Chapter 2

That night, after Junie fell asleep with her hand curled around my thumb, I did something I should have done six months ago.

I opened her iPad.

It's old, cracked at the corner, loaded with dinosaur games and sign-language cartoons. It also still syncs to Beau's iCloud, because he set it up three years ago and never bothered to unlink it. Why would he? I was the safe one. The wife who handled audiology appointments and payroll and never asked questions.

The messages loaded.

My marriage ended on a screen smeared with a seven-year-old's fingerprints.

Fourteen months.

Hotel charges on Thursdays, when he had "writing sessions." A six-thousand-dollar bracelet in April — the month he told me we had to be careful, that the out-of-network surgical center was "a lot to swallow right now." A ski weekend in Aspen in January, while I sat in a beige room at Rivergate learning the phrase "candidacy evaluation."

And the texts.

Kacey: "does she seriously not suspect anything 😭"

Beau: "Josie? never. she's too busy playing nurse to the kid."

Kacey: "playing nurse is expensive lol. when do I get the title on the truck?"

Beau: "after Friday. board pushes her out, insurance lapses, she'll be so buried in hospital bills she won't have the bandwidth to fight anything."

She won't have the bandwidth to fight anything.

I sat on the edge of my daughter's bed, in the house I paid cash for, and read a man calmly plan to use my child's deafness as a strategy.

Let me tell you what the last nine years actually looked like.

When I met Beau, he was singing covers at a Printer's Alley bar for tips and sixty-eight thousand dollars in debt. I paid it off.

When I put him on a stage in my dead father's honky-tonk and played him the demo of "Carolina Rain," he said, "You're the songs, I'm the smile." I liked that. I believed it.

I put my entire inheritance into Tin Roof. Two hundred eighty thousand dollars, everything my daddy left me when the cancer took him. I wrote the songs. I registered the copyrights. I hired the first nine employees and made payroll out of my own checking account for twenty-one months.

And Beau stood in stadiums and said "we" a lot, and the world decided he was the artist and Blackbird was some reclusive Nashville legend, and I let them, because I thought it didn't matter who got the applause as long as we got the life.

His mother, Charlene Rhodes, took my hand at our rehearsal dinner and said, "You understand you're marrying up, sugar. The Rhodeses have been in this town four generations. My daddy played the Opry."

I paid for that wedding. Every plate.

And my mother — Ruth, five-foot-two, in her one good dress — sat at a corner table while Charlene introduced her to exactly nobody.

Later, I heard Charlene near the coat check, laughing with a friend.

"The mother folded sheets in a hospital basement for twenty-four years. Can you imagine. There's bad blood in that family, if you ask me. Thank God the girl is useful."

Bad blood.

My mother raised me alone after a scaffold gave out under my father on a job site. She worked overnight laundry at St. Bridget's for twenty-four years so I could take music theory instead of a shift. She has never once asked me for anything.

I kept scrolling. My hands were perfectly steady. Screenshots. Cloud backup. Two copies. Three. Timestamps intact, metadata preserved, the way Nadia taught me the day she drafted my publishing license and said, "Someday you'll be glad this is airtight."

Then I reached the last exchange, sent forty minutes before I opened the iPad.

Kacey: "I sat in her chair in Booth B today. It's comfy 🖤"

Beau: "told you. one more week."

Kacey: "the baby won't wait forever. And neither will Ironwood."

I read that line six times.

The baby, I'd already swallowed. Ugly, but simple.

But Ironwood?

Ironwood Sound was our competitor. The label that had tried to buy my catalog twice and been told no twice — by me.

Why was my husband's pregnant mistress talking about Ironwood like it was a deadline?

I set the iPad back on the charger, exactly where I'd found it, the way a good wife does.

Then I went to the kitchen table, opened my laptop, and pulled up three documents: a trust deed, an exclusive publishing agreement, and a cap table with sixty-two percent of Tin Roof Records sitting under a company called Blackbird Holdings.

By sunrise, I wasn't a wife anymore.

I was a countdown.