Chapter 13
Rhett
Jolene had grown up two towns over from where I did, a fact I'd learned from her the first week we started rehearsing the duet, back when we were still strangers finding our footing around each other's voices.
She'd talked about her grandmother's church choir and how she'd learned to sing standing on a folding chair so she could see over the pews, and I remembered thinking, at the time, that she reminded me of myself at nineteen, hungry and unguarded in a way the industry hadn't yet taught her to armor over.
Jolene found me in the hallway outside the studio two days after I told Troy and Kendra I wanted the bachelor branding undone, and I could tell from the set of her jaw before she said a word that someone had already told her more than I would have wanted to lead with myself.
"You're married," she said, not a question. "You've been married this whole time."
"Jolene..."
"Six years, according to what I just heard. Six years, and your team let the entire country think I might be your next girlfriend, let me stand up on that stage with you knowing exactly what they were selling and never once thought to mention it to me."
"I never asked for that," I said. "You're right that I let it keep happening."
"But you let it happen," she said, arms crossed, voice tight.
"You stood next to me on that stage and let the internet spend the whole night deciding whether we were sleeping together, and the entire time you had a wife sitting at home wondering why you couldn't say her name out loud.
Do you have any idea what that makes me look like now?
Some home-wrecker who didn't know any better? "
"I know it's not fair to you."
"I've spent three years building a name for myself that isn't just Rhett Callahan's duet partner," she said. "One headline like this and I'm the girl who almost broke up a marriage I didn't know existed. That's not a footnote I get to erase, Rhett. That follows an artist."
I did not try to defend myself, because there was no defending it, and any excuse I offered would only make it worse.
"You're right. I should have shut that speculation down the first time it came up, years before you were ever part of it.
That's on me, not on you, and I'm sorry it landed on you at all. You didn't do anything wrong."
She studied me a moment longer, some of the anger in her face giving way to something closer to disbelief, her arms slowly uncrossing.
"I actually thought you were single. I want you to know that.
I never would have done that duet the way I did it, with the eye contact and all of it, if I'd known there was somebody at home. "
"I know. That's on me too."
"What's she like?" Jolene asked, unexpectedly, some of the anger draining out of her voice. "Your wife. Is she anything like what people are going to assume?"
"No," I said. "She's better than anything anybody's going to assume, and she deserved better than what I gave her."
"How'd you two meet?"
The question caught me off guard, coming from someone who'd been furious with me two minutes earlier.
"Small bar in east Nashville. I was playing to about fifteen people who mostly wanted to hear somebody else's songs, and she was one of maybe three who actually listened.
Came up after and told me exactly what was wrong with my second verse. Wasn't gentle about it either."
"Was she right?"
"Completely," I said. "I rewrote it before I went to sleep that night, and it became the first song anybody outside my own head ever really responded to."
Something in Jolene's expression softened, just slightly. "That's not the story I expected from a man who spent six years pretending she didn't exist."
"No," I agreed. "It isn't. That's most of the problem, if I'm honest with you. The story that's true and the story I let everyone believe stopped matching up a long time ago, and I let the gap get wider every year instead of closing it."
"Fix it," she said. "Whatever you're planning to do, fix it fast, because I'm not interested in being anybody's cover story for the rest of my career. I've got my own name to build."
"You deserve that name built on your own terms," I said. "Not mine."
"I've spent three years watching people ask me about you in every single interview," Jolene said.
"Not my songwriting, not my voice, you. I used to think that was just the cost of doing business with a bigger name.
I'm starting to think it was something you could have stopped a long time ago if you'd wanted to badly enough. "
"You're right," I said. "I could have. I'm going to, starting today."
"You know what the worst part is?" Jolene said, some of the fight going out of her voice.
"I actually liked performing with you. That duet felt real to me, in the way a good performance is supposed to feel real, two people telling the truth about longing even though neither of us meant a word of it literally.
Finding out you were hiding an actual marriage the whole time makes me wonder what else about working with you was staged that I didn't know to question. "
"None of the music was staged," I said. "That part was always real. I never once had to fake caring about the songs."
"That's easy to say now."
"It was true then too," I said. "I just never had a reason to say it out loud until you asked."
"Maybe," she said. "I don't know anymore. I think I need some time before I can tell the difference."
"That's fair."
"It better not." She paused at the door, one hand on the frame. "Whatever it means, I hope you fix whatever's actually broken. Not the headline. The marriage."
She left without waiting for a response, which I understood and didn't try to stop.
I called Kendra the second Jolene walked away. "End the speculation. All of it. Today."
"That's going to raise questions we can't fully control," Kendra said. "Once we deny the Jolene angle without offering an alternative, people are going to ask why. They're going to dig, and once they start digging they tend to find things faster than we can manage the finding."
"Let them ask."
There was a pause on the line, a pause Kendra rarely allowed herself, one that told me she was recalculating something. "You understand what you're deciding here. This isn't a small statement. This is the start of something we can't fully take back once it's out."
"I also want the tour poster downtown pulled," I said. "The bachelor one. Savannah mentioned it's still up."
"That campaign's contracted through the end of the month with the billboard company."
"Buy out the contract," I said. "Today. I don't care what it costs."
"I understand," I said. "I'm done deciding my marriage doesn't exist because it's inconvenient for a headline. I've been doing that for years and I'm not doing it for one more day."
"Alright," she said, and I heard something shift in her voice, resignation giving way to something almost like relief. "Give me twenty-four hours to draft language that doesn't blow everything up at once. After that, it's your call how far we take it."
I called Beau that evening, mostly because I needed to hear a voice that wasn't attached to a contract or a headline.
"You sound different," Beau said, after I'd talked for a few minutes. "Lighter, maybe, underneath all the panic."
"I feel like I just jumped off something without checking how deep the water was."
"Sometimes that's the only way to find out," Beau said. "You spend too long checking, you talk yourself out of jumping at all. For what it's worth, for whatever a friend's opinion is worth right now, I think this is the first honest decision you've made about your own life in years."
"Feels like it, some hours. Feels like the stupidest thing I've ever done, other hours."
"Probably both," Beau said. "Most of the good decisions are."
"Can I ask you something?" I said. "Have you and Lila ever had a version of this? Something you were hiding, even small, that finally came out?"
There was a pause on the line long enough that I understood I'd touched something real. "Smaller scale," Beau said finally. "Yeah. We've got our own version of a hallway we haven't fully walked through yet. Watching you go through this has made me think about a few things."
"If it helps, waiting doesn't make it smaller. I waited six years and mine only got bigger."
"Duly noted," Beau said, quieter now. "I'll think about that."
"Lila's a good woman, Beau. Whatever you're sitting on, she deserves the same thing Savannah deserved and didn't get. The truth, sooner rather than later."
"I hear you," Beau said. "Doesn't make it easier to say out loud, though, does it."
"No," I agreed. "It doesn't. But it gets easier every time after the first."
"How'd you get the nerve, in the end? To finally say it on camera?"
I thought about the question honestly before answering. "I stopped asking whether I was ready and just did it anyway. Waiting for ready was how I lost six years in the first place. Ready was never going to arrive on its own."
"That's either terrifying or the most useful thing anybody's told me in months."
"Probably both," I said, and heard Beau laugh, a short, surprised sound, like the answer had landed somewhere he hadn't expected it to reach.
"You should write a song about this," Beau said. "The whole thing. The hallway, the fallout, all of it."
"Maybe someday. Not yet. It's still too close to be a song. Right now it's just my actual life, and I'd rather live through the ending before I start turning it into three verses and a chorus."
"Fair," Beau said. "Let me know when you're ready. I'll be the first to buy the record."