Chapter 23
Rhett
Weeks passed slower and better than I expected, Savannah gradually spending more time at the Nashville house while keeping her work at Nolan's venue firmly her own, building a life that belonged to her regardless of what happened with us.
I did not push for her to give any of it up.
I had learned, finally, what it cost her the last time I asked her to fold herself into something smaller for my sake, and I had no intention of making that mistake twice.
She moved back into the house gradually, a few boxes one week, more the next, and we developed a habit of sitting on the back porch most evenings when I wasn't traveling, talking through the day the way we used to before either of us had reason to guard our words.
We had one difficult stretch a few months in, when an old photo resurfaced online of me at a charity gala two years earlier, standing close to a singer I barely remembered, the caption speculating about a romance that had never existed.
Savannah found it before I did, and I watched her go quiet in a way that told me she was working hard not to spiral into old patterns of doubt.
"I don't know that woman," I said, before she'd even asked. "I met her once, for maybe ten minutes, at an event neither of us wanted to be at."
"I believe you," she said. "That's not actually the problem."
"Then what is?"
"The problem is I used to see photos like that for years and just swallow the feeling," she said. "I'm trying to learn how to say it out loud instead of swallowing it, and I don't know how to do that gracefully yet."
"You don't have to do it gracefully," I said. "You just have to do it. I'd rather have this exact conversation every week for the rest of my life than go back to you swallowing things because it was easier for me."
She exhaled, some of the tension leaving her shoulders. "I keep expecting you to get tired of these conversations."
"I got tired of the six years where we didn't have them," I said. "This is easy by comparison."
Later that same week, a magazine reached out requesting a joint interview, the two of us together, our story told properly for the first time. I brought the request to Savannah before answering, the way I'd promised myself I would with anything touching our life together.
"Absolutely not," she said, immediate and certain.
"That's what I told them too," I said. "I just wanted you to hear that I turned it down before you heard it from anybody else."
"Thank you for asking first."
"That's the whole plan now," I said. "Ask first. Every time. Even when I already know what the answer's going to be."
Troy called later that week with an update on the sponsors we'd lost, most of them gone for good, a few tentatively circling back now that the story had settled into something closer to respect than scandal.
"Slower rebuild than the old model," he said, "but a sturdier one, probably.
Companies like attaching themselves to something real, once they get over the initial nerves. "
"I'm not in a hurry."
"I've noticed," Troy said, something almost fond in his voice. "It's a good look on you, not being in a hurry. Took you long enough to find it."
"You planning to stick around and watch the slower version of my career play out?"
"Wouldn't miss it," Troy said. "Eight years in, I've earned the right to see how this chapter ends. Besides, somebody's got to keep telling the board you know what you're doing, even when the numbers look scary for a quarter or two."
"Appreciate that more than you probably know."
"I know exactly how much," Troy said. "You've told me twice this call already.
Might be a record for you." Some nights the conversation stayed easy.
Other nights it circled back to the same old wounds, and I learned to let it circle without rushing to close the subject down the way I once would have.
"I still catch myself waiting for the version of you that disappears when the cameras show up," she told me one evening, watching the last light go out over the yard.
"I know," I said. "I don't expect that to stop just because I want it to."
"I'm not saying it to hurt you. I'm just telling you it's still there."
"I'd rather you tell me than not," I said, and meant it, though the old instinct to defend myself had flared for a second before I managed to set it down.
We had a harder conversation a few weeks later, when a tour offer came in for a joint appearance with three other acts, a high-visibility slot my old team would have jumped at without a second thought.
I brought it to Savannah before I brought it to Troy, laying out the details plainly, the dates, the exposure, the money, and telling her I wanted her opinion before I gave anyone an answer.
"Why are you asking me?" she said. "It's your tour."
"Because it affects our life, not just my career," I said. "I spent six years making decisions like this without you in the room. I'm not doing that again just because it's easier."
