“The modesty continues.”
“I’m just accurate.”
We stayed like that until the sun shifted and the shade got thin. Her fingers traced slow circles on my knee and I ran my thumb along her shoulder and the morning was the quietest good thing I’d had in years.
Crystal found me on the Lodge porch after lunch.
“I’ve been thinking,” she said, settling beside me on the rail with the smooth confidence of a woman reclaiming a seat she considered hers. “About us. About this week. I made a mistake letting you go, Wade, and I think you know that.”
“Crystal.”
“Let me finish.” She put her hand on my arm, light and familiar, the same move she’d used in a hundred press photos. “We were good together. We made sense. The tour, the press, the numbers — all of it worked when it was you and me. And I think if you’re honest with yourself, you miss that.”
“I don’t.”
“And when the week ends? You go back to your life and she goes back to hers. She’s a ranch photographer, Wade. I’m the one who understands what your life actually looks like.”
“I don’t miss any version of my life that had you in it.” I moved my arm out from under her grip. “We’re done. We’ve been done. And the fact that you drove three hundred miles to try this again tells me you already knew that.”
Her expression dropped. For half a second the charm disappeared and I saw the calculation underneath, the rapid resorting of options. Then the smile was back, glossy and smooth.
“Well,” she said. “Good luck tonight.” She turned and walked toward the Lodge.
Milo was leaning on the porch rail. He’d been eating an apple the entire time with the conspicuous focus of a man who was absolutely eavesdropping.
“That go how you wanted?” he asked.
“It went how it was always going to go.”
“She’ll recover. Tour bus, three million followers. I give it a week before she’s posting about her restful Hill Country getaway.” He bit into the apple. “Meanwhile, you’ve got a show to play and a woman who can actually sing.”
“That I do.”
“Try not to stare at her onstage tonight. It was obvious on Wednesday and it was worse on Friday.”
“I don’t stare.”
“Wade. You stop playing. You literally stop playing and watch her sing. Russ had to cover your last chord on Friday because you forgot it existed.”
I took the apple out of his hand, bit into it, and gave it back. “Sound check’s at two. Don’t be late.”
“I’ve never been late,” Milo said. He had been late to every call time since 2019, and we both knew it, and I was grinning when I walked off that porch.
The afternoon sound check ran clean. Full band, full monitors, the outdoor mix tighter than I’d expected. Milo arrived twelve minutes late, Les Paul in hand, as if he’d been there all along. We ran the whole set twice. Layla joined for the second run, her voice strong in the monitors, her rhythm fills covering what Kirby would have handled. She missed one entry in the fourth song and corrected herself before the next bar.
The sun dropped. The heat eased from brutal to merely warm. Ranch staff strung the last of the lights, tested the generators, laid programs on the folding chairs.
By seven-thirty the meadow was filling. Ranch guests took the front rows. Locals from Saddlehorn filled the middle — families, couples, a group of older women in matching turquoise shirts who’d claimed an entire row and were having the time of their lives before we’d hit a single note. A cluster of teenagers gathered near the side speakers, phones out, filming each other and the stage with the urgent energy of people who were going to post about this immediately. The string lights came on in loops around the stage and the cedar posts, bright against the darkening sky.
Backstage was a roped-off square with two benches and a cooler. Layla sat on the far bench with her Martin across her knees, tuning a string that was already in tune.
I sat next to her and started picking through the opening riff, low, just to keep my hands busy alongside hers.
“I’m fine,” she said, before I opened my mouth. “Completely fine. Very calm. Deeply relaxed.”
“You’ve tuned that string nine times.”
“It’s a perfectionist string.”
