Chapter 8
Rhett
The Grace family's house looked exactly the way I remembered it from nine years ago, white porch railing, a dog I did not recognize barking somewhere behind the fence, and Earl standing in the yard with his arms crossed before I had even gotten the car door fully open.
He'd clearly been watching for me, or maybe just watching the road out of habit, but either way he was ready.
"I need to see my wife," I said.
Earl looked at me a moment longer, the same look he had given me the day I asked to marry his daughter, the one that measured a man and did not care how many awards he had won since.
Nine years ago that look had made me sweat through my shirt.
It did the same thing now, and I was wearing a much better shirt.
"Funny," he said. "Last night she worked for you."
I had nothing to say to that. Not one thing. I stood there in his yard with my hands in my pockets like a teenager caught out past curfew, and the silence stretched long enough that a bird landed on the fence between us and then thought better of it and flew off.
"You remember that fence?" Earl asked, nodding toward the back corner of the property.
"You came out here one Saturday, no warning, just showed up with your own tools because you heard me grumbling about it at Sunday dinner.
Spent four hours in the heat helping an old man fix a fence that wasn't even yours to fix. "
"I remember."
"That boy," Earl said, "wouldn't have known what a west door was if you'd drawn him a diagram. Wouldn't have understood why anybody would want to hide a wife they were proud of. I keep asking myself when he turned into somebody who did."
"I don't have a good answer for that."
"No," Earl agreed. "I didn't figure you would."
He went quiet, looking out over the yard at nothing in particular.
"You know I used to tell people about you at the feed store.
Bragged on you like you were my own son, before any of it.
Told them my daughter married a boy who was going to make something of himself, and I meant it as the highest compliment I had.
Now half of them ask me if I'm still proud, and I don't rightly know what to tell them anymore. "
"What do you tell them?"
"I tell them I'm proud of my daughter," Earl said. "That much hasn't changed and never will. The rest of it, I keep to myself these days."
"She's not coming out here," Earl went on. "Not today. Maybe not tomorrow either."
"I'll wait," I said.
"Suit yourself."
I stood in that yard for two hours while the Georgia heat climbed and Earl went back to whatever he had been doing before I arrived, occasionally glancing out a window at me like a man checking on weather he expected to pass eventually.
My suit jacket was long gone, tossed in the rental car, my shirt sticking to my back by the second hour, sweat gathering at my collar in a way that would have horrified any stylist who'd ever dressed me for a photograph.
Maeve came out around noon with a glass of water she handed me without a word of comfort attached to it, just the water and a look that said she'd give me that much and nothing more.
"She's not obligated to come out here because you're standing in our yard," Maeve said. "I raised her better than to think a man showing up is the same as a man showing up right."
"I know I hurt her."
"Do you," Maeve said, not really a question, and went back inside, the screen door clapping shut behind her with a sound that felt more final than it probably meant to be.
I stood there a while longer, the water glass sweating in my hand, and thought about all the times over the years I'd stood in far grander houses, waiting rooms of executives and label heads, never once made to feel the particular smallness Maeve had just handed me with four words and a screen door.
Money bought a lot of things. It had never once bought me patience from a woman who'd raised the person I'd hurt.
Daisy came out onto the porch a while later, arms crossed, studying me the way a younger sister studies a suspect. "You know she's furious with you too, not just Savannah."
"I gathered."
"I'm furious too," Daisy said. "I'll tell you something nobody else in this house is going to tell you today. She still talks about you like you're the same man she married. The guy from the hallway is the one she can't trust."
"What would you do, if you were me?"
Daisy considered the question seriously, more seriously than I expected from someone who'd spent the last two days looking at me like I was something scraped off her shoe.
"I'd stop trying to fix it with things I'm good at.
Money, charm, whatever's worked for you before.
I'd try being good at the thing you've never actually practiced.
Patience. Actual patience, not the kind where you wait for somebody to come back to you on your timeline. "
"That's harder than it sounds."
