"You don't have to write for anyone else. Not the label, not the fans, not even me. Just... write. Whatever comes out. However it comes out."
I flipped through the blank pages, all that possibility, all that space to fill with whatever I wanted. No rules, no expectations, no committee approval needed.
"Thank you." The words weren't enough, but they were all I had.
"Play me something else?"
So I did. I played fragments of melodies that had been haunting me. Lyrics that didn't fit the Stevie Wilson brand but felt like me. A song about Poet, about horses knowing secretshumans were too complicated to understand. Another about the sound Clay's guitar made when he played on the porch, how it wrapped around the evening like a blanket.
My voice got stronger with each song, finding its way back to power. Not the manufactured power of stadium shows, but the real power—the ability to tell truth through melody, to make people feel things, to connect.
"I wrote this the night before..." I paused, not wanting to say it. "Before the attack. Never got to finish it."
The melody was darker, minor key, something that had been pressing at me for weeks before everything happened. About feeling like a product, a commodity, something to be packaged and sold.
"They paint my face like a masterpiece, Dress me up in rhinestone lies, Tell me smile, never cease, While something inside me dies..."
It was angry, raw, nothing like the empowerment anthems the label wanted. But it was true.
"That's powerful," Liam said when I finished. "That's the kind of song that changes things."
"Robert would never let me record it."
"Then Robert's an idiot. And also, who says he gets a vote anymore?"
I looked at him, this man who'd saved me in every way a person could be saved. "I'm still under contract. Three more albums."
"Contracts can be broken."
"It would cost?—"
"Steph." He leaned forward, intense. "What's it costing you to stay? Your voice? Your sanity? Your safety?"
He was right. Of course, he was right.
I picked up the notebook, grabbed a pen, and started writing. Not a song, just thoughts, feelings, everything that had been bottled up for months.
Music used to be my language, my way of making sense of the world. Somewhere along the way, it became my prison. But sitting here in this cabin, with a horse named after poetry and a man who knew me before I was a commodity, I'm finding my voice again. Not Stevie Wilson's voice. Mine.
Liam read over my shoulder, his presence warm and steady. "You could write a whole album here. Your own terms, your own truth."
I scoffed. “An album no one would want to produce."
"Clay knows a guy in Austin. Independent studio, does things old school. Analog equipment, no autotune, just real music."
I glanced over at him. “You've thought about this."
"I've been thinking about it since the day I saw you on magazine covers looking like someone I didn't recognize. You were meant for more than being packaged and sold, Steph. You were meant to tell stories, to move people, to be real."
I played another chord progression, something hopeful this time. "It would be career suicide. Walking away from Nashville, from the machine."
"Or it would be career rebirth. Doing music because you love it, not because someone's forcing you to."
The next song came out of me before I could stop it. Before I could think. Before I could breathe.
It was about him. About us. About that night in Austin we never talked about and all the years between and whatever this was becoming now. Too honest. Too exposed. Toomine.
But true. So terrifyingly true.
