Chapter 5
Savannah
The house was quiet in the way only a house built for two hundred guests could be quiet when there was only one person standing inside it.
I let myself in through the side door instead of the front, out of some instinct I didn't examine too closely, and stood in the mudroom for a long moment listening to nothing at all, my heels still in my hand, the marble floor cold through my stockings.
I walked through rooms I had helped pick the paint colors for, past the wall of framed magazine covers Kendra's team had curated for visitors, past the grand staircase Rhett had carried me up the night we closed on the place, laughing because neither of us could quite believe a boy from a trailer outside Knoxville had ended up owning something like this.
I remembered that night clearly. He had tripped on the fourth step and nearly dropped me, and we had both laughed so hard we sat down right there on the stairs and stayed for twenty minutes, drinking champagne out of the bottle because the movers hadn't unpacked the glasses yet.
We had talked that night about the family we wanted to raise in this house, the life we imagined, both of us drunk on more than the champagne.
The television in the great room was still playing the after-show coverage on mute, hosts recapping the night's biggest wins, Rhett's face filling the screen every few minutes with his trophy held high and his smile aimed at fifteen thousand strangers.
I watched it for a moment without sound, the silent version of his triumph looping over and over, his mouth moving through words I already knew by heart because I'd heard some version of that speech rehearsed in our kitchen three nights running, and then I turned it off and kept walking.
There was a smaller room down the east hall that the decorator had wanted to turn into a second home office.
Rhett had insisted on keeping it for our things instead, the photographs and souvenirs that did not fit the magazine version of his life, and I had not opened that door in longer than I liked admitting, less from avoiding it than from how life in this house had a way of pulling you toward its front rooms and away from its back ones.
Our wedding photographs were in there, the real ones from the courthouse in Georgia, Rhett in a rented suit and me in a dress off the clearance rack, both of us laughing too hard to hold still for the camera.
Photographs from the years after, from tiny bars and county fairs and one particularly disastrous outdoor show where it rained through his entire set and I stood at the edge of the stage holding an umbrella over his guitar instead of over him, because the guitar had cost more than either of us made in two months and my hair would dry eventually.
There was a photograph of us outside that Chattanooga motel, both of us squinting into the sun, his arm slung around my shoulders like it belonged there because it did.
I picked up a shoebox from the bottom shelf, the one marked in my own handwriting from years ago, and found inside it a stack of rejection letters from labels that had never returned Rhett's earliest demos, form letters that all said much the same thing, thank you for your submission, this is not the right fit for our current roster at this time.
I remembered typing up a spreadsheet to track every single one of them, forty-one labels in eighteen months, so we would know which ones we'd already tried and which ones might still be worth a second attempt once Rhett had a few more songs to show them.
I remembered the night we got the first real check, four thousand dollars for opening a tour date we'd fought for months to land, and how we'd sat at that same kitchen table with the wobbly leg and just stared at the number on the paper for several minutes before either of us said a word, because we had never held that much money at once in either of our lives, and it had felt, for one evening, like proof that all of it had been worth something.
In every one of those photographs I stood beside him. Not behind him, not off to the side waiting for security to walk me somewhere quieter. Beside him, because there had been no reason yet to hide me, no publicist calculating angles, no brand to protect.
I remembered, too, the first time anyone had suggested keeping things quiet.
It had been Rhett's first manager, a man named Denny who'd since faded out of the picture entirely, sitting across from us at a diner not unlike the one in Georgia, explaining in his careful, reasonable voice that a young unmarried artist tested better with certain demographics, that it was only a marketing consideration, that nothing about our actual marriage had to change, just how loudly we talked about it.
Rhett had looked at me that night like he needed my permission before he'd agree to anything, and I remembered giving it, because it had seemed so small at the time, a temporary strategy for a fragile new career, not a permanent architecture we would still be living inside six years later.
"Just until the first album drops," Denny had said, tapping the table for emphasis. "Once you've got a fan base, none of this matters. Married men sell records too. We just can't afford the risk this early."
"How long is early?" I'd asked.
"A year. Maybe two."
