Chapter 24
Savannah
Several months later, Rhett and I were living together again in the Nashville house, though I kept my days at Nolan's venue on the calendar every week regardless of his schedule, and he had stopped entirely expecting me to build my life around his.
He'd started asking about Wren's progress unprompted, remembering names of the other performers I worked with, small things that told me he was actually paying attention rather than performing interest.
I had taken Nolan up on his offer eventually, after weeks of turning it over, and the title on my new business cards read Director of Artist Development, a phrase that had felt almost absurd to say out loud the first few times, though it fit better with each month that passed.
Rhett had framed one of the cards, unprompted, and hung it in his office next to his own platinum records, a small gesture that told me more about how far he'd come than any speech could have managed.
My work with the live-music program had grown past Thursday nights into something closer to a real position, three venues now instead of one, and Wren had signed with a small label of her own, a fact that made me prouder than almost anything I had accomplished in my own career, prouder even than I expected it to.
We attended a major industry event together that fall, an event that once would have sent me through a side entrance while Rhett walked the carpet alone.
This time I walked beside him, in full view of every camera lined up along the barricade, and reporters who had spent months speculating about the mystery wife finally got their answer in the most ordinary way possible.
My name. My hand in his. Nothing hidden and nothing performed, just two people walking into a building together the way married people do.
I did not suddenly enjoy the attention. I was not built for it the way some people seemed to be, and I doubted I ever would be, my hand tightening in his more than once when a flash went off too close.
What mattered was not the cameras themselves.
What mattered was that nobody backstage or on that carpet was asking me to disappear so someone else's story could run more smoothly.
A reporter called out a question as we passed, asking how long we'd actually been married, and Rhett answered without missing a step, six years, plainly, the way a man states a fact rather than defends one.
Another asked if I had any comment on the months of speculation, and I found, surprising myself, that I did.
"Only that I was here the whole time," I said. "I just wasn't standing where anybody thought to look."
It wasn't a clever line. It wasn't designed for a headline the way so many of Rhett's old answers had been. It was just true, and saying it out loud, on a carpet, in front of cameras that had spent months guessing at my existence, felt like closing a door that had been left open far too long.
Inside, at the reception after, I found myself talking with a young songwriter's wife who had clearly recognized something of her own marriage in the headlines from earlier that year.
I spent twenty minutes telling her what I wished somebody had told me years earlier: wanting to be seen was reasonable, regardless of how many people around her tried to convince her otherwise.
Wren had been invited to perform a short opening set for the reception, a detail I'd arranged weeks earlier without telling Rhett, wanting it to be entirely her moment rather than something filtered through his name.
She played three songs to a room full of industry executives who had no particular reason to be paying attention, and by the end of the second one, half the room had stopped their conversations to listen properly.
Rhett found me afterward, something bright in his expression. "That's your doing."
"Some of it," I said. "Most of it's hers. I just opened a door."
"You've gotten good at that," he said. "Opening doors for people instead of watching them stay shut."
Lila found me near the bar partway through, Caroline a step behind her, and the three of us stood together for a while the way we used to backstage, except this time nobody was watching the west door for me.
"You look different," Lila said. "Lighter, maybe."
"I feel different," I said.
"Good," Caroline said. "Somebody in this friend group should get to feel that way first."
There was something underneath her voice when she said it, something I didn't push on, the same something I'd noticed in Beau's face months earlier, and I wondered, not for the first time, whether the version of this story playing out in my own marriage might not stay contained to just the one house.
"You two doing alright?" I asked Lila quietly, while Caroline was pulled into a conversation with a passing executive.
"We will be," Lila said. It was different from saying yes, and I recognized the hesitation well enough to leave it alone. I squeezed her hand once before Beau reappeared at her side with two fresh drinks and a joke that made her laugh in spite of herself.
At home that night, after the dress had been hung back up and the earrings set on the dresser, Rhett and I sat on the back porch the way we did most evenings now, no schedule pulling either of us toward the next obligation.
"You looked happy tonight," he said.
"I was," I said. "The carpet had nothing to do with it. It was what came after. Going home without wondering which version of you was going to walk through the door."