She thought about it for a long moment. "Take it, if you want it. Just don't schedule it over the two weeks I already told you I need for the fall showcase circuit. That's mine, and I'm not moving it for anybody's tour."
"Done," I said, and meant it, writing the dates down before I'd even called Troy back, a small unremarkable negotiation that would have been unthinkable a year earlier, when my calendar had simply been handed to her after the fact, finished and unchangeable.
We also had to work out what public life would look like going forward, a conversation that took most of one long Sunday afternoon on the back porch.
She wanted no more surprise interviews, nothing about our marriage discussed publicly without her seeing it first. I agreed without hesitation, and we wrote it down together, an actual list taped inside a kitchen drawer, half joke and half genuine boundary, a document that would have seemed absurd to either of us six years earlier and now felt like the only sane way to build something that might actually last.
There were nights that were harder than others.
One evening a magazine ran a retrospective piece about my career, a full page dedicated to the bachelor years, complete with old quotes I'd given about being married to the road, and Savannah found it before I did, left it open on the kitchen counter without a word.
I found her later on the back porch, arms wrapped around her knees, staring out at nothing.
"I'm not upset about the article," she said, before I could ask. "I'm upset that I still flinch every time one of those old quotes resurfaces. I thought I was further past it than I am."
"You don't have to be further past it on any particular schedule," I said, sitting down beside her, careful to leave space until she closed it herself. "I put those quotes into the world. I don't get to also tell you how fast you're allowed to heal from them."
She leaned into my shoulder eventually, not right away, and we sat there a long while without talking, a silence that had become easier between us than it used to be, less like something to fill and more like something to simply share.
"I keep waiting for you to get tired of the version of me that flinches at old headlines," she said eventually.
"I'm not going anywhere," I said. "You don't owe me a timeline for when you stop flinching. I'm the reason the headlines exist in the first place."
"That's a generous way to look at it."
"It's an accurate way to look at it," I said. "Generosity would be pretending the headlines were somebody else's fault."
We talked most nights, small conversations that had nothing urgent riding on them, updates about Wren's progress or a song I was working on or nothing at all, just the sound of each other's day.
It was strange, how much I had missed exactly that, the ordinary parts of a marriage I'd let myself take for granted for years.
She came to one of my shows toward the end of the tour, the first time she had attended a performance since the award show months earlier, and this time she stayed backstage after rather than being ushered somewhere quieter out of view.
I introduced her to the new members of the crew myself, by name, without any explanation attached beyond the truth.
A young stagehand who did not recognize her approached while I was signing a stack of merchandise for the crew, glancing between us with open curiosity.
"Sorry, who is this?" he asked, nodding toward Savannah.
I looked at her first, the way I should have looked at her in that hallway months ago, giving her the space to answer for herself if she wanted it, or to signal that she'd rather I handle it, or anything in between, waiting for whatever she needed from me in that moment.
She gave me the smallest nod, permission and invitation both.
"My wife," I said.
No speech. No camera crew angling for the moment.
No careful phrasing designed to manage anybody's reaction.
Just the truth, said plainly, to a stagehand who had no idea he had just witnessed the thing I had failed to say to a reporter on the biggest night of my career, the same two words that had cost me nothing at all to finally say out loud.
The stagehand nodded, unbothered, already moving on to the next question about the merchandise boxes, and that was exactly what I wanted, the ordinary shrug of somebody hearing a true thing stated plainly, nothing more remarkable than that.
We walked back to the greenroom together afterward, and Savannah stopped at the same wall of photographs I'd noticed months earlier, the gallery of past winners and their families. She studied my old solo photograph for a moment without saying anything.
"They'll probably update this one eventually," I said. "Add you to it, if they ever get around to reprinting."
"I don't need to be on a wall," she said. "I just needed to stop being erased from the room the photograph was taken in."
Savannah's hand found mine, and I understood that this small unremarkable exchange, forgotten by everyone else in that hallway within the hour, meant more to both of us than the trophy I had won the night everything fell apart.