Chapter 22
Savannah
He asked me to meet him at the bar in east Nashville a few days later, the same tiny room with the scarred wooden stage where I had first watched him perform for a crowd of maybe fifteen people, years before either of us had any reason to believe his life would turn into what it had become.
The place had not changed much. Same low ceiling, same battered upright piano in the corner missing the same two keys it had been missing for a decade, same smell of old beer and older wood that had somehow never bothered either of us, even when we couldn't afford to order more than one drink between the two of us and had to nurse it through his whole set.
Rhett was waiting when I arrived, no entourage, no security, sitting at the same corner table where I used to sit alone during his early sets, watching the door until I walked through it, his whole posture shifting when he saw me.
"I wanted to say this here," he said, once I sat down. "Not the house. Not somewhere the label picked out. Here, where none of this started with a camera in the room."
"Okay."
He did not reach for my hand, did not try to soften what was coming with a joke first. He just started talking, plainly, the way Maeve and Birdie and Earl had all, in their own ways, been telling him to talk for weeks.
"I'm sorry for every entrance you walked through alone while I walked through the front door with cameras on me," he said.
"I'm sorry for every rumor I let run instead of shutting it down the first time it started.
I'm sorry for every time you asked when things could change and I said later, because later was never a real plan, it was just a way of avoiding telling you no.
I'm sorry I made you feel unreasonable for wanting something as simple as existing in the open as my wife.
And I am more sorry than I know how to say for calling you part of my team in that hallway, because that wasn't a slip, Savannah.
That was six years of decisions, compressed into four words, and you deserved better than every single one of those years. "
I let him finish without interrupting, because he had earned that much at least, watching his hands twist together on the table like he needed somewhere to put all the words that weren't coming out.
"I found the list," I said, once he'd stopped. "In your office. The dates."
His expression stilled. "I wasn't sure you'd ever see that."
"Delia mentioned some other things too," I said. "The access protocols. The staff meeting. You've been making changes I wasn't supposed to see, is what I'm noticing, which is a strange thing to accuse somebody of when the changes are all good ones."
"I didn't do them for credit."
"I know," I said. "That's exactly why they mattered when I found them."
"Why did you write it?"
"Because Birdie asked me a question I couldn't answer," he said.
"How I could sing about love in front of fifty thousand strangers and not say four words in a hallway.
I couldn't answer it right then, so I started writing down every time I'd done some smaller version of the same thing, trying to find the pattern.
There were more of them than I wanted to find. "
"I'm not asking you to forgive me tonight," he continued. "I know I might have changed too late to matter. I understand that's a real possibility, and I'm not going to pretend it isn't just to make this conversation easier for me."
"I do believe you've changed," I said, and some of the tension left his shoulders. "Believing that is different from trusting it fully yet. Trust is going to take longer."
"I found the fund you set up," I said. "The one for spouses. Nobody would have known that was your idea if I hadn't gone digging through paperwork you left open on a desk."
"It wasn't supposed to be about credit."
"I know," I said. "That's exactly why it mattered."
"Slow and honest," he said. "I can do that. I want to do that."
"You're going to have to."
"I will let you set the pace on everything," he said. "The house, us, all of it. I'm not going to push, and if I catch myself pushing, I want you to tell me, because I don't fully trust my own instincts on this yet either."
"What if I need longer than you're hoping for?"
"Then it takes longer than I'm hoping for," he said. "I don't get to put a deadline on this. I forfeited that right the first time I said later and meant something different by it than you did."
"I saw the billboard came down."
"That was overdue by about six years," he said. "I'm not asking for credit for finally doing something that should have never gone up in the first place."
"I'm not giving you credit," I said. "I'm just telling you I noticed."
"Delia mentioned you slept on the couch in the photograph room a few nights ago."
"You knew about that?"
"She told me after the fact," he said. "I found you there myself, actually, the night I got the blanket. Didn't want to wake you and didn't want you to think I was watching you sleep like something out of a bad film, so I just covered you up and went to the guest room instead."
"That was you."
"That was me," he said. "I wasn't trying to make a gesture out of it. I just didn't want you cold on a couch in my own house."
"It wasn't nothing," I said. "Even the small things aren't nothing anymore. I notice all of them now."
"Good," he said. "That's the only way any of this works, I think. Noticing the small things instead of waiting for the big ones to fix everything at once."
We sat there a while longer, the bar around us thinning out as the night wore on, the bartender wiping down the far end of the counter with the unhurried patience of somebody who'd worked this room for years and had learned not to rush a couple deep in something that mattered.
"I don't know what happens next," I admitted. "I don't mean tonight. I mean what our life actually looks like from here. Do I move back in next week, next month? Do we tell people we're working on it or keep it private a little longer? I don't have a plan."
"Neither do I," Rhett said. "For once, I think that's alright. I spent six years following a plan that turned out to be wrong. Maybe not having one for a while is exactly what this needs."
"That's either very wise or very convenient."
"Probably both," he said, echoing Beau's words from weeks earlier without knowing it, and something about the unintentional overlap made me smile despite everything.
"What made you smile?"
"Nothing," I said. "Just something Beau said to you a few weeks back, apparently. Small world, married people ending up in the same conclusions from different directions."
"Beau give you advice about us?"
"Not exactly," I said. "Just a phrase. It stuck with him too, I think, more than he let on."
Rhett considered that for a moment, something thoughtful crossing his face. "Maybe we're not the only ones figuring something out this year."
"Maybe not," I said, and left it there, because that particular thread belonged to Beau and Lila to pull, not to us.
The bartender finally called last round, and Rhett walked me out to my car, hands in his pockets, no attempt to close the distance between us further than I'd already closed it myself.
He waited while I unlocked the door, then stepped back rather than lean in, giving me the space to decide whether tonight ended with anything more than words.
"Goodnight, Rhett."
"Goodnight, Savannah," he said, and stood in the parking lot until my taillights disappeared around the corner, a small thing I only knew because I checked my mirror twice before the turn, unable to help myself.
I drove back to my parents' house with the radio off again, the same silence that had filled the car the night I left Nashville, except this silence felt different, less like grief and more like the quiet a person needs to actually hear themselves think clearly for the first time in longer than they'd noticed going without it.
"What does slow look like to you?" I asked. "Say it out loud so we're not guessing at each other."
He thought about it for a moment. "It looks like me not asking you to move back in until you tell me you're ready. It looks like you keeping the work at Nolan's, whatever that becomes. It looks like me actually asking instead of assuming, every single time, even about the small things."
"That's a good start."
"There's one more thing," he said. "I talked to Troy about scaling back the touring schedule next year.
I won't cancel anything already booked, and I'm done adding more just because the label asks.
I want more of my life to actually happen at home, if home is still something you want to build with me. "
"That's a big change to make before you know if I'm staying."
"I'd rather make it and have you decide not to stay," he said, "than keep the old schedule and lose you for the same reasons twice."
"What does Troy think about it?"
"He thinks I'm insane," Rhett said, a small tired laugh escaping him.
"Told me the label's going to push back hard, that a lighter schedule means lighter revenue projections for next year's renewal talks.
I told him I've made plenty of decisions for revenue projections.
I'd like to make a few for something else for once. "
"And if the label really does push back?"
"Then I remind them who's actually walked out on that stage every night for fifteen years," he said. "I've given that company a lot of leverage over my life because I never once tested where the actual limits were. I'm testing them now."
I reached across the table then and took his hand, the first time I had touched him since the night of the award show, and felt him go still like he had been braced for me not to, his fingers tightening around mine almost involuntarily.
"Let's start there," I said. "One conversation at a time. No more later."