Eleanor grinned, nodding, watching a bead of sweat drip down Shep’s temple. Off in the distance, she could hear Hendrix finish up “Foxy Lady,” and then his guitar started playing a familiar tune, “The Star-Spangled Banner,” in honor of today’s holiday. “Met a lot ofmusicians back when ragtime was the thing. But Jimi Hendrix would take the cake.”
“You’ve sure lived a life.” Shep’s voice was half awe, half whiskey.
Megan flipped the tent flap open, and Eleanor squinted into the sun. “A life, I sure have.”
But only half of one, if she was being honest.
Because for the past few decades, she hadn’t really been living. She’d been existing—cooking dinners, folding sheets, showing up to church with lipstick on and teeth clenched. She’d smiled through grief. Through boredom. Through invisibility. The spotlight had moved on, and she’d quietly packed up her guitar like a guilty secret and buried it beneath her sweaters and sacrifices.
She remembered when it had all started—New York City, 1918. She was eighteen, shaking like a leaf in her borrowed boots, her guitar strapped across her body like armor. That first open mic night, she’d played chords no one understood. Not jazz, not folk—something new. Something too loud, too fast, too alive.
She remembered how the polite silence in the room had felt like rejection. The way the applause had come a beat too late, too tepid. Like the crowd was clapping just to be polite, not because they felt a connection with her music. And so she’d changed the tune, gave them the Bell of Wartime Music like they wanted.
But she’d kept coming back to original sound.
Week after week, heart thudding in her chest, she’d returned to the stage. The regulars began to notice. Heads tilted. Fingers tapped. One man leaned over his gin and said, “That girl plays like a fuse about to blow.”
And then someone told… What was his name? Will? Ben? Willy Ben?
No, it was Billy Murray. They told him to come hear her.
TheBilly Murray. Star of the phonograph. America’s golden-voicedcrooner back then. He’d come backstage after the show, still in his camel coat, smelling of whiskey and money.
“Where’d you learn to strum like that?” he’d asked, eyebrows raised.
Eleanor had shrugged, nonchalant, even though her knees were jelly.
“Just how it came out of me.” Despite her nerves, she’d been able to play it cool.
He’d asked her to show him the chords. And she had. Right there in the hallway of a smoke-filled speakeasy, she’d handed him her guitar and taught him her rhythm, her pulse. He’d invited her onstage for a show the very next week.
She never forgot the look in his eyes. Like he’d stumbled onto something before the world was ready for it.
Eleanor glanced over at Shep, who was watching her like he had just discovered something rare. If only she could explain to him what it had cost her to tuck that girl away for so long. But instead, she reached down to scratch Roxy’s ears. The little dog blinked up at her, blissed out and half asleep.
“You ever miss it?” Shep asked.
Eleanor looked out at the sunbaked horizon where the stage waited, where the crowd pulsed like a heartbeat.
“Every day I didn’t pick up the guitar,” she said softly, “I missed her.”
And for once, she didn’t mean the music but herself.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Traffic had been hellacious, and once more they were going to miss the opening of a festival. After sitting on the highway going approximately zero miles per hour for hours, they called it quits. They were only four hours from Atlanta, but the way things were going, they’d never make it in time to even see the last set.
Nashville it was.
The hotel lobby in Tennessee smelled of lemon cleaner and something faintly metallic—old radiator pipes, maybe. Through the open front door, the late-afternoon heat poured in like the velvet curtains in Leanne’s mother’s living room, heavy and slow, the low hum of music drifting from down the street.
At the front desk, Leanne thumbed through a spinning rack of postcards with glossy, oversaturated colors and tongue-in-cheek sayings. One caught her eye: “Wish You Were Here—But Then Who’d Feed the Dog?” There was a cartoon guitar lounging in a hammock strung between two cowboy boots, with the neon lights of Nashville behind it.
She smiled at the silly image. Maybe if she couldn’t get Dean toanswer the phone, she could at least make him laugh through the mail. If he even had it in him anymore to crack a smile.
“Do you have a pay phone?” she asked the clerk behind the desk, who was reading a paperback. The question was starting to feel like a mantra.
“Yes, ma’am.” He pointed around the corner toward the vending machine and the ice maker, which was humming like it might start randomly spewing ice at unsuspecting patrons.
