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“That unplugged session on High Fever! What are you doing!?” I step back in the house, leaving the door open in invitation for her to step in, but she stays planted on the front step.
“What do you think I’m doing?”
“I don’t fucking know! Losing your goddamn mind?!”
“Why would my singing a song you wrote mean I’m losing my mind?”
“Don’t play coy with me, Riggins Greene. I’m not talking about you singing my song. I’m talking about you calling me your fuckingwife!”
“But you are,” I say with a smile. “You are my wife.” Her face goes redder, and she takes a step forward. For a moment, I think she might hit me.
“What are you doing, Riggins? Why would you do that? I’m going to have reporters hounding me now!”
“Telling the world you’re mine.”
She throws her arms up, walking into the house as she scoffs.
“We went seven fucking years, no one knew anything. You didn’t know anything! Now, when this ends, I’m going to have all your little fans coming at me. I had privacy. I had anonymity. No one cared about me.”
“That’s bullshit, and you know it.Icare about you.”
“I’m not even going to touch that, Riggins. You threw me into the spotlight without even thinking about how that will impact me.” That’s a lie because I thought long and hard about how it would impact her. But Stella was always meant to shine, not hide behind a pen name. “And my mother is going to?—”
I cut her off with a groan. “Jesus, Stella, why is that always your biggest concern? How your bitch of a mother is going to react.”
“She’s my mother, Riggins, she?—”
“Is fucking horrible to you! She treats you like shit and always has.” She hasn’t told me much about her relationship with her mother since I’ve been back in town, but I know she set her up with that fuck wad and wasn’t even a little concerned when she found out he tried to assault her daughter. But even if things were amicable, Rhonda Hart would always be no better than the dirt under my shoes for the way she treated Stella.
“She’s my mother.”
“That doesn’t mean she deserves your time, your energy, or your grace, Stella.” She stares at me, and for a moment, I wonder if I broke through. But then she shakes her head.
“We’re not here to talk about me or my mother. I’m here to talk about you and what you did.”
“I’m not going to apologize for telling people who you are. The world deserves to know how amazing you are.” She shakes her hair, and I move to close the door, reducing any way for a quick exit because it’s time we finally talked.
“I can’t believe this. Why can’t you just leave me alone? We talk one time in seven years, and then you come back to town and try to changeeverything.You’ve been fucking stalking me for a week?—”
“Getting lunch at the only diner in town is not stalking.”
“Then go to another town! Another state! You’re a fucking celebrity; you have millions of dollars! You can go anywhere, and instead, you choose Ashford, New Jersey, the town you fucking hated your whole life! You were itching to leave here the second you turned sixteen. You get out, and seven years later, you’re back. Why, Riggins? Did the words dry up? No more angry songs to write about your bitchy girlfriend who left you?”
She’s referencing the first album we released after she left, which was full of angry breakup songs about her since that was all I had in me at the time.
Anger and confusion and addiction.
“Wife,” I say instead, the word rolling through the room low and angry.
“What?”
“You weren’t my girlfriend when you left. You were my wife.”
Stella rolls her eyes, throwing her hands up in the air.
“So what, you go on live television to sing a song I wrote about you as payback? The song I wrote about the all-consuming jealousy I felt seeing her on your arm? Great job, Riggins, great job reminding me how I spent the seven years you were gone trying to keep my head above water, not even looking at another man because it made me sick to my stomach, and here you were, going on dates with a pop star. Having a grand, sweeping, on-again, off-again relationship with her. God, her little fucking fans are giant and will crucify me!”
“Willa?”