"There's only one version now," he said. "I'm sorry it took me this long to make that true."
"You don't have to apologize every night for the rest of our lives, Rhett."
"No," he agreed. "Just enough of them that you know I haven't forgotten why I needed to."
Wren caught me by the coat check before we left, still glowing from the reception, and hugged me tight enough to lift me half off my feet. "I got two calls from other venues this week. Bigger rooms. I don't know what to do."
"Take the one that lets you keep writing the songs you actually want to write," I said. "The room size matters less than you think. The songs are the only thing that has to still be true five years from now."
"That sounds like something you learned the hard way."
"It is," I said. "I'm hoping you get to learn it the easier way, watching somebody else's mistakes instead of living through your own."
Rhett found us mid-conversation and waited a polite distance away until Wren finished, then shook her hand properly, no cameras, no publicist hovering to capture the moment for a press release.
"Your set tonight was better than half the acts on my last tour," he told her, plainly, no exaggeration in his voice.
"That's a big thing to say to somebody who's been doing this for eight months."
"It's true regardless of how long you've been doing it," he said. "I learned the hard way that flattery and honesty aren't the same thing, and I'd rather give you the second one."
Wren looked between the two of us, something working behind her eyes. "You two are exactly what I hoped a marriage could look like, whenever I bothered to hope about it at all."
"Ask us again in five years," I said, laughing. "We're still figuring it out ourselves."
Wren left to find her mother, and Rhett and I stood together for a moment in the thinning crowd, watching the room empty around us the way it always eventually did, cameras and executives and the whole machinery of the industry packing up for the night, leaving behind just the people who actually mattered.
"She's going to be something," Rhett said.
"She already is," I said. "She just doesn't know it fully yet. Give her another year."
"I believe you," he said. "You've had a better read on that than most of the executives I pay a great deal of money to have opinions about talent."
"I've had practice," I said, echoing myself from months earlier, and felt, saying it, how far that practice had actually carried me.
Lila and Caroline found us near the door, coats already on, the four of us falling into the easy rhythm we'd shared for years before any of this started, before award shows and headlines and hallways had ever threatened to come between any of us.
"Same time next year?" Beau asked, appearing behind his wife.
"Same time next year," Rhett agreed. "Assuming none of us end up on the front page again before then."
"No promises," Hayes said, dry, and the six of us laughed together, a small ordinary sound in a building built for much larger spectacles, and it struck me, walking out into the cool evening air, that ordinary sounds were exactly what all of us had been missing most.
Lila hugged me goodbye longer than usual, and when she pulled back there was something new in her eyes, a resolve I hadn't seen there before.
"I think Beau and I are going to have our own version of your hallway soon," she said, quiet enough that only I could hear it.
"I wanted you to know you helped me find the nerve, even if you didn't mean to. "
"You don't need my nerve. You've got plenty of your own."
"Maybe," she said. "But it helps to watch somebody else survive it first."
"You'll survive it too," I told her. "Might not feel that way in the middle of it. Feels that way looking back, though. I promise you that much."
She squeezed my hand once before letting go, and I watched her walk back toward Beau, already composing whatever quiet, difficult conversation waited for the two of them somewhere down the road, a hallway of their own they hadn't walked through yet.
After the event, once the cameras had thinned and the cars were pulling around, Rhett found me near the exit the way he used to find me after his earliest shows, before any of this started, before the west door and the hallway and everything that followed.
"Ready to go home?" he asked.
I thought about the word for a moment, turning it over the way I had turned over so many things since the night I packed that suitcase.
Home used to mean the enormous house I sometimes felt like a guest inside.
It meant something different now, something built out of slow conversations and honest apologies and a folder he had left open on his desk before he knew whether I was coming back at all, something we had both had to rebuild from the ground up rather than simply patch over.
"Yes," I said. "Let's go home."
I understood, walking out of that building with his hand in mine and the cameras finally quiet behind us, that I had never needed millions of strangers to know I was Rhett Callahan's wife. I had only ever needed my husband to stop behaving as though being mine was something he had to hide.
THE END