Chapter 16
Savannah
Nolan's trial Thursday turned into three Thursdays, and by the third one I had found a nineteen-year-old singer named Wren who played guitar like she had been doing it for twenty years and sang like she had already lived through every song she wrote, showing up to the first tryout so nervous her hands shook on the strings and leaving two hours later like a different person entirely.
I spent two weeks helping her build a set list that actually showed off what she could do, the same way I had once built set lists at a kitchen table for a man who had gone on to sell out arenas, and I felt something settle in me every time we worked through it together, an old muscle I hadn't used in years remembering how to move.
Wren had grown up two counties over, the daughter of a preacher who didn't approve of her playing bar rooms, and she told me all of this over coffee one afternoon with the particular openness of someone who hadn't had many people ask about her life before.
"You really think I'm ready for a real crowd?" she asked me, the day before the showcase, her fingers picking anxiously at a loose thread on her sleeve.
"I think you're more ready than you know," I said. "The nerves don't go away. You just learn to play through them."
"How do you know that?"
"Because I watched somebody else learn it, a long time ago," I said, and left it at that.
Two days before the showcase, Wren's guitar developed a buzz on the low E string that neither of us could find the source of, and she nearly canceled the whole thing over it, convinced it was a sign she wasn't ready.
I sat with her for two hours at the venue, taking the guitar apart string by string until we found a loose bit of hardware near the bridge, and by the time we fixed it she had stopped talking about canceling entirely, too absorbed in getting the tone right again to remember she'd ever doubted herself.
"You could have just told me it would be fine," she said, watching me tighten the last screw.
"I could have," I agreed. "But you needed to see the actual problem get fixed, not just hear somebody promise you it wasn't a problem at all."
Midway through the set, the venue's ancient sound system cut out for nearly ten seconds, a full silence in the middle of Wren's second song, long enough for panic to cross her face before she caught herself and kept singing unamplified, her voice carrying to the back of the room on its own.
I signaled the sound technician from the side of the stage, found the loose cable myself when he couldn't locate it fast enough, and had the system back before the next verse, all of it happening quietly enough that half the crowd never noticed anything had gone wrong at all.
Afterward, Wren found me by the bar, still catching her breath. "I almost walked off. Right in the middle of it."
"You didn't, though."
"Because you fixed it before I had time to."
"I fixed the cable," I said. "You're the one who kept singing through ten seconds of dead air in front of forty strangers. That's not something I could have fixed for you even if I'd wanted to."
"How did you stay so calm out there? I was watching you from the stage. You didn't even flinch."
"I've watched somebody freeze in front of a crowd before," I said, thinking of Rhett's first real showcase, years earlier, a broken string in the middle of his best song and the particular silence of an audience deciding whether to be patient.
"I learned a long time ago that the fix matters more than the panic.
Panic doesn't get the sound back on. Somebody moving toward the problem does. "
"I want to be that calm someday."
"You will be," I said. "Give it a few more shows with something going wrong. That's usually what it takes."
Nolan found me afterward, counting the night's till with a grin he didn't try to hide. "Best Thursday we've had yet. You should think about doing this full time."
"I have a lot going on right now."
"I know," he said. "I'm not asking you to decide tonight. I'm just telling you what I saw out there, in case it helps whatever you're figuring out."
Wren found me minutes later, still buzzing from the set, her mother trailing a few steps behind with an expression I couldn't quite place, somewhere between pride and discomfort.
"My mother came," Wren said, like she still couldn't quite believe it. "She's never once come to a show. Not even the church ones back home."
Wren's mother approached slowly, clutching her purse with both hands. "I didn't understand what she was doing with all this," she said to me, not quite meeting my eyes. "Her father still doesn't. I came tonight because I wanted to see it for myself before I decided what to think."
"And?"
"And I think my daughter is better at this than either of us gave her credit for," she said, something loosening in her voice. "I don't know what to do with that yet. But I saw it."
Wren hugged her mother right there in the middle of the room, and I stepped back to give them the moment, thinking of my own mother's kitchen table, of Rhett's grandmother's hard-won honesty, of how much of this work seemed to come down to people finally being witnessed by the family members who mattered most.
Wren's mother approached me again before they left, hesitant. "You're the reason she's this good this fast, aren't you. She talks about you like you're the reason any of this seemed possible at all."
"She's got the talent. I just helped her point it in the right direction."
"That's not nothing," the woman said. "Somebody pointed my daughter in a direction her own mother was too scared to point her in. I won't forget that."
She hesitated a moment longer, glancing back toward Wren, who was gathering her guitar case near the stage.
"For what it's worth, I've read the headlines about you too.
I don't know your husband, so it isn't my place to judge him.
I do know what it's like when somebody finally takes responsibility. Sometimes that matters."
"Thank you," I said, and meant it more than my voice probably managed to convey.
Wren's mother left with a small wave, and I watched her go, thinking about my own mother's face the night I'd shown up on her doorstep with a suitcase, the way she hadn't asked a single question before pulling me inside.
Some mothers needed to see the proof before they could offer their blessing.
Others simply trusted their daughters enough to skip that step entirely.
I wasn't sure yet which kind Wren's mother would turn out to be, but tonight, at least, she'd decided to see for herself, and that alone counted for something.
The showcase night drew the biggest crowd the venue had seen on a weeknight, forty people packed into a room built for thirty, and Wren closed with an original song that left half the room quiet in the particular way only a genuinely good song can manage, a quiet that wasn't empty at all.
I saw Rhett near the back of the room about halfway through the set.
He had come alone, no entourage, no security detail hovering by the door, wearing a plain jacket with a cap pulled low enough that most of the crowd never clocked him at all.
I nearly missed him myself, and only caught his face because I happened to glance toward the door at the exact moment the light from the stage swept across it.
He did not approach me during the show. He stayed at the back, watching, one shoulder against the wall like he was trying to take up as little space as possible, and when Wren finished her final song he slipped out before the applause had fully died down, gone before I could decide whether I wanted to go find him or not.
He texted an hour later. You were good at that tonight.
I stared at the message longer than I meant to before I answered.
It said nothing about coming home. It asked nothing of me at all.
It was the first thing he had done since the award show that did not seem to be angling toward an immediate return on investment, no request folded quietly into the compliment.
I'm proud of you, the second text said. That's all. Didn't want to interrupt your night to say it in person.
I did not know what to do with a version of Rhett who showed up quietly, watched, and left without asking for anything in return.
It unsettled me more than the flowers had, more than the jewelry, more than the guitar pick that had arrived without a card.
Every other gesture he had made since I left had come with an expectation attached, spoken or not, a debt I was meant to eventually repay by softening toward him.
This one did not, and I found myself sitting in my car outside the venue for a long time afterward, engine off, phone in my lap, trying to figure out what to make of a man who was finally, possibly, learning to want something for me instead of from me.
I mentioned it to Daisy the next morning, half expecting her to be suspicious of it the way she'd been suspicious of everything else he'd sent.
"Maybe he's actually trying," Daisy said, surprising me. "I know I've been the loudest voice telling you not to trust it. I still think you shouldn't rush anything. Showing up quietly, then leaving without asking for credit, sounds different from what he used to do."
"You're allowed to still be angry at him and say that."
"I am angry at him," Daisy said. "Both things can be true. I can want to throw something at his head and also notice when he does something that isn't about himself for a change."