“I sing to the horses,” I said. “Bonnie gets the full setlist every morning. She hasn’t complained yet, but she also can’t talk, so the bar is low.” The humor felt thin but it was there, a thread I could follow back to solid ground. “My brother Bobby, who’s a wildland firefighter doing prescribed burns up in the Hill Country, caught me singing on the phone once when I didn’t know he was still on the line. He told me I was good and I should stop wasting it on livestock. I hung up on him.”
Wade was quiet for a moment. “Tell me about your family.”
“My mom, Polly, feeds people. That’s her whole thing. She makes enough food for twenty whether twenty are coming or not, and half of it ends up on the neighbors’ porches. Her kitchen is where everything happens. Holidays, arguments, homework, heartbreak. If you’re in the Rigsbee house, you’re at that table.” I looked at my hands. “Four kids. Three boys and me. Justin and Tucker stayed on the ranch with Daddy. Bobby and I are the ones who left. He fights fires. I take pictures. We’re the Rigsbees who needed something different, and he’s the only one in the family who’s never given me grief about it.”
“Good brother.”
“He is. He’d also tackle you in a parking lot if I asked him to, so keep that in mind.”
Wade laughed. It was the first real laugh I’d heard from him all morning, and it loosened a knot in my rib cage that had been clenched since yesterday.
“Fair enough,” he said. “My sister Whitney would do the same. She’s got two kids under five and the organizational capacity of a four-star general. She called me last month to tell me my new single was, and I’m quoting here, ‘fine but the second verse drags.’ She was folding laundry when she said it.”
I felt my mouth twitch. “She sounds terrifying.”
“She is. She gets it from my mom. Eloise Bishop, piano teacher. Thirty years of giving lessons from the living room. Every afternoon from three to six, our house was a recital hall run by someone with unlimited patience and absolutely no tolerance for a lazy pinky finger.” He leaned back on the bench. “My dad, Owen, is an accountant. Quietest man alive. He comes home from work, kisses my mom, sits down at the kitchen table, and does the crossword. He has done this every single day since 1989. The man is a monument to consistency.”
“And you grew up in that house and decided to be a rock star.”
“Country star,” he corrected. “Big difference. Rock stars smash guitars. I can’t afford that.” He stretched his legs out. “I was in college when I auditioned for SoundStage. Pre-law, if you can believe it. My mom drove me to the audition because my truck was in the shop. I threw up in a parking garage from nerves and Milo held my guitar. I walked onto that stage and sang and forty million people watched it and three weeks later I had a record deal and my whole life was different.”
“Was it what you wanted?”
He considered this. “The music was. The rest of it, the image and the brand and the people who wanted Wade Bishop the product, I didn’t know that was part of the deal. Nobody tells you that when you sign. Or they tell you and you’re twenty-one and you don’t hear it because the music is so loud.” He looked at me. “You know what my mom said when I told her I’d won? She said, ‘That’s wonderful, baby. Don’t forget to eat dinner.’”
I laughed. The sound surprised me, bright and reckless, how laughing used to feel before I’d spent two days convincing myself that nothing about this week was real.
Wade turned toward me on the bench.
“Layla,” he said. “I am not the man in that picture. I need you to believe that. Forget what I’ve said. You’ve been watching me through your lens all week. You know what you’ve seen.”
I sat with it. The sun pressed down. The garden hummed. His eyes held mine and they were asking me to trust what I saw when the image didn’t add up.
I’d let this man see me. All of me. The body I’d never been comfortable in and the voice I’d locked away for six years. I’d stood in front of my own camera and let him tell me what he saw. I’d believed it because his eyes matched his words and his hands matched his voice, and nothing about him had felt constructed.
Crystal had offered me a different version. A cleaner one. One that fit the story I’d always told myself, that a man who looked like Wade Bishop would never choose a woman who looked like me.
But I’d been behind a camera long enough to know that a clean frame could lie. That the tightest composition could leave out the one detail that changed everything. And the man sitting next to me on this bench, hat off, hair messed up, telling me about his mother’s piano lessons, was not performing.
“Okay,” I said.
“Okay?”
“Okay, I believe you.” I looked at him. “But if you’re lying to me, Bobby is a very large person and he knows where to find accelerants.”
His grin went wide and real and the relief in it rushed warm through my chest. He reached over and took my hand off my lap and held it, and his palm was callused and steady and mine fit inside it the way my voice fit under his.
“Walk with me,” I said.
He looked at me.
“There’s a lake on the east side of the property,” I said. “Past the Pavilion. I want to get out of here for a while.”
He picked up his hat but didn’t put it on. We stopped at the Lodge kitchen, where Marisol pressed foil-wrapped breakfast tacos into our hands without comment, and ate them on the path toward the lake. We left the garden trail and took the path past the cabins and the Pavilion and into the stretch of live oaks that ran along Wildridge River toward the lake. The trail was narrow and shaded and the air smelled of cedar and sunbaked stone and the creek running somewhere to our right. I held his hand and he matched my pace and we didn’t talk for a while, which was fine. The silence was easy now, how it had been on Wednesday before everything tilted.
Lake Wildridge opened up through the trees, sudden and still. The water was green-gold in the late-afternoon light, ringed by limestone shelves and live oaks that leaned out over the surface. The sun was dropping toward the ridge and the light had gone heavy and thick, the kind of late light that made everything look how a country song sounds. No one was here. The kayak rack at the shore was empty. The little dock stretched out over water so still it held the sky in it.
I set my camera bag on the dock. Then I pulled my boots off and set them beside it. Wade watched me.
