Then Lucinda waved me over, and the comfortable distance disappeared.
I crossed the yard with my camera resting against my chest and the sun beating down on both of us. Lucinda put her hand on my shoulder. “This is Layla Rigsbee, our staff photographer. She’ll be covering all your performances and ranch content this week. Anything you need shot, she’s your girl.”
“Hey, Layla.” Wade looked at me, and his full attention landed on my face and stayed there. The rest of the yard — the trucks, the heat, the guests watching from the porch — went softat the edges. My chest tightened. “Good to meet you. Looking forward to working with you this week.”
“Hi. Welcome to Wild Vista.” I shook his hand. His palm was rough with guitar calluses and warm from the sun, and his grip was firm without being showy. I let go and stepped back. “Let me know when you’re ready and I’ll get some shots of you all getting set up.”
“Sounds good,” he said. His smile deepened, those dimples creasing into his tanned cheeks. I turned and walked back to my camera bag on the porch because I had batteries to swap. Also because the flush climbing my neck was going to reach my face in about three seconds, and I preferred to be pointing a camera at something else when it did.
The band spent the next hour unloading and settling in while the June sun hammered the property and a dry wind pushed dust across the yard without cooling anything down. I shot all of it, water bottle close by. Wade and the guitarist were hauling gear into the Saloon, the guitarist talking nonstop while Wade just grinned and shook his head. The bassist ran cables along the stage, his ball cap dark with sweat. The drummer positioned his kit with the focused silence of a man who did not require conversation. I stayed in motion, swapping lenses, working different angles.
When Wade stepped onto the Saloon stage and tested the microphone, I was near the back wall changing a lens. His voice owned the empty room. He said “Check, check — one, two,” and then sang a few bars of one of his slower songs, just testing levels, and the sound rolled through the Saloon and settled into every surface. It was deeper live than on any recording, fuller, and I felt it hum along the back of my neck and down my spine. I stood there with a lens in each hand and heat pooling low in my belly that had nothing to do with the weather.
This was going to be a very long week.
The afternoon took a sharp turn at three-fifteen.
I was at the stables photographing a guest family with the ranch’s gentlest mare when I heard the commotion from the trail — voices carrying, a horse coming in fast, Jake on the radio calling for Carl. Kirby Hollister, the band’s backup vocalist and rhythm guitarist, had gone out on the afternoon guest ride to see the property. Somewhere on the west ridge trail his horse had spooked at a snake, reared hard, and put him in the dirt. He came back cradling his right wrist against his chest, his face gray under his sunburn.
The ranch medic wrapped it and sent him to the urgent care in Saddlehorn. The X-rays came back as a sprain, not a break, but his wrist was swollen and angry and he wasn’t holding a guitar pick for at least two weeks. Kirby sat on the Lodge porch afterward with an ice pack and a glass of Marisol’s sweet tea, wearing the quiet resignation of someone who knew exactly what this meant for Wednesday’s show.
The band gathered on the Saloon porch to regroup. I was inside uploading photos and caught pieces of the conversation through the open windows. Wade’s voice was low and even, working through options. The guitarist was quicker, running through the setlist out loud. The bassist asked a steady question I couldn’t quite hear. They could cover the main sets with Wade on lead vocals and acoustic guitar, the rest filling in around him. But Kirby had handled harmonies, rhythm guitar fills, and most importantly, the bridge sets: the twenty-minute acoustic stretches between main sets where one person held the room alone with a voice and a guitar while the rest of the band took a break. Without Kirby, those sets were dead air.
I was packing up my laptop when Lucinda appeared in the Saloon doorway with Wade behind her. She had the look she got when she was solving a problem — bright-eyed, purposeful, already three steps ahead.
“Layla used to sing,” she said to Wade, with the sunny conviction of a woman who was volunteering someone else for the one thing on earth that someone else least wanted to do. “Studied music at Texas State. She’s got a gorgeous voice.”
The blush hit fast. It rolled up my neck and flooded my cheeks, hot and unstoppable, because I had the complexion of a redhead and my skin announced my emotions whether I gave it permission or not.
