"You're fine." I kept playing, quiet, just under the conversation. "It's by the stool."
She crossed the room and picked up the bag, and I expected her to leave. She didn't leave. She stood there with the strap in her hands, turned toward the stage, listening.
"New song?" she asked.
"Trying to be." I played the chorus through once and shook my head. "The bridge keeps wanting to go somewhere I haven't found yet."
She settled onto the stool facing mine, the same one from rehearsal, and set the bag at her feet. The string lights caught the gold in her hazel eyes and the floral scarf was gone from her hair, which fell loose and heavy past her shoulders. Without the camera up in front of her face, she looked different — more present, more herself.
"Play it again?" she said.
I played it again. She listened with everything she had, still and focused, her head tilted, her gaze on my hands. I could notremember the last time someone had heard a half-finished song of mine with that quality of attention. My label listened for the single. My producer listened for the hook. Milo listened to find his guitar part. Layla just listened, and the room went very small and very quiet around the two of us and the unfinished melody.
"The bridge wants to go up," she said when I stopped. "You keep bringing it back to the verse key, but it wants to climb."
I looked at her. Then I played the bridge again and let it rise, and she was right. The melody opened up. The whole song rearranged itself in the air, and the sound that came out of my guitar was the sound I'd been hunting for three weeks in hotel rooms and green rooms and sound checks from Tulsa to Austin.
"How long have you been playing?" I asked.
"Since I was fourteen. My brother Bobby bought me a secondhand Yamaha for my birthday and I taught myself from YouTube videos in the barn." She gave me a full, real smile, and it changed the entire shape of her face. "I used to play for the horses. They're a very forgiving audience."
I laughed before I could smooth it into anything polished or professional. She looked startled by it, as if she hadn't realized she was funny. The surprise made her prettier, which was already becoming a problem.
I set my guitar down and rested my elbows on my knees. My hat was back at the cabin. I'd left it after dinner and hadn't missed it. "Can I ask you something? Why'd you quit performing?"
The smile dimmed but held. "Froze on stage in college. Open mic night at a coffeehouse in San Marcos. Sixty people watching and every lyric I'd ever learned went blank. I walked off and never went back." She said it evenly, no drama, no plea for sympathy, just a fact she was handing me because I'd asked. Her voice was steady in a way that took effort.
"For what it's worth," I said, "what I heard today isn't someone who needs coaching or patience or hand-holding. What you have is already there. You just have to stop thinking it isn't."
She held my eyes for a beat longer than she had all day. The Saloon air pressed close, and my pulse was running faster than the conversation justified.
"Thank you," she said. "For today. For making it easy."
"Anytime."
She grabbed her camera bag, stood, and gave me a small wave at the door. The Saloon settled into itself after she left: the overhead lights buzzing, the old building ticking in its joints, the ghost of an unfinished song hanging in the still air.
I ran the new bridge one more time. She was right.
I leaned back on my stool and thought about every woman I'd been with since the fame hit. Every one of them had been right there while I played, and not one of them had heard the music. They'd been waiting for the cue, the single, the angle — whatever piece of Wade Bishop the brand they could take with them. I'd gotten so used to it I'd stopped expecting anything different.
Milo would have told me I was being dramatic. Milo would have been right.
Layla Rigsbee walked into a room and heard a bridge that wanted to climb when I kept pulling it down. She'd given me her full attention — no agenda, no angle, no mask. When she'd looked at me tonight, something landed behind my ribs that I'd buried so deep I'd lost track of it, the weight of being seen by someone who wanted nothing but the real thing.
I stood up, set my guitar in the stand, and hit the lights. The Saloon went dark. I stepped out onto the porch and the Hill Country night spread wide above me, stars scattered dense above the ridge, crickets and tree frogs pulsing in the grass. Theair carried the dry cedar smell of a June evening that wasn't done with the day's heat.
The night air should have cooled me down by now, but the heat had nothing to do with Texas and everything to do with a woman who played for horses and smiled like she'd forgotten anyone was watching.
I put my hands in my pockets and made for the cabin, and somewhere in the live oaks the mockingbird from this morning was at it again, singing to an audience of nobody with the tireless conviction of a performer who had never needed one.
