Chapter 14
Savannah
Isaw the statement before Rhett called to tell me about it, a short line from his publicity team denying any romantic involvement with Jolene Price and asking the press to respect both artists' privacy.
It stopped short of mentioning me by name, but it was the first thing he had done in years to actively push back against a rumor instead of letting it run its course unchecked.
He called that afternoon and asked if he could see me. I said yes before I had time to talk myself out of it, surprising myself with how quickly the word came.
We met at a coffee shop near my parents' house, neutral ground, a place with mismatched chairs and a chalkboard menu that hadn't been updated in weeks.
He looked different than he had at the award show two weeks earlier, less polished, like a man who had not slept well in a while and had stopped trying to hide it, dark circles he usually covered with makeup for photo shoots now plainly visible.
He had picked this particular coffee shop, I noticed, watching him wait for me at a corner table, because it was two blocks from the diner where we'd had our first real date, back when neither of us had two dollars to spare for anything fancier than coffee.
He'd probably picked it on purpose, some quiet gesture toward the people we used to be, though he didn't say so and I didn't ask.
"I love you," he said, before I had even sat down fully. "I've always loved you. I need you to know that whatever else I got wrong, that part was never a performance. Not for one day of the last six years."
"I never doubted that you loved me," I said, settling into the chair across from him. "I doubted that loving me mattered more to you than being seen a certain way. Those aren't the same thing, Rhett, even though you've spent years acting like they were."
"It does matter more. It matters more than anything."
"Then why did it take a reporter cornering you in a hallway for anything to change? Why didn't it matter more three years ago, or five, when I first started asking?"
He did not have an answer for that, and I did not need him to invent one, watching him search for something honest and come up empty.
"Do you remember the night I asked you at your label dinner?
" I said. "Three years ago. I asked if we could just tell people, and you changed the subject before I'd even finished the sentence.
I've thought about that dinner more than almost any other night in our marriage.
It wasn't dramatic. It was quiet, which is exactly why it stuck.
You didn't even seem to notice you were doing it. "
"I remember the dinner. I don't remember changing the subject."
"That's exactly what I mean," I said. "It was so automatic for you that it didn't even register as a decision. That's what scares me more than the award show does. The award show was one bad moment under pressure. The dinner was just an ordinary Tuesday where you didn't think twice about it."
He absorbed that for a long moment, something working behind his eyes. "I think that might be the truest thing anybody's said to me about any of this."
We sat there a while longer, the coffee shop emptying around us as the afternoon wore on, a barista wiping down tables with the particular unhurried thoroughness of someone closing up for the day. Rhett watched her work for a moment before speaking again.
"I used to think if I just got big enough, successful enough, none of the old fears would matter anymore," he said. "Turns out you can sell out arenas and still be the same scared kid who doesn't know how to say the true thing out loud. The stage just got bigger. The fear came right along with it."
"That's the most honest thing you've said all afternoon."
"I've been saving it," he said, something almost like a smile crossing his face, gone as quickly as it appeared. "Didn't want to lead with the whole diagnosis before I'd earned the right to say it out loud."
"You don't have to earn honesty, Rhett. You just have to decide to say it, every time, even when it costs you something."
He nodded slowly, turning his empty cup in his hands.
"I keep thinking about the ballad I played you the morning of the awards show.
You told me the bridge was too crowded, that I'd buried the vocal under the strings again.
You were right, same as you're always right about the parts of me I try to hide under something louder. "
"I wasn't talking about the song."
"I know," he said. "But it's the same problem, isn't it. Burying the true thing under something that sounds impressive instead of just letting the true thing stand on its own."
"Strip it back, then," I said, echoing my own words from the morning of the show. "The marriage version, not the album version."
"I'm trying to. It's harder than stripping a mix. There's no producer I can blame for building it too loud in the first place."
"No," I agreed. "Just you."
"Just me," he said, and didn't flinch from it, which was itself different from every other version of this conversation we'd had before.
The barista called out that they were closing in ten minutes, and neither of us moved right away, both reluctant to let the conversation end on whatever note it might end on if we let the closing time dictate it instead of us.
Finally Rhett stood, leaving cash on the table for coffee we'd barely touched.
"Same time next week?" he asked. "No pressure if you're not ready. I just wanted the door open."
"Same time next week," I said, and meant it, surprising myself with how easily the answer came.
"The award show didn't break anything, Rhett," I said.
"It just showed me what had already broken, out loud, in front of a camera crew instead of just between the two of us where I could keep pretending it wasn't as bad as it felt.
You loved me for six years in every room nobody else could see.
That's real, and I know it's real, but it isn't the same as loving me in front of people, and I need you to understand the difference, because I don't think you ever have, not really, not underneath whatever you've told yourself about protecting me. "
He sat with that for a while, long enough that the coffee between us went cold and neither of us reached for it, long enough that I watched something shift behind his eyes, the particular stillness of a man finally hearing a sentence he had avoided for years.
"I loved you where nobody could see me doing it," he repeated quietly, as though hearing the words clearly for the first time. "That's exactly what I did. I never once thought of it that way until you just said it back to me."
"Yes," I said. "That's exactly what you did."
"I don't know how to fix six years in one conversation."
"You can't," I said. "I'm not asking you to. I'm asking you to stop pretending the fix is small."
"I keep wanting to find the one thing I can do that undoes all of it," he said. "One grand apology, one big gesture, something that makes the math balance out again."
"There isn't one," I said. "That's the part you have to actually sit with, Rhett. There's no single thing. There's just time, and whether you're willing to spend it differently than you have been."
"What does a fix that isn't small even look like to you?"
I thought about it for a moment, wanting to give him a real answer instead of something vague.
"It looks like consequences you actually let land instead of managing your way around.
It looks like time. It looks like me watching you do the hard thing more than once before I trust that it wasn't just guilt talking. "
"I can live with that," he said.
"There's something else," I said, turning my cup between my hands. "I need to know this isn't happening because you got caught. I need to know some part of you would have eventually done this even if that reporter never asked me who I was."
He went quiet, and I appreciated that he didn't rush to answer, that he actually seemed to weigh the question honestly instead of reaching for whatever response might land best.
"I don't know if I can promise you that with total certainty," he finally said.
"I'd like to believe I would have. But I also know I had six years of chances to do this without being caught, and I let every single one of them pass.
So the honest answer is I don't know, and I think you deserve the honest answer more than you deserve a reassuring one. "
"Thank you for saying that instead of the easier thing."
"I'm trying to only say true things to you from here forward," he said. "Even when the true thing makes me look worse."
"You used to write me songs about small things," I said. "The color of the kitchen. A fight we had about nothing. You don't write about small things anymore. Everything's a bridge to a chorus about heartbreak or triumph, nothing in between."
"I stopped noticing the small things," he admitted. "I think that's the same problem, just showing up in a different room of my life."
"Maybe start there, then," I said. "Not with some grand gesture. Just start noticing small things again."
He reached for my hand across the table and I let him take it, though I didn't lace my fingers through his the way I used to without thinking, and I think we both noticed the difference without either of us saying so.