Chapter 6
Rhett
Igot home from the after-party earlier than anyone expected, having told Troy I had a headache when the truth was I could not stand one more person congratulating me on a night that had gone this wrong underneath the surface.
I drove myself, waving off the driver, because I needed the twenty minutes alone with my own thoughts and I didn't get many of those anymore.
The house was dark. I told myself that meant Savannah had already gone to bed, that she was upstairs asleep and I would wake her gently and say everything I had failed to say in that hallway, that I would sit on the edge of the bed and hold her hand and tell her the truth without a single qualifier attached to it.
I even rehearsed the sentence on the drive home, out loud, alone in the car, the way I rehearsed lyrics before a session.
I climbed the stairs two at a time, already forming the apology in my head, and found the bedroom empty, the bed still made, untouched since the housekeeper had turned it down that afternoon.
Her side of the closet was half empty. Her toiletries were gone from the bathroom counter, the specific gap on the shelf where her perfume usually sat somehow louder than anything else missing.
I stood in that bathroom for a moment just staring at the empty space, running my thumb along the edge of the shelf like the missing bottle might somehow still be there if I looked hard enough.
The card was propped against the coffee maker exactly where she knew I would find it first, because she knew my morning routine better than I knew my own reflection, better, it occurred to me standing there, than I had bothered to learn hers.
I read it twice, then a third time, then set it down carefully like it might tear if I held it too long.
I called her four times before I accepted the phone was off.
I called her parents' landline, the one number of theirs I had memorized years ago and never once used, and got no answer at two in the morning, which told me nothing except that either they were asleep or they already knew enough to let it ring.
For six years I had solved every problem in my life with a phone call.
A bad review, a scheduling conflict, a leak to the press, all of it handled by someone I paid to handle it, usually before I'd fully understood there was a problem at all.
I stood in my own kitchen at three in the morning with my wife's handwriting in my hand and understood, for the first time in for years, that this was not a problem anyone on my payroll could fix.
There was no number for this. There was no team, and the word landed with an ugly irony given how the whole night had started.
Troy called back within the hour, already awake, already managing. "You've got the morning show at nine and the label breakfast at eleven. I can push the breakfast but the morning show's live, Rhett, we can't just..."
"Cancel it."
There was a pause on the line long enough that I knew he was recalculating everything he thought he understood about how this year was going to go, running numbers in his head, sponsors and slots and a calendar he'd spent months building.
"Cancel all of it," I said. "Whatever's on the calendar today, cancel it."
"Can I ask why?"
"Because I called my wife a member of my team on national television, and she's gone, and none of the rest of it matters until I fix that."
Troy did not argue. He'd been managing me long enough to hear when a decision was actually a decision and not an opening for negotiation, and that alone told me how badly I had let this get, that even Troy, who fought me on almost everything involving the calendar, wasn't going to fight me on this.
"I'll handle the calendar," he said instead. "Go get her."
"That's the part I can't figure out how to do," I admitted, more honestly than I usually let myself talk to Troy. "I've never had to actually go get anything in my life. Somebody always brought it to me."
Troy said nothing at first. "Then maybe that's the whole problem, and maybe the answer isn't a strategy. Maybe it's just you, showing up, with nothing to offer but the truth, which isn't really in either of our usual toolkits."
I tried calling her twice more before the jet finished fueling, and both times the call went straight to voicemail without ringing, which told me she'd turned the phone off entirely rather than simply ignoring me.
I left one message on the second attempt, four words long, deleted it before I could stop myself, and called back a third time just to leave nothing at all, because anything I might say felt smaller than what the moment actually needed.
I stood in the empty kitchen a while longer before finally heading out to the car, running my thumb along the edge of the counter where we used to sit some mornings, coffee between us, no schedule pressing on either of us yet.
The house had a hundred rooms designed to impress people who would only ever see them once.
It had exactly one kitchen counter that had ever actually meant anything, and I hadn't leaned against it in longer than I wanted to admit.
