Chapter 3
Savannah
They called his name for the award an hour later, and in the scramble backstage to get him miked and positioned for his walk to the stage, I ended up standing right beside him when a camera crew rounded the corner faster than anyone expected, the reporter's heels clicking hard against the concrete floor, a cameraman jogging to keep pace with her.
In the minutes before that, I had already watched the night's small accumulations pile up one on top of another.
A junior publicist directing me to stand slightly out of frame during a group photo of the label's biggest names, apologizing after the fact and explaining that the shot list hadn't included me.
A security guard, new that season, asking politely for my credential when I tried to follow Rhett past a checkpoint, and Rhett not noticing I'd fallen behind until I caught up two minutes later.
A woman in the press pit turning her camera toward Rhett and Jolene as they crossed a hallway and never once turning it toward me, because there was no reason for her to know she should.
None of it was cruel, exactly. It was simply the sum of what happens when a life gets built around one person being visible and everyone attached to him being optional.
I had absorbed that math for six years without doing the multiplication out loud, and standing in that hallway watching it happen one small time after another, I found myself doing it anyway.
I thought about the first industry event we'd ever attended together after Rhett signed with the label, a much smaller showcase in a hotel ballroom, and how he had introduced me to every single person in that room himself, his hand never leaving mine, correcting anyone who assumed I was a publicist or an assistant before the sentence finished leaving their mouth.
That man had faded gradually. Each compromise had taken a little more of him until I could finally see how different things had become.
A publicist I didn't recognize approached Rhett not long after with a folded card, some detail about the winner's circle photograph, and glanced at me with polite confusion before addressing him directly, as though the question of who I was hadn't quite resolved itself in her mind and she'd decided not to spend the effort resolving it.
Rhett thanked her, took the card, and didn't introduce me, his attention already moving to the next thing on his schedule, and I watched him not notice that he hadn't, the way a man doesn't notice the specific silence of an instrument he stopped playing years ago.
We passed a row of framed photographs lining the corridor toward the stage entrance, a rotating gallery the network hung every year showing past winners with their families, their partners, their whole visible lives arranged behind glass for anyone walking past to see.
Rhett's photograph from three years earlier hung near the end, alone in the frame, his arm slung casually around nothing but empty space where a partner might have stood, and I remembered standing beside him when that photograph was taken, remembered being asked to step out of frame by a photographer who explained, apologetically, that the shot list called for solo portraits of the nominees that year.
I had stepped out of frame without arguing.
I had done it so easily, so automatically, that I'd genuinely forgotten it happened until I saw the photograph again just now, hanging on a wall for the whole industry to walk past year after year, evidence of an absence nobody but me would ever notice as an absence at all.
Further down the hallway, a cluster of interns compared notes on a shared tablet, one of them pulling up what looked like a mocked-up magazine cover, Rhett's face superimposed over a headline asking which lucky woman might finally tame country music's most elusive bachelor.
I caught a glimpse of it before they noticed me looking, and one of them, a young man who couldn't have been more than twenty-two, laughed and said something about how the label loved this angle because it wrote itself every single year, no new material required.
I kept walking. There was nothing to say to a room full of interns who had no idea they were describing my own life back to me as a punch line.
The reporter was young, the kind who had learned to spot an opportunity before her own producer did.
Her eyes went from Rhett to me and back to Rhett, taking in how close we stood, how his hand rested at the small of my back with the ease of a man who had done it a thousand times before and never once thought about who might be watching.
"Rhett! Quick one before you head up." She turned the microphone toward him, then glanced at me again, sharper this time. "And who's this?"
The question hung there for exactly as long as it took Rhett to decide what to do with it.
I looked at him. This was the moment I had pictured in some quiet corner of my mind for longer than I wanted to admit, the moment where all he had to do was say two words and every year of the west door and the missing photographs and the bachelor headlines would simply stop mattering.
