudged Hayes. "You told me you were sure last year."
"I lied," Hayes said easily. "Man's got to protect his ego somehow."
I watched the four of them fall into their familiar rhythm, teasing and easy, and noticed the small thing Lila had let slip, the way her comment about Beau being scared had carried a weight that didn't fully belong to a joke about award shows.
I filed it away without asking, because that was not my business to press on, though I made a note to call her later in the week just to check in, the way I always did when something in her voice sounded like it wanted checking on.
We watched the three of them talk easily about the seating chart and which executive was avoiding which other executive this year, about a mutual friend's album that had leaked early and the scramble that followed, about nothing that mattered and everything that did, the shorthand of people who had built a life inside this world together.
I understood, the way I had understood it a hundred times before, that their marriages lived in daylight and mine lived somewhere just behind a closed door.
Nobody here asked Lila to enter through a service hallway.
Nobody scheduled Caroline's arrival around which cameras might catch her.
Beau excused himself a moment later to take a call, and Lila watched him go with an expression I recognized, the patience of a woman who had learned to read her husband's schedule as a weather system of its own, something to plan around rather than something to expect explanations from.
"He's been on that phone a lot lately," she said, mostly to herself.
"Tour stuff?"
"Something like that." She didn't elaborate, and I didn't press, though I filed the exchange away the same way she'd been filing away my own small silences all evening, two women quietly cataloguing the same trouble in each other's marriages without either of us saying the word out loud yet.
"You okay?" Lila asked, low, under the noise of the room. She had a way of noticing things other people missed, always had, even back before Beau's career took off, when the four of us used to sit around a much smaller table trading war stories about the same rooms full of the same executives.
"Fine," I said. "Just tired."
She let it go, because that was also the friend she was, but I caught her glancing at me twice more before Rhett's slot came up, her eyes flicking toward the west entrance every time an usher walked past like she was cataloguing something for later.
A network coordinator came by with a clipboard and asked, without looking up, whether I was on the approved list for the winner's circle photograph after the main categories.
I told her I was Rhett Callahan's wife. She checked her list twice, apologized, said the name hadn't been flagged that way, and moved on to Caroline without further comment.
Caroline caught my eye afterward, something sympathetic there, and did not say anything either, which I appreciated more than a comment would have helped.
A little while later I passed Jolene in a hallway near catering, and she smiled at me, an easy unguarded smile, clearly assuming I was somebody's assistant or a member of the production staff.
"You wouldn't happen to know where the water station moved to, would you?" she asked. "They keep rearranging this place every hour."
"End of the hall, past the wardrobe racks," I told her.
"You're a lifesaver," Jolene said, and hurried off without a second glance, and I stood there for a moment turning over the strange smallness of the exchange, a woman half the country would soon be speculating about romantically with my husband, asking me for directions like I was furniture with legs.
It wasn't her fault. She had no way of knowing who I was, because nobody had ever told her there was a reason to ask.
Lila watched the whole thing from a few feet away and didn't say anything until Jolene was out of earshot.
"That's exactly the thing I mean," she said quietly. "You'd think after six years somebody would have at least put your name on a list somewhere in this building."
"I've stopped expecting the list," I said.
"You shouldn't have to stop expecting it," Lila said. "That's the part that gets me."
Rhett walked out under the lights with Jolene Price a little while later, the two of them doing the duet from his last album, and the chemistry between them filled the whole arena the way it was supposed to, the way professional chemistry is built to do when two talented people know exactly how to sell a room on something that isn't real.
His voice cracked in exactly the right place on the bridge, the crack that sounded accidental and had actually been rehearsed four times in the studio until it landed just so, and the crowd went up out of their seats like a single organism.
I watched from the wings and felt the energy climb, and beside me a girl from the social media team had her phone out, scrolling, laughing under her breath.
"They're already shipping it," she said to no one in particular, tilting her screen so the girl next to her could see. "Rhett and Jolene's trending in four countries already."
The girl beside her laughed. "The label's going to love this."
"The label started this," the first girl said, not unkindly, just stating a fact she'd clearly clocked a dozen times before. "Half the caption ideas came out of this morning's meeting."
Jolene was twenty-seven and talented, and she had done nothing wrong. She sang the song the way she was hired to sing it, focused entirely on hitting the right notes and landing the choreography drilled into both of us during rehearsals.
They wanted the speculation. It sold records.
It kept Rhett's name in every headline that used the word bachelor, and a bachelor sold more tickets to a certain audience than a married man ever would.
I had watched this exact machinery turn for years without letting myself name it plainly, and standing there in the wings with the applause still ringing in my ears, I named it plainly for the first time.
He found me in a quiet corridor soon after, still catching his breath, sweat at his hairline, and pulled me against him without checking who might see, which was its own small mercy that I noticed and appreciated even as everything else that night was starting to feel wrong.
"Did you watch?" he asked.
"I watched. You were good."
"You looked worried out there." He tucked a piece of hair behind my ear. "It's just a song, Savannah."
"Why don't you ever correct them?" I asked. "The rumors. The bachelor thing. It's been years, Rhett. You could end it with one sentence."
Something moved across his face, quick and uncomfortable, gone before I could name it fully. It was the look of a man doing math he didn't want to do out loud.
"After this album cycle," he said. "I promise you, once the tour wraps, we'll figure out how to bring you into all this the right way. I don't want to do it halfway. You deserve better than a rushed announcement squeezed between tour dates."
"You said that after the last album too."
"This time's different."
"You said that too," I said, quieter, not angry yet, just tired in a way I hadn't let myself sound before.
He didn't have an answer for that, and for a moment neither of us said anything, the noise of the arena pressing in through the walls around us.
I had heard that same promise in five different years, wearing five different justifications. After the album. After the tour. After the next round of negotiations with the label. There was always a reason it had to be later, and later had never once arrived on its own schedule.
Caroline found me a few minutes after Rhett walked away, sensing something off in my expression even though I hadn't said a word. "You alright?"
"Fine," I said, the automatic answer, the one I gave everyone.
"You don't have to say fine to me," Caroline said, gently. "I've known you long enough to hear the difference between fine and actually fine."
I almost told her, right there in that corridor, everything I'd been swallowing for years. Instead I just shook my head and let the moment pass, the way I always did, and Caroline let me, though I caught her watching me a beat longer than usual before Hayes called her back toward their seats.
I thought, watching her go, that Caroline had probably swallowed a few things of her own over the years, being married to a man whose whole career depended on the world believing certain things about him.
I wondered if the four of us, Beau and Hayes and their wives and Rhett and me, were more alike underneath the surface than any of us let on to each other, all of us performing an ease that cost more than it appeared to from the outside.
"Okay," I said, because that was what I always said. He squeezed my hand and went to find Troy before I could say anything else, before I could ask him to actually name a date instead of a season.
I stood alone in that corridor for a moment longer than I needed to, listening to the muffled roar of the crowd through the wall, and felt something small and stubborn refuse, for the first time, to be soothed by his promise the way it usually was.