“I can’t wait,” he rumbles, mouth on my body, “to see how far your music travels when you invite other people to carry on the love story we started.”
I nod jerkily, my smile star bright as Liam’s fingers coast through my hair and his mouth hooks back onto mine. In the end, he drew the same conclusion about my songs that I did.
They change meaning the second someone claims them. They belong to every person who listens in specific ways I’ll never comprehend.
If music is an offering, I’d hold mine out to the world and say,I made this with the best intentions. You can share it with me, if you want, and take a piece of it to keep for good. You can even move it to a different place on the circle and make it into something else, something unrecognizable to my eyes, and that would be an honor.
It would be an honor to see where I end and where the music keeps going. It would be an honor to see what happens when otherpeople claim pieces of the art I made. And even when that happens, it won’t changethis, or what it meant to me when I made it.
“I love you so much, Liam,” I whisper, my spine arching away from the bed. “Loving you is the honor of a lifetime.”
Liam bunches my shirt in his fist. “I will love you in endless places. You wrote that I always would. When my truck breaks down. When my body goes weak. I’ll love you from the sidelines, from the studio, from wherever we choose to be. Forever.”
He pulls the shirt over my head, our bodies working toward an uncapturable harmony.
Flashes of everything that ever existed between us blink across my mind.
That first, curious look through the shelves of a Knoxville bookstore. Discovering he likened me that day to a siren. My heart feeling inexplicably fisted when I caught sight of Liam again at a party. Dirt on my skin from baseball practice and the patient look in his eye when I taught him to play guitar. Breakfast in our pajamas in public. The way he held me when Maisy left my life, when Folly returned to it. Lying on a blanket while he told me about his dad. Liam’s gaze on the ceiling in that hospital room, how my heart broke when his did. That last, precarious thread of joy in him I snapped out of fear when I walked away in World’s Fair Park. The invisible string I followed to find him again at CMA Fest, bolstered by a bravery he planted.
And everything since.
And everything yet to come.
Individually, our impact is still a grand slam, but together we’re really something.
He molded me, and I shaped him, and this love story isn’t over yet. There will be more songs and proper fights and deeper passion and bigger doubts to unearth, and Liam and I will always be a work in progress. Which also means, like art on a circle that someone created with the best intentions, we’re never, ever over.
Epilogue
If life imitates art, then art looks something like this:
Squeals of delight and matching, dimpled grins when Paige sees Zara and Maren in New York City.
A cooler of Gatorade dumped over Liam’s head on the very last night of Penelope Parker’s summer tour. Penelope jumping into Jake’s arms, kissing him soundly at the wrap party. Shots and speeches and tears and signed T-shirts and promises likesee you soonandI’ll never forget this summer as long as I live.
Hands clasped over the dashboard of a truck, which rumbles across a bridge from Savannah toward Tybee Island. It pulls up to a small one-story with overgrown shrubs, a pregnant single mother and her three-year-old waving from the front porch, cardboard boxes piled beside them.
Flights and car rentals and even more hotel rooms, but also studio time with friends and so. Many. Contracts.
Seventy-five hearts swelling in sync when Hailey and Candice kiss on their wedding day. ABristol Motor SpeedwayT-shirt that Liam bought in town and hardly ever takes off. The Savannah Bananas baseball cap Paige stole from his childhood bedroom.
Champagne because he got an assistant coach job at a high school in his hometown. A spritz because she hasn’t worked adouble in four months, then five. She records a few songs, releases them quickly. No advertising, little fanfare.
They gain quiet traction anyway. Nothing like the traction of commercial success with a major label, but people in the industry are paying attention. Paul is thrilled.
A few months of calm after the new year, time with Folly in Nashville before she gives birth.
A tiny, bald, scrunchy-faced life entering the world, and so much emotion surrounding it that three new songs come out of Paige in one day.
Kayla gives birth two weeks later. It’s a boy; she names him Henry, after her and Liam’s dad.
A new song she writes, which neither of them ever want a single other soul to hear. Another song she records, and another still that she passes along.
The new Etta Girls album drops that March.
The new Penelope Parker that April.
He knows how much she hates it—every second she has to be on that stage while accepting her Grammy for Songwriter of the Year, even with Penelope, Gretta, and Henrietta up there behind her. But she smiles through it, tugging at the hem of her vintage designer dress, and says the words they’d practiced three times in the limo.
