Chapter 12
Savannah
Iwent back to Nashville the following week to deal with practical matters, a few belongings I had left behind and a bank account that needed my signature, and I found myself back at Nolan's restaurant twice in four days without entirely planning to, telling myself both times it was simply the closest good coffee to the lawyer's office.
"I need somebody who actually knows music helping me book the Thursday nights," Nolan said the second time, sliding into the booth across from me without asking permission first, two coffees already in hand like he'd expected to find me there.
"Not somebody who can read a spreadsheet.
Somebody who can hear when a kid's got something real, before the algorithm figures it out and it stops being interesting. "
"You've got a whole industry full of people for that."
"I've got a whole industry full of people who'll tell me what's trending," he said.
"I want somebody who can tell me what's good.
I remember watching you pick out which of Rhett's songs to play first for a room of strangers back when nobody had heard of either of you.
You had better instincts than half the label executives I've met since, and I've met plenty. "
I laughed, an actual laugh, the first one that had come easily in days. "I used to think Rhett was just the talented one. I was the person who carried the merchandise boxes and made the flyers."
"You were the person who built the strategy," Nolan said, leaning forward. "He wrote the songs. You figured out how to get anybody to hear them. Those aren't the same job, and one of them isn't smaller than the other, whatever story you've been telling yourself for six years."
I doubted myself out loud for another ten minutes, listing every reason I lacked the obvious qualifications for something like this.
I had no formal training and had spent years away from the work, with instinct and old habit carrying most of what I knew.
Nolan let me finish every objection before he answered any of them, nodding along without rushing to fill the silences.
"Try it for a month," he said finally. "One night a week. If it doesn't work, you walk away and I've lost nothing but a Thursday, and you've lost nothing at all."
"And if it does work?"
"Then we figure out what comes next," he said. "No contract, no pressure. Just Thursdays, to start."
I agreed before I let myself think too hard about it, and spent the drive back turning over exactly what I would need to actually do the job well, a list already forming in my head before I'd even said yes out loud.
The following week I sat in the back office of the restaurant with a laptop and a stack of submission forms, listening through recordings for hours at a stretch, developing a system for sorting them that had nothing to do with any spreadsheet Nolan's previous booking manager had used.
I separated the pile into three categories, technically skilled but forgettable, genuinely interesting but unpolished, and the rare third pile that held both qualities at once, the pile Wren's audition eventually landed in.
It felt strangely similar to the years I'd spent listening to Rhett's early demos, trying to hear past the rough recording quality to whatever was actually true underneath it.
Nolan came by the office one afternoon while I was working through the pile and watched over my shoulder for a minute without saying anything.
"You've got a system," he said.
"I've always had a system," I said. "Nobody ever asked to see it before."
He pulled up a chair and sat across from me, more serious than his usual easy tone. "I've been thinking about something. What if this wasn't just Thursdays. What if you actually ran the music program across all three locations. Real title, real say in the budget, the whole thing."
I set down the recording I'd been listening to. "You barely know if Thursdays are going to work yet."
"I know enough," Nolan said. "I've watched you build a better process in three weeks than my last two booking managers built in two years combined. I'm not offering you a favor, Savannah. I'm offering you a job because you're good at it."
"Let me think about it."
"Take your time," he said, standing to leave. "The offer's not going anywhere. Neither, for what it's worth, am I, if you ever need somebody in your corner who isn't tangled up in the rest of it."
I sat with that for a long while after he left, turning the offer over the same way I'd turned over the guitar pick weeks earlier, uncertain whether I was ready to build something permanent while everything else in my life still hung so completely undecided.
My first real task was listening through submissions, a folder of recordings Nolan's assistant had collected from local musicians hoping for a slot, most of them competent and forgettable, a handful genuinely bad, and one, buried near the bottom, that stopped me halfway through the first verse because the girl singing it had a voice that cracked in exactly the place a voice is supposed to crack, unpolished but true in a way none of the others had managed.
I brought that recording to Nolan the next day. "Her. Whoever this is."
"Wren Castillo," he said, checking the file. "Nineteen. Never played anywhere bigger than her church."
"Book her."
"You sure? She's got no stage experience at all."
"I wasn't sure about a lot of things when I booked somebody's first real show either," I said. "Sometimes you just have to hear it."
