I knew she would be. I've known it all summer. Knowing it and watching her draw that building are two entirely different things, though.
My fingers curl into the countertop.
“Carter,” I tell him. “I got a home studio. Fly the engineers out and we’ll do it from here. I can’t make this album without the view I’m looking at right now.”
In the background, the mountains stand proud against the blazing blue sky.
But it's Sadie who's in the foreground of that view. The most important part. Sadie with her coffee and her pen, writing in the margins ofournotebook.
It’s Sadie who I can't make this record without. Sadie who I couldn't have made it without even if I'd tried.
Carter is saying something about distribution. I have no idea what.
I've written a lot of music in my life. First album I was twenty-three, hungry and trying to prove something. Second was rawer, more honest, the one the critics called a breakthrough. The ones after that the label wanted more than I did.
This one is mine.
Mine, and hers.
The mood shifts song to song. There's a propulsive one that'll open the album. A slow one crafted for maximum emotional damage. Two or three that'll play at every wedding in the country for the next decade. The usual mix, on the surface.
But underneath that, the subject doesn't change.
Top to bottom, every song on this record is a love song.
Every one of them is about Sadie.
Three-quarters of them were written with her, her words woven into mine until I lost track where hers end and mine begin. The rest have been written about her, for her, in the hours after she fell asleep when I'd get up and go write at the kitchen table because something she said or did or looked like was still moving through me and the only place it had to go was into a song.
It's my love letter to her. Twelve tracks. Forty-three minutes. Everything I haven't been able to say out loud since the second week of June.
I look at her across the kitchen.
She's uncapped her pen again, head bent over the notebook, copper hair falling forward, completely absorbed. She hasno idea. Or maybe she does and is choosing not to say anything, the same way I've been choosing not to say anything, both of us circling the same truth from opposite directions.
August is half gone.
We’re running out of time.
Chapter 35
Skinny Dipping
SADIE
It's Jonah's last week before school starts, and camp is done, and summer’s end is at hand.
Daryl offered to take Jonah fishing in the morning, ostensibly to get in some extra time before school starts up again, but I have a feeling he wants to give me and Walker our last few moments to ourselves.
Daryl doesn't miss much.
It's my last week as part of the Rhodes household.
I don't sleep well. I blame it on the heat wave, but the house is air-conditioned and the truth is my sleeplessness has nothing to do with temperature and everything to do with time.
Seven days.
I lie in Walker's bed at night listening to him breathe. In the darkness I scroll through photos of the apartment in New York I’ll be calling home in a few days. Read and re-read the welcome packet from the director of the school I’ll be working at.
