Chapter 18
Savannah
Iwatched the interview alone in my parents' living room, my mother hovering in the doorway pretending to fold laundry, my father very obviously not reading the newspaper he held in front of his face, both of them clearly aware I needed the room to feel like it was just mine even though neither of them left it.
My first reaction was anger, sharp and immediate. Rhett had ended six years of secrecy on national television without calling me first, without asking whether I was ready for the entire country to know my name, without giving me any say at all in how this particular door got opened.
"He didn't even warn me," I said out loud, to no one and everyone.
"No," Maeve agreed, setting down the shirt she'd been folding for the third time without actually folding it. "He didn't."
My phone had already started buzzing by the time the segment finished, an unknown number, then another, then a text from an address I didn't recognize claiming to be a reporter from a national outlet asking for comment on my marriage.
I turned the phone face down on the coffee table and didn't touch it again for an hour.
I watched the clip a second time, and a third, and somewhere around the fourth viewing I started noticing what he had not done as much as what he had.
He had not blamed Troy or Kendra or the label.
He had not called the years of hiding a mutual arrangement, the easy lie that would have cost him nothing and cost me everything.
He had not tried to spin his own confession into sympathy, had not mentioned my name at all, had kept the door I still needed closed shut even while he tore his own reputation open in front of the country, and had even asked, at the end, for people to leave me out of it.
By evening, the internet had done what the internet does, and my name had surfaced anyway, some enterprising fan finding old photographs from our courthouse wedding and a local paper's coverage of one of Rhett's earliest shows, a grainy shot of me standing in the crowd nine years younger and completely unguarded, my whole face turned toward the stage like there was nothing else in the world worth looking at.
Within hours, three different outlets had published pieces attempting to reconstruct my entire biography from public records, my maiden name, the high school I'd attended, an old employer from the feed store years who apparently gave a quote to a reporter describing me as quiet and hardworking, details that felt both accurate and violating at once, facts about my life laid out for strangers to consume over their morning coffee.
A blogger with a modest following managed to find my sister's name within the same afternoon, and Daisy spent an hour deleting old social media posts she hadn't thought about in years, muttering the entire time about wishing she'd made her accounts private a decade earlier.
By nine that evening, a photographer had climbed the fence of a neighboring property to get a shot of our house from an angle the street didn't allow, and the neighbor called Maeve directly, more amused than upset, to ask if she wanted the police involved or if she'd rather just laugh about it over coffee sometime.
Maeve picked the coffee, though she did mention it to Earl, who made a point of walking the property line twice that night with a flashlight, muttering the whole time about people with no respect for a fence.
A local news van parked at the end of our street by nightfall, and Earl went out to have a quiet word with the driver that resulted in the van moving two blocks away before dinner.
He came back inside rubbing the back of his neck, an old habit from whenever he was more rattled than he wanted to admit.
"They asked if you were home," he told me. "I told them that wasn't any of their business, and the young man had the sense to look embarrassed about asking."
Daisy showed me the trending searches with grim satisfaction, scrolling through them on her phone with the particular energy of someone who couldn't decide if she was more angry or more entertained.
"They're calling you the mystery wife. Half of them think you're a tragic figure.
The other half think you're about to walk away with half his fortune, and there's apparently a whole thread arguing about which one is more likely. "
"I don't want to be a headline," I said.
""Too late," Daisy said, not unkindly, setting the phone face down on the table between us. "The question now is whether you hate him for finally telling the truth, or whether some part of you is glad he was finally willing to lose something over it."
I didn't answer right away, and Daisy, for once, didn't push. She sat with me instead, scrolling through nothing in particular on her own phone, offering the specific company that doesn't demand a response, and I found myself grateful for it in a way I didn't have words for yet.
Maeve came in a while later with a plate of food I hadn't asked for and set it down in front of me without comment, the universal maternal gesture for a daughter who needs feeding more than she needs advice.
