Chapter 9
Savannah
The flowers arrived first, an arrangement so large it barely fit through my parents' front door, white roses and something expensive-smelling I couldn't name, and I sent them back without opening the card.
A jewelry box came the next day from a store in Nashville I recognized by the packaging alone, and I sent that back too, unopened, because I already knew what was inside and I did not need to see it to understand what it meant.
"He doesn't know how to apologize without spending something," Daisy said, watching the delivery driver carry the jewelry box back out to his van with visible confusion, like he'd never once had a delivery refused before. "That should tell you plenty right there."
"He's always been generous," I said, and heard, even as I said it, how much it sounded like an excuse.
"Generous and sorry aren't the same thing," Daisy said. "You know that better than anybody."
Rhett was trying to fix this with the only language he trusted anymore.
Money. Access. A gesture that could be arranged with a single phone call to an assistant, requiring nothing of him beyond the willingness to spend.
I understood, watching the second box disappear back down the driveway, that every dollar he threw at this problem was in some way easier for him than picking up the phone and simply saying he was sorry without an object attached to the sentence.
A third package came two days later, smaller than the others, no card attached, no return label I could trace.
Inside was a single guitar pick, worn smooth on one edge, paper-clipped to a handwritten set list on paper gone soft with age.
I recognized both instantly. The pick was one I had bought Rhett from a gas station outside Macon during our first real tour together, back when tour meant four dates in three states and a van that overheated twice a week and we'd had to stop every ninety minutes to let it cool.
The set list was in my own handwriting, made at his kitchen table the year we met, back when I was the only person who believed his songs were good enough to build a career on, before anyone else had bothered to listen closely enough to agree with me.
That one hurt more than the flowers and the jewelry combined, because it proved he still remembered exactly who we used to be before any of this, proved the memory was still in him somewhere, filed away and untouched, which made the west door and the team comment feel less like an accident and more like a decision he had made in spite of remembering, rather than one born of forgetting.
I held that guitar pick for a long time that night, sitting on the edge of the guest bed in my childhood room, turning it over in my palm the way I used to turn it over watching him play, and I did not know whether to be moved or furious, so I ended up being both at once, exhausting in its own right.
I put it in the drawer of the nightstand rather than throw it away, telling myself that meant nothing, though I checked on it twice more before I fell asleep.
It was the small package, more than anything expensive that came before it, that made me understand something had to change about how I was responding to all of this.
Sending things back was its own waiting, a way of staying in the conversation without actually deciding anything.
I still had no idea what I wanted instead.
I only knew I was done spending the next month standing at my parents' front door handing packages back to delivery drivers.
I went out with Daisy that evening to get away from the house for a few hours, and we ended up at a restaurant downtown that had opened a live-music room in the back, string lights strung across a small patio and a young singer working through a set of covers to a crowd of maybe thirty people, nursing drinks at mismatched tables.
"Savannah Grace," a voice said behind me, warm with genuine surprise. "It has been years."
Nolan Pierce looked the way I remembered him, easy smile, forearms still marked with the same scar from a kitchen accident he'd gotten telling a different story about every time I asked, dark hair a little longer than it used to be.
We had grown up two streets apart, gone to the same church youth group, stayed loosely in touch through the early Nashville years before Rhett's career swallowed most of my time and most of my attention.
"You own this place?" I asked.
"Three of them now," he said, sliding into the empty chair Daisy pointedly vacated to go find the bathroom, though I suspected the bathroom trip was mostly diplomatic.
"This one's my favorite. Best acoustics in the building even though nobody designed it that way on purpose.
We put the stage in the wrong corner and it just worked. "
"You always did like things that weren't supposed to work out."
"Look who's talking," he said, and then seemed to catch himself, a small wince crossing his face. "Sorry. That came out worse than I meant it."
"No," I said. "It's fair."
"Whatever it means," Nolan said, "I always thought you two had something real, back when it was just the two of you and nobody was watching.
