Yes.
One syllable. The best thing I've ever heard in my entire life, and I’ve made a career out of beautiful sounds. Nothing comes close. Nothing ever will.
“Yes, Walker.” Her voice is soft and sure, completelywithout hesitation. “In every path, in every life, the answer is yes.”
Jonah pumps his fist.
“She said yes!” he announces to the departures hall at large.
The terminal erupts. There’s applause and “awws.” The sound of strangers who have been holding their breath all letting it out at once. Someone whistles. Someone cheers. I hear crying from at least two directions.
I stand up and slide the cherry ring pop onto my future wife's finger.
Then I take her face in both hands and I kiss her in the middle of Marble Falls airport with two hundred strangers cheering and phones filming and my son making a sound of pure triumphant satisfaction somewhere to my left.
Jonah throws himself between us, both arms around both of us, his face pressed into the space between our bodies.
“I knew it,” he says, muffled and victorious. “I knew it the whole time.”
I wrap one arm around Sadie and one around my son.
My dream life.
Mine to keep.
Chapter 43
Epilogue
SADIE
The album drops one month later.
Our home studio has been a rotating door of sound engineers and a couple of producers. Even Carter Caldwell, the record company president, drops by.
He looks like a long-lost Rhodes brother, tall and handsome as all the others, though more debonair than rugged.
Walker gives him shit for his shiny designer shoes and Carter gives him shit for waiting two years to make a single song and then demanding to make the entire album in a couple of weeks. Then they’re pulling out the whiskey and reminiscing about old times and arguing over the bass levels and I tune back out.
I’ve been looking for teaching jobs here and there, but mostly I’m writing songs. Now I’m addicted to it. It’s like poetry, but with the additional fun puzzle of figuring out rhythm and repetition that suits a melody. All myEnglish-teacher skills are still being put to use, just in a different direction.
Walker pulls me in when he needs my help rewriting something on the fly and I listen to it come together.
One night, we’re in bed, his arms wrapped around me from behind while I read and he taps at his phone. Jonah is asleep. Outside the window the Montana sky is all stars.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand with a notification.
Walker Rhodes posted a new video.
I put my book down. Open my phone.
It's him, thirty seconds, just his face and his guitar in the low light of the studio. He looks relaxed. Happy. Like a man who has nothing to prove and knows it.
“New music,” he says on the screen. “The album is out now. It's called Heartstrings. Hope you like it.”
I lie there for a moment, thinking about it.
Heartstrings. Of course. A guitar has strings. So does a heart. Both are the kind that go slack and silent after enough neglect, that need coaxing back into tune.