I ate without tasting much of it, my mind still circling the interview, the trending searches, the strange sensation of an entire country suddenly having an opinion about a marriage that had, until three days ago, belonged to exactly two people.
"You don't have to decide anything tonight," Maeve said, clearing the plate once I'd picked at enough of it to satisfy her. "Whatever this turns into, it doesn't have to turn into it right this minute."
Earl came back inside from his conversation with the news van, sitting down heavy in his chair by the window. "For what it's worth," he said, "the boy said your name never once. I'll give him that much."
"He said he wanted you left alone," Maeve added. "I watched the whole thing twice trying to find the catch in it and I didn't find one."
"I keep waiting for the part where it turns out to be strategy," I admitted. "Some angle I haven't spotted yet."
"Maybe there isn't one," Earl said. "Maybe a man can just do the right thing sometimes without it being a play for something else. I know that's a hard thing to trust after six years, but it happens, even to men who've spent a long time forgetting how."
Daisy, scrolling through yet another headline on her phone, looked up with something between amusement and disbelief. "There's already a thread comparing you to some tragic country song heroine. Somebody's proposing a title. The Wife Nobody Knew, or something along those lines."
"Wonderful," I said. "I get to be a headline and a bad song title in the same week."
"Could be worse," Daisy said. "At least it's not your face on the tabloid cover. Small mercies."
That changed within the hour. Somebody had dug up a photo from a farmers market two towns over, taken years earlier, long before any of this started, me in a sundress laughing at something out of frame, and a tabloid ran it beside the headline about the mystery wife as though it had been taken yesterday.
My mother saw it first and set her phone down without a word, her jaw tight in a way I recognized from every difficult conversation of my childhood.
"They didn't even ask," she said. "Just took an old photo of my daughter and slapped a stranger's headline on it."
"That's how this works now, apparently."
"It shouldn't," Maeve said. "I don't care how many years that man's been famous. Nobody gave a magazine permission to use your face like a prop."
I didn't have an answer for that, because she wasn't wrong, and being right didn't change anything about how exposed the whole situation left me feeling, sitting in my childhood living room while strangers argued online about a photo of me from a farmers market I barely remembered visiting.
Daisy, ever practical in a crisis, spent the next hour drafting a polite but firm request to the tabloid's editorial team asking them to take the photo down, citing its age and the misleading context. She copied Kendra's office on it without asking anyone's permission first.
"You didn't have to do that," I told her.
"Somebody had to," Daisy said. "Might as well be me, since I'm apparently better at strongly worded emails than either of you right now."
The photo came down within the day, whether from Daisy's email or from pressure Kendra's team applied on their end, I never fully learned, and didn't much care which. It was down, and for the first time since the interview aired, something had actually gotten smaller instead of bigger.
Maeve came to find me before bed, sitting on the edge of my old bed the way she used to when I was small and couldn't sleep. "I know this feels like it's never going to end. It will. Maybe it won't happen tonight or next week. Eventually the world will find something else to talk about."
"How do you know that?"
"Because that's how it's always worked, since long before either of us was born," she said. "Fame is a fire that needs constant feeding. Eventually it moves on to easier kindling. You just have to survive being the thing it's currently burning."
It wasn't the most comforting thing anyone had said to me that week, but it was, I thought, probably the truest.
Maeve stood to leave, then paused at the door.
"If it helps, I read a piece today calling you the strongest woman in country music right now.
I don't know if that's true. I know you're my daughter, and you were strong long before any of this, back when nobody was watching closely enough to write a headline about it. "
"Thank you, Mama."
"Sleep if you can," she said. "Tomorrow's another day of this, probably. Might as well face it rested."
I did not have an answer that night. I lay awake a long time in my childhood bedroom, staring at the ceiling, feeling the particular vertigo of a private life becoming public property overnight, and underneath the anger and the exposure I found, unwelcome and undeniable, the smallest flicker of something that might have been hope, small enough that I almost talked myself out of noticing it at all.