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“Right, but honey, you should go.”
“Why?”
Paisley narrowed her eyes at me, adjusting her grip on the iPad she held against her chest. “When was the last time you went home?”
My stomach turned like the inside of a washing machine just thinking about it. Despite the fact that my hometown was only an hour and a half away from where I currently resided in Nashville, it’d been nearly six years since the last time I’d stepped foot in Charlotte Oaks. Seeing as how I’d rejected the proposal of the only man I’d ever loved that Christmas—against my will, might I add—I couldn’t go back and risk seeing him.
I wouldn’t.
Paisley didn’t know about Everett Wilson or that all but one of my love songs were about him. And not just the happy ones. I’m talking all of them. Every lyric about devastating heartbreak? Everett Wilson. All the verses about painful regret? Everett Wilson. Even though my current sound was way more upbeat than the ones I came up playing before I hit it big, I still wrote my own lyrics, and they were all about Everett Wilson and what I’d lost.
Melodies coursed through me without warning. Sweet, sorrowful, and ironically upbeat despite the subject. Like that song that mentioned the worst mistake of my life was letting him push me away. Or the one about the way he looked at me when I walked out that door. Definitely the one about how I could still feel his lips on mine even though it’d been years since I last felt them.
But as close as we were, I didn’t plan to tell Paisley about any of it until I had to—and hopefully, if she let me wriggle out of this reunion, that wouldn’t be anytime soon.
No. It was much safer to stay here in Nashville where I wouldn’t have to face my hometown and the memories that practically seeped out of every pore of every person, place, or thing I looked at. I mean, come on, what was the use of facing hard things head-on when you could hide from them instead?
Since I’d gotten lost in my thoughts instead of answering her, Paisley cleared her throat and gave me a pointed look. “Exactly. I bet you can’t even remember the last time you were there.”
Oh, I remember. And goodness, I wish I didn’t.
“Look,” she went on as Jeanie continued working on my hair, “I know your family doesn’t mind traveling to see you, but you’re a hometown celebrity in Charlotte Oaks. Don’t you think it would be fun to go back to your old stomping grounds for some pre-tour PR?”
“Fun isn’t the word I’d use,” I deadpanned.
“Laney. Please. I know what I’m talking about. Your album is called Small-Town Girl, for crying out loud. And yet, you avoid your hometown like the plague.”
“I like other small towns.”
She gave me a look. “What’s so bad about yours?”
Nothing. Everything. Okay, just him. But avoiding Charlotte Oaks was basic survival instinct. Seeing Everett again after all these years would be like a knife to the heart. Was that dramatic? Maybe. But as a songwriter, it came with the territory.
That said, Paisley was right. She always knew what she was talking about when it came to my music. She’d been hired by my label when I’d first been discovered, and we’d immediately clicked. She knew the direction the label wanted to take my brand, and she ran with it, helping me become the massive success I was today, six years later.
The only problem was, it wasn’t exactly the direction I would have gone if I’d had a crystal ball at the time. Singing all these pop-country songs for a mostly teenage audience was a