Nolan looked at me closely, something like respect settling into his expression. "Alright. Your call. She's yours to prep."
Two weeks into the arrangement, a booking conflict landed in my lap when a touring act Nolan had promised the Thursday slot to canceled with less than three days' notice, and Nolan was out of town at a supplier meeting when the news came in.
His assistant called me in a small panic, unsure what to do with an empty slot and a room full of ticket holders expecting a show.
I spent the afternoon working the phone the way I used to work it for Rhett a decade earlier, calling every local musician I'd met in the last month, and by evening I had two acts willing to split the night, a folk duo and a solo guitarist who'd been begging for a slot since the first Thursday.
I called Nolan to tell him what I'd done, half expecting him to want final approval before it went out to the mailing list.
"You already fixed it?" he said. "Then it's fixed. I don't need to sign off on something you've already handled."
"I wanted to check with you first."
"Next time, don't," he said. "That's the whole point of trusting somebody with a job. Send the announcement."
The folk duo turned out to be a bigger draw than the original act would have been, word spreading fast enough that Nolan asked me afterward if I'd consider making them regulars rather than a one-off fix.
I said yes on the spot, no hesitation, and felt a small thrill at how easy the decision had been to make once I stopped waiting for someone else's approval to make it.
"You handled a crisis in an afternoon," Nolan told me later, closing out the register for the night. "Most people panic first and solve second. You skipped straight to solving."
"I've had practice," I said. "Different crisis, different decade, same basic skill."
Not every act I booked worked out as smoothly.
A guitarist named Dale, older than most of the performers I usually dealt with, showed up to his second Thursday visibly unprepared, half his set forgotten, blaming the sound system for problems that had nothing to do with the sound system.
I pulled him aside after the set instead of letting it slide the way the old booking manager apparently had for months.
"You didn't rehearse this week," I said. It wasn't a question.
"Things got busy."
"Things are always going to get busy," I said. "That's not an excuse I can build a stage schedule around. I need to know if this is something you want, because if it is, you treat every Thursday like it matters, not just the ones where nothing else came up."
Dale bristled, clearly unused to being spoken to so directly by someone half his age. "I've been playing longer than you've been alive."
"Maybe," I said. "But I'm the one deciding who plays this room, and right now that decision isn't looking good for you."
He didn't come back the following week, which stung less than I expected. Nolan asked about it a few days later, curious rather than concerned.
"You cut Dale?"
"He cut himself," I said. "I just told him the truth about what I saw."
"Good," Nolan said. "That's exactly the call I hired you to make. I was starting to wonder if you'd ever be willing to actually say no to somebody."
"I've had plenty of practice saying yes when I should have said no," I said. "I'm trying not to keep making that particular mistake."
Nolan watched me for a beat, something curious in his expression. "You want to talk about where that practice came from?"
"Not really. Not tonight."
"Fair enough," he said, easy, no pressure behind it. "Door's open whenever you do. I've got two ears and a bad habit of listening better than I talk."
"I'll keep that in mind."
"See that you do," he said, echoing a phrase I'd heard from someone else recently, though I couldn't quite place who, and let the register drawer close with a soft click that punctuated the end of the conversation better than any goodbye could have.
I drove home that night thinking about how many people in my life had started saying much the same thing lately, watch, wait, prove it with action instead of words.
It seemed like the whole world had quietly agreed on the same lesson at once, and I wondered whether Rhett was hearing an identical chorus from his own corner of it, or whether that particular wisdom only reached the people who'd already done the leaving.
It was such a small exchange, five sentences over a cup of coffee, but driving back to my parents' house that night I understood what had just happened.
Nolan had asked my opinion and trusted it completely, without checking it against anyone else's judgment first or running it past a publicist or an executive.
For the first time in longer than I could remember, I had made a decision that had nothing to do with Rhett's schedule, Rhett's career, or Rhett's reputation.
Nobody's brand depended on how it looked.
It was such a small thing. A trial run helping book local musicians at a Nashville restaurant while I was still living three hours away at my parents' house, trying to work out whether the marriage Rhett wanted to save could become something different from the one I had left.
It felt bigger than small. It felt like the first breath I had taken in years that was entirely my own, unshared, unmanaged, mine to spend however I decided.