Two years had become four, and then six, each renewal wrapped in a new justification delivered by a new person, Denny replaced by Troy, the diner replaced by a conference room, the stakes always somehow higher than they'd been the time before.
I thought about all the demos Rhett had sent out in those same years, cassette tapes and then digital files, forty-one labels in eighteen months, every single one of them a small act of hope mailed out into indifference, and how strange it was that the hiding had outlasted every one of those rejections by years, had outlasted the entire era of struggling to be heard at all.
I sat on the floor of that room for a while with a box of ticket stubs in my lap, sorting through them without any real purpose, just the motion of my hands giving my mind somewhere to rest while it worked through what my body already understood.
There was a stub from the very first show I'd ever booked for him, a Tuesday night at a bar that no longer existed, four dollars at the door, a crowd of maybe twelve people including the bartender.
I had not slowly become invisible. I had been made invisible, one decision at a time, by a man who found it easier to let the world believe he had nothing to lose.
Every west door, every team comment, every after-the-album had been a brick laid deliberately, and I had helped lay half of them myself by agreeing every single time that later made sense, telling myself patience was a virtue instead of naming it for what it actually was.
I found, near the bottom of the box, the spiral notebook itself, its cover soft and curled, and flipped through pages of phone numbers for bar owners who'd long since closed up shop or sold out to somebody else, names I hadn't thought about in years.
Tucked between two pages was a napkin with Rhett's handwriting on it, an early draft of lyrics for a song that never made an album, something about a girl who believed in a boy before anyone else had reason to.
I remembered him writing it, remembered feeling, at twenty-three, like the luckiest woman in Georgia to be the reason a man wrote songs at all.
That napkin was proof the feeling had been real once, undeniable and specific, not a story I'd built after the fact to explain why I'd stayed as long as I had. Which made it harder, somehow, not easier, to sit with what the last six years had actually cost that feeling.
I folded the napkin carefully and tucked it into my bag alongside the guitar pick I'd already decided, somewhere in the last hour without quite noticing the decision happen, to keep rather than throw away.
Whatever came next, I wanted proof of who we used to be, evidence that the man I was leaving had once existed plainly, without a publicist standing between his mouth and the truth.
I sat with the box a while longer, running my thumb along the edge of an old photograph until the cardboard corner softened further under the pressure.
Somewhere in this house, framed and displayed for visitors, hung a version of our life curated for strangers.
Down here, in a box on the floor of a room nobody entered, sat the only version that had ever been entirely true.
I thought about calling Daisy right then, just to hear a voice that wasn't attached to any of this, but decided against it.
Some nights needed to be sat through alone first, before anyone else's comfort could actually reach the part that hurt.
I turned off the light in that small room and closed the door gently behind me, the way you close a door on a room you intend to come back to, not one you're sealing away for good.
I did not cry, and I did not call anyone to talk me through it.
I went upstairs and packed one suitcase, the practical kind, the kind meant for a trip you intend to come back from eventually rather than a life you are leaving behind entirely, because I was not ready to think about which one this was.
I packed underwear and two pairs of jeans and the boots I'd had since before any of this started, the ones that still fit the same way they had the year we married, and left behind the closet full of things Kendra's stylist had picked out for events I'd never once been photographed at, dresses with tags I hadn't bothered to cut off.
Before I left I wrote one line on a card from the kitchen drawer and left it propped against the coffee maker where he would find it in the morning, because he always made coffee first, before anything else, a habit from years ago that had never changed even after everything else had.
I can't keep being your wife only when the doors are closed.
I stood there for a moment with the pen still in my hand, wondering if I should write more, if there was some fuller explanation I owed him, and then decided that seven words were enough, that anything longer would only give him room to argue with the parts he didn't want to hear.
I took my ring off the dresser where I had left it hours earlier before the show, put it back on my finger, and drove myself out of Nashville a little after two in the morning, the city lights shrinking in my rearview mirror until they were gone, the radio off the whole way because I couldn't stand the thought of some love song coming on and undoing whatever fragile resolve was holding me together.