I'm not saying that to make this harder.
I'm saying it because I don't think you should let anybody, including me, talk you into deciding this was fake from the start.
It wasn't. I watched it not be fake for years. "
"Then what happened?"
"I don't know," he said. "But I know it's not my business to tell you what to do about it. I just didn't want you sitting here thinking the whole thing was a lie, because from where I stood, it never looked like one."
He did not ask about Rhett. He did not glance at my ring or angle the conversation toward the man I was married to at all, which after two days of headlines was such a relief that I felt something in my shoulders loosen for the first time since the award show.
He asked what I had been up to, actually up to, and when I gave him the vague answer I gave everyone he pushed gently past it.
"No," he said. "What have you been doing. Not what he's been doing. You."
I opened my mouth to answer and found, embarrassingly, that I didn't have a ready one.
I talked around it for a minute, mentioning things I'd helped Rhett with, decisions I'd been part of, and Nolan just watched me with a patient, unhurried expression until I ran out of things that weren't really about myself.
"I don't have a good answer," I admitted finally.
"That's alright," he said. "Most people don't, the first time somebody actually asks them that instead of asking about somebody else."
Daisy returned from the bathroom a while later and slid back into the booth with the particular smugness of a woman who believed she'd engineered something. "You two look like you're having a real conversation for once. Should I stay away longer?"
"You're being obvious," I told her.
"I'm being helpful," she said. "There's a difference, and I'll let you figure out which one this is."
Nolan laughed, unbothered, and stood to check on the bar before Daisy could say anything else. "I've got to make my rounds. It was good seeing you, Savannah. I mean that."
"You too."
Once he was out of earshot, Daisy leaned across the table, eyebrows raised. "Well?"
"It's not like that," I said.
"I didn't say it was like anything. I said well, as in, how do you feel."
"Lighter," I admitted. "For the first time in a week, actually lighter."
"Good," Daisy said, softer than her usual teasing tone. "Hold onto that. You've earned a little lighter."
We sat there for a while listening to the singer work through a cover of an old standard, and I found myself, for the first time in days, thinking about something other than a hallway and a reporter and two words that wouldn't stop replaying in my head.
Watching the small stage, the string lights, the low hum of a room paying attention to someone singing their own words, I thought about the county fairs where I used to sell Rhett's merchandise out of the trunk of my car, a card table and a cash box and a stack of t-shirts I'd ironed myself the night before.
I remembered a woman once asking me, counting out crumpled bills for a shirt, whether I was Rhett's sister, and how I'd said no, just somebody who believed in him, because at the time saying wife had felt like giving away something private to a stranger at a fair.
I hadn't minded it then. It had felt like our secret, not yet a habit that would calcify into something else entirely.
I did not have a good answer, and for the first time in years, that bothered me more than anything Rhett had said in that hallway.
Driving home that night, Daisy at the wheel and the radio turned low, I found myself thinking about the woman at the county fair asking if I was Rhett's sister, and how easily the answer had come to me then, believer, not wife, a title I'd worn almost proudly at the time.
It occurred to me, watching the dark road pass outside the window, that I had spent years wearing smaller titles than the truth allowed, and calling it humility instead of what it actually was.
"You're quiet," Daisy said, glancing over at a red light.
"Just thinking."
"About Nolan?"
"About titles," I said, which made her laugh, though I didn't explain further, and she let it go, turning the radio up instead, some old song neither of us had heard in years filling the car for the rest of the drive home.
We passed the old feed store on the way, dark and closed for the night, and Daisy slowed without me asking her to, both of us looking at it a moment longer than the empty parking lot deserved.
I'd done the books there for two years, back when Rhett's music was still just something we believed in privately, before belief needed defending to anyone at all.
"Feels like another life," Daisy said.
"It was another life," I said. "I'm starting to think I liked her better than the one I traded up for."