"Everything worth doing is," Daisy said, and left me alone on the porch with that.
I sat there until the sun dropped below the tree line, the Georgia heat finally releasing its grip on the evening, and thought about all the patience I'd apparently never had to practice because everyone around me had always practiced it for me instead.
Assistants who waited on my schedule. A label that waited on my next album.
A wife who had waited, longer than any of them, for a version of honesty I'd never once had to work very hard to withhold from her.
By the time I stood to leave, the porch light had come on automatically, and I understood, walking back to the rental car, that whatever patience Daisy meant would have to be a different kind entirely, the kind a man builds himself instead of the kind other people build around him.
I caught a glimpse of movement in an upstairs window a while later, a curtain shifting, and for one absurd hopeful second I thought it might be Savannah.
It was a younger face, gone as quickly as it appeared, and I told myself it had probably been Daisy checking to see if I was still standing there.
I tried one more thing before giving up on the yard entirely. I asked Earl if I could at least leave a letter, something she could read whenever she was ready, no pressure attached. He considered it longer than I expected before shaking his head.
"She doesn't need your handwriting right now," Earl said. "She needs time. A letter's just another thing asking for her attention on your schedule instead of hers."
It was an answer that stung exactly because it was right, and I didn't have anything to say back to it.
A neighbor from two houses down walked by with her dog while I stood in that yard, an older woman I vaguely recognized from a Fourth of July cookout years earlier, and she slowed just enough to look at me with open curiosity before continuing on, clearly recognizing my face from the awards coverage already circulating that morning.
I understood, watching her go, that whatever privacy this family had once had was already eroding around me, one curious glance at a time, another cost of a life I had built without ever asking Savannah how much of her own world she was willing to have swallowed by mine.
By late afternoon I understood I was not going to get what I had come for by force of proximity, and I checked into the only hotel in the nearby town instead of driving back to the airfield, because leaving felt like giving up and I was not ready to call it that yet.
The hotel had exactly one restaurant attached to it, a diner with a laminated menu and a waitress who recognized me halfway through my second cup of coffee and had the decency not to say anything about it beyond a small, knowing smile.
The waitress came back around midnight with a fresh pot of coffee neither of us had asked for, setting it down with the easy familiarity of someone who'd worked that counter long enough to read a man's whole night off his face.
"Rough one?" she asked.
"You could say that."
"You're that singer, aren't you. The one that was on the television last week." She didn't wait for confirmation. "My daughter loves your music. Plays it in her truck loud enough to rattle the windows."
"Tell her thank you."
"I will." She topped off my cup without being asked, then paused, studying me a moment longer than the small talk required.
"If it helps, whatever's got you sitting alone in a diner past midnight in a town like this, it can't be as bad as it feels right now.
Things that feel unfixable at midnight usually look different by morning. "
"I hope you're right."
"I'm always right about midnight things," she said, with the confidence of someone who'd clearly said the same line to a hundred strangers before me, and left me alone with the coffee and my own thoughts, which felt, strangely, like exactly what I needed.
I sat in that hotel room and replayed the hallway from two nights before more times than I could count, hunting for the moment where I could have said something different, and every single time I landed on the same two seconds.
The reporter's question hanging in the air.
Troy's face over her shoulder. Kendra's jaw tight behind the camera.
My own mouth opening and picking the safe answer instead of the true one, the way I'd picked the safe answer a hundred times before without ever once counting the cost of it.
I had built an entire career out of telling the truth in songs I wrote for strangers, and I had not been able to say four words to a reporter about the one truth that actually mattered.
I thought about all the interviews I'd given over the years, the ones where I talked about authenticity and staying true to where you came from, and felt something close to disgust at how easily those words had come to me on a stage and how completely they had failed me in a hallway.
I lay awake most of that night listening to the ice machine down the hall, an echo of a room I hadn't thought about in years, and understood there was a certain justice in ending up back in a place so much like the one where all of this had started.