“Oh — that was a long time ago,” I said. “I don’t really perform anymore.”
Wade leaned against the doorframe with his arms crossed. Up close, in the warm light of the Saloon windows, his eyes were a clear, bright blue, and he was watching me with the kind of patient curiosity that made my pulse thud in my throat. “You play guitar too?”
I kept it in past tense, and I meant it to stay there. “I used to.”
“We’re in a tough spot,” he said. His voice was honest and unhurried, no push behind it. He wasn’t performing, wasn’t charming me into it. “I don’t need a professional. I just need someone who can hold a harmony and carry a twenty-minute set with an acoustic guitar. Private rehearsals, just you and me, see if it works. One rehearsal. That’s it.”
I looked at him. I looked at Lucinda, who was smiling with absolute warmth while her eyes communicated that she would be revisiting this conversation every hour until I said yes. I looked down at my camera, resting against my stomach, and for once it offered me nothing.
The truth was that I had not sung in front of another person since my sophomore year at Texas State. I’d signed up for a coffeehouse open mic, walked onto the stage, and frozen. Sixty people were watching. Every lyric I’d ever learned was gone from my head. The silence stretched into forever until I finally walked off that stage, out of the building, and out of performing entirely.I’d picked up a camera the next semester and found that I could still make beautiful things without anyone looking at me while I did it.
But Wade Bishop was standing in a doorway asking me to sing with him, and the word that came out of my mouth was not the one my brain had prepared.
“One rehearsal,” I said. “And if it’s terrible, we pretend it never happened.”
His grin started slow, crinkling the corners of his eyes before it reached his mouth, and those dimples carved deep. “Deal.”
Lucinda clapped once — problem solved, next item — and swept out to manage her next project. Wade pushed off the doorframe, gave me a nod that carried more warmth than it had any right to, and headed for the cabins.
I stood in the empty Saloon with my heart beating hard against my camera strap. I had just agreed to sit across from Wade Bishop — Wade Bishop, the man whose voice I fell asleep to, the man who’d won SoundStage on national television, the man whose concert clips I watched in bed eating cereal — and open my mouth and sing. The same mouth that had frozen shut on a stage in San Marcos six years ago.
And I had agreed to do it alone with him. His voice and mine. No camera to hide behind.
I grabbed my bag, slung my camera strap across my chest, and walked out into the late-afternoon heat. The shadows were getting long and the air smelled of warm dust and sage. I took a deep breath of dry Texas air and told my stomach to settle, and my stomach informed me it would be doing nothing of the kind.
That evening I sat cross-legged on my bed in the employee cabin with my laptop open and the day’s photos filling the screen. I sorted and flagged the keepers, tossed the misses. The trail ride shots were beautiful. The Lodge porch at golden hour glowed warm enough to sell vacations all on its own. Kirby’sice-pack face was going into my personal archive for comedy purposes.
I stopped scrolling on a candid I’d taken near the Saloon. Wade, mid-laugh, caught in profile with Milo beside him. His hat was off. His sandy hair was mussed, his head thrown back, his whole face crinkled with a laugh that had started somewhere deep in his belly. He looked nothing like the album covers or the polished performer who’d stepped out of the truck that morning with his hat set right and his public smile in place. My camera had caught him with his guard all the way down, and the man in the photograph was someone I wanted to keep looking at.
I stared at that image for longer than any professional review required. Then I closed the laptop, turned off the lamp, and lay in the dark with the crickets singing through my open window. The night air was barely cooler than the day, dry and still, drifting through the screen with the faint smell of cedar.
Tomorrow afternoon I was going to sit in the Saloon with Wade Bishop and sing. A cold spike of dread shot through me at the thought, but right behind it, pressed tight against the fear, an electric hum of anticipation buzzed beneath my ribs. I groaned into my pillow. Then I laughed at myself, because all of this was ridiculous. Then I reached for my phone.
I turned the volume low and let his album play while the cabin settled around me. That voice filled my cabin, the rough warmth of it folding over me in the quiet. I closed my eyes and let it carry me under.
Tomorrow I was going to have to look him in the eye without a camera between us. I’d figure out how to survive it in the morning.