My wife. Two words. I had watched him say harder things than that into a microphone a hundred times, had watched him talk through grief and failure and every private thing he'd ever turned into a song for an audience of strangers.
I watched him find Troy's face over the reporter's shoulder, watched him find Kendra standing just behind the camera operator with her jaw tight, and I watched the decision happen in real time, quick as a blink, the calculation of a man whose whole livelihood depended on managing exactly what the world was allowed to see.
He smiled. The smile the cameras loved, the one that had sold out arenas, the one I used to think was reserved for me before I understood how many other people got it too.
"Savannah? She's part of my team," he said.
The reporter nodded, already losing interest, already turning to scan the hallway for someone else worth thirty seconds of her segment.
She didn't ask what team, what role, what I actually did for Callahan Entertainment.
The answer was easy enough that she didn't need to.
Rhett's hand stayed at my back like nothing had happened at all, warm and unhurried, as though the ground underneath both of us hadn't just shifted.
I did not raise my voice. I did not make a scene in a hallway full of cameras that would have loved nothing more than a scene to run on a loop for the next forty-eight hours.
"Is that really what I've become to you?" I asked, quiet enough that only he could hear it.
He turned to me, and for one second I saw something crack open in his face, the beginning of an answer forming behind his eyes, something that looked almost like panic.
"Callahan, they're calling your category," Troy said, appearing at his elbow with the urgency of a man who had built his entire career on Rhett's timing, on knowing exactly when to interrupt and exactly how hard to pull. "Sixty seconds. We need you moving now."
Rhett's hand tightened at my back. "Savannah, I..."
"Go," I said. "They're waiting for you."
He hesitated one more second, long enough that I thought, for one strange suspended moment, that he might actually stay, that he might turn to the reporter and correct it, that he might pick me over sixty seconds and a trophy.
Then Troy's hand landed on his shoulder and turned him, gently but firmly, toward the stage entrance, and he was gone before either of us finished whatever that sentence was going to be.
For a moment I considered going after him, pushing through the crowd to catch him before he reached the stage, to make him finish the sentence he'd started.
I pictured it clearly, the two of us standing in front of Troy and Kendra and anyone else who happened to be watching, Rhett finally saying the words out loud regardless of the cost. I took one step in that direction before stopping myself, understanding that if he wanted to say it badly enough, he would have found a way to say it already, hallway or no hallway, sixty seconds or not.
Kendra passed me a moment later, close enough that I caught the edge of her perfume, and for one strange second her eyes met mine, something unreadable passing across her face, not quite an apology and not quite indifference, something in between that I couldn't name and didn't have the energy to try naming right then. She didn't stop walking. Neither did I.
I stood in that hallway alone while the crowd noise swelled somewhere beyond the wall, and a stagehand jogged past me with a coil of cable over one shoulder, not sparing me a glance.
Nobody in this hallway knew who I was. I had just stood beside the biggest star in the building and no single person here could have told you my name, and somehow that fact, more than the reporter's question, more than Rhett's answer, was the thing that finally settled into my chest and stayed there.
I understood, with a clarity that surprised me by how calm it felt, that I had just watched my husband decide in under three seconds, and the decision had not been close.
I found the spouse section again eventually, sliding back into the seat Lila had saved, and she took one look at my face and didn't ask what had happened, just reached over and squeezed my hand once, hard, the way you'd catch somebody who'd nearly fallen, before letting go and returning her attention to the stage as though nothing had passed between us at all.
It was exactly the right thing to do, and I was grateful for it more than I had words to tell her that night.
Caroline leaned over minutes later, her voice pitched low enough that only I could hear it. "Whatever happened out there, you don't have to talk about it tonight. Just know we noticed you were gone longer than the walk to the stage should have taken."
"I appreciate that."
"We're not going anywhere," Caroline said, simply, and turned her attention back to the broadcast, leaving me with exactly the quiet support I hadn't known I needed until she offered it.