I sat on the jet an hour later watching the sun come up over fields I didn't recognize, running the hallway back through my head for the hundredth time, and I could not find a single version of it where I came out looking like a man worth waiting for.
I thought about calling the jewelry store that had made her ring, about having something sent ahead so it would be waiting when I arrived, and then thought better of it, some instinct telling me, even that early, even that raw, that a gift was not going to be the right opening move this time.
Somewhere over Alabama I opened my laptop and pulled up the label's marketing calendar out of habit, the same folder I checked most mornings, and found a notification about a scheduled post celebrating my award win, drafted the night before, already queued to go out at nine sharp with a caption calling me country music's most eligible bachelor for the third year running.
I stared at that caption longer than I meant to before I deleted the post entirely and typed a note to Kendra instead.
Pull that language from everything going forward. All of it. I'll explain when I land.
She wrote back almost instantly, even at that hour. Understood. No questions asked yet, but I imagine there will be some.
I sat for a while longer with the deleted post still fresh in my mind, thinking about how many other queued messages existed in that same folder, built months in advance by people paid to keep a particular story running smoothly regardless of what was actually true underneath it.
I'd never once thought to ask how much of my public self was manufactured weeks ahead of time, sitting in a folder waiting for its scheduled release, until the morning I needed to stop one specific lie from going out and found I had no idea how many others were already queued behind it.
Troy showed up at the house himself an hour before the jet was ready, letting himself in the way he'd done a hundred times before, and found me sitting at the kitchen table with the card still propped against the coffee maker, untouched, as though moving it might undo whatever had already been decided.
"You look terrible," Troy said, which from him passed for genuine concern.
"I feel worse than I look."
He sat down across from me, uncharacteristically quiet for a man who usually filled silence the way other people filled a room with furniture.
"I've worked for you eight years, Rhett.
I don't think I've ever seen you rattled like this.
Not after the second album flopped. Not after the tour got canceled in Ohio. Not ever."
"None of that ever cost me what this might."
"No," Troy agreed. "I don't suppose it did.
" He was quiet a moment longer, turning his phone over in his hands without looking at it.
"If it helps, I liked her a lot more than I ever told you.
Back at the start, before any of this. She used to bring coffee to the studio for the whole crew, not just you.
Remembered everybody's order. I don't think I ever thanked her for that. "
"You can thank her yourself, if she ever lets either of us near her again."
There would be time to answer for all of it, I knew. I just didn't have answers ready for any of them yet, not the ones the label would ask and not the one Savannah deserved most.
Troy stood to leave a while later, pausing at the door the way he did when he had one more thing to say and wasn't sure it was his place to say it.
"Whatever it means," he said, "I don't think this is unfixable. I've watched you fix things that looked a lot more broken than this from the outside. I just don't think you can fix this one the way you fix everything else, by throwing resources at it until it goes away."
"How do I fix it, then?"
"I don't know," Troy admitted. "That part isn't really in my job description. I'd start by actually showing up empty-handed, the way you're about to. Might be the first time in years you've walked into a room without something expensive doing the talking for you."
I thought about that the rest of the flight, turning it over the way I used to turn over a lyric that wasn't quite finished.
Every negotiation I'd ever won, every crowd I'd ever worked, had depended on me offering something, a song, a favor, a percentage point.
I had never once, in fifteen years of building this career, walked into an important room with absolutely nothing to trade.
The pilot announced our descent somewhere over the Georgia state line, and I watched the landscape change below, farmland giving way to the outskirts of a small city I'd visited exactly twice before, both times for reasons that had nothing to do with the man I was becoming on this particular morning.
I had left the trophy at home. Bringing it toward Savannah would have turned the worst night of our marriage into something I was still asking her to celebrate.
I went to her with nothing in my hands, because for once there was nothing I could buy, carry, or offer that would make the conversation easier.
I went anyway, empty-handed except for the trophy still sitting in its case on the seat beside me, an object I hadn't had the heart to leave behind and didn't quite know what to do with now that I was holding it.