Chapter 10
Savannah
The headlines kept multiplying. Every entertainment site ran some version of the same story, Rhett Callahan's duet with Jolene Price, screenshots of the trending hashtags, quotes from anonymous sources close to the situation who claimed the two of them had undeniable chemistry offstage as well as on.
One outlet ran a piece calling him America's most eligible bachelor for the third year running, complete with a photo gallery of women he had supposedly been linked to, most of whom I recognized as women he'd stood near exactly once at some industry function.
A different piece speculated openly about which of the two Nashville Billionaires would settle down first, running side by side photographs of Rhett, Beau, and Hayes under a headline asking whether the three of them had made a secret pact to stay single.
I read every single one, sitting alone in my parents' guest room with my phone brightness turned low so nobody would see the light under the door, because apparently I had not yet learned to stop.
Each article felt like picking at the same wound, and each time I told myself this was the last one, and each time it wasn't.
One evening, Daisy pulled up an old interview from three years earlier, a magazine piece where a reporter asked Rhett point blank whether he was seeing anyone, and he'd laughed and said he was married to the road, an answer the magazine had printed as a cute, quotable line.
I remembered watching him give that interview from across the room, remembered the small flinch I'd felt and swallowed at the time, telling myself it was just a clever line for a magazine, not a real denial of anything that mattered.
Reading it again now, printed in black and white with his photograph beside it, it read exactly like what it had been.
I found three more like it that same night, spread across different years and different outlets, each one a small variation on the same joke, married to the music, married to the road, wedded to my career, phrases clever enough to quote and vague enough to protect him from ever having to say the word single or the word married outright.
I counted them the way I used to count ticket stubs, laying them out in order, watching the pattern emerge with a clarity that made my stomach turn.
It hadn't been one hallway. It had been years of small, practiced evasions, each one polished enough to sound charming instead of dishonest.
Daisy watched me read through the last one without saying anything, letting me get to the end of it on my own.
"You didn't know about all of these?" she finally asked.
"I knew about some. I don't think I ever let myself add them up before tonight."
"And now that you have?"
"Now I understand it wasn't ever an accident," I said. "It was a strategy with a very long shelf life, and I was the only person who never got a copy of the plan."
I called him on the fourth night. He picked up before the first ring finished.
"Savannah." His voice cracked slightly on my name, relief and hope tangled together in two syllables. "Where are you? Are you okay? I've been out of my mind, I drove down to your parents' and your father..."
"Are you going to correct it?" I asked.
The line went quiet, long enough that I could hear, faintly, the sound of him moving through a room, a door closing somewhere on his end.
"Correct what?" he said, though I could hear in his voice that he already knew exactly what.
"The bachelor headlines. Jolene. All of it. Are you going to tell them the truth?"
"Savannah, it's complicated right now, Kendra's saying if we come out with it suddenly it's going to look like damage control, like we're only doing it because..."
"Because you got caught," I said. "Because your wife left and you're worried about the optics of that more than you're worried about the truth."
"That's not what I meant."
"Are you going to correct it," I said again, quieter this time, watching a moth beat itself uselessly against the guest room window. "Yes or no."
The silence stretched long enough that I had my answer before he spoke another word.
"I need a little time to figure out how to do this the right way," he said. "There's a strategy to something like this, Savannah, I can't just..."
"Your answer is still your career," I said. "It's been your career every single time for six years. Every single time I've asked, that's the answer underneath whatever words you actually use."
There was a long pause before he spoke again, and I could hear something shifting underneath his usual smoothness, a crack showing through despite his best effort to keep his voice level.
"I don't know how to be the man who says yes to this without feeling like I'm burning down everything I built to get here," he said.
"Maybe that's the actual problem," I said. "You've spent so long protecting what you built that you forgot the thing worth protecting most was standing right next to the blueprint the whole time."
"That's not fair."
"No," I said. "It isn't. None of the last six years have been especially fair to me either, but you didn't hear me complaining about it out loud very often, so I understand if this feels sudden to you. It hasn't been sudden for me."
"That's unfair," he said again, weaker this time, as if he was hearing himself say it and no longer quite believed it.
Earlier that day, Daisy had shown me a promotional poster for Rhett's upcoming tour leg, his face forty feet tall on the side of a building downtown, a tagline underneath reading Rhett Callahan: Available Every Night This Fall, a joke clearly engineered to keep the bachelor branding alive even while the label's own publicity team was supposedly discussing damage control behind closed doors.
I had stared at that poster for a long moment before Daisy pulled the car away from the curb, wondering how many more of those existed already printed and paid for, already too far into production to simply cancel because a marriage had become inconvenient to the campaign.
"You keep saying that like it's an argument," I said. "It isn't. It's just a fact you don't like."
He didn't answer that, and the silence between us stretched long enough that I could hear him breathing on the other end, slow and uneven.
"I don't know what to say to you right now that you'll believe," he finally said.
"You could start by telling Kendra to pull the tour poster downtown," I said.
"The one with your face on it and a joke about being available every night this fall.
Daisy showed it to me yesterday. It's still up.
It's been up for two weeks since the show, Rhett, since you supposedly started fixing this. "
"I didn't know that one was still running."
"That's the problem," I said. "You don't know what's still running because you've never had to check. Somebody else always checks for you."
"I'll call Kendra tonight."
"You always say that like it's the solution," I said. "Calling Kendra tonight doesn't fix six years of never once checking yourself. It just outsources the checking to somebody else again, same as everything else."
He was quiet long enough that I wondered if the call had dropped. "You're right. I don't know what the answer is except to actually start checking myself, starting now, tonight, instead of handing it off."
"That would be new."
"I'm aware," he said, something rueful in his voice. "Newer than I'd like to admit at this point in my own life."
"I'm going to hang up now," I said. "I'm not angry anymore. I just don't think either of us is going to say anything more useful tonight than what's already been said."
"Can I ask you one more thing before you go?"
"Ask."
"Do you still love me? Underneath all of this?"
The question hung there a moment, and I found, to my own surprise, that I didn't have to search for the answer.
"Yes. That was never the part in question.
The part in question is whether love was ever going to be enough on its own, and I don't think it is, not without everything else changing alongside it. "
"What would be enough, then? If not love?"
"Love plus proof," I said. "I've had six years of one without the other. I'm not interested in going back to that particular math."
He was quiet for a moment. "I can work with that math. I don't love it, but I understand it."
"You don't have to love it," I said. "You just have to live with it long enough for it to stop feeling like a punishment and start feeling like an actual marriage."
"Okay," he said, quiet. "Goodnight, Savannah."
"Goodnight."
"Then maybe don't say anything," I said. "Show me instead. Or don't. Either way, I'm done asking."
There was a long pause on the line, and for a moment I thought he might actually try, might say something that broke the pattern instead of continuing it.
"Savannah, I don't want to lose you over a headline I can control if I just handle it right."
"That's the whole problem," I said. "Everything with you comes down to handling it right. Not doing right. Handling. Those aren't the same verb, and I've spent six years not noticing the difference."
I hung up before he could say anything else, and I sat with the phone in my lap for several minutes after, waiting to feel something like satisfaction at having finally said it plainly.
What I felt instead was tired, the particular exhaustion of a woman who had just confirmed something she had already known for longer than she wanted to admit, the confirmation itself somehow worse than the not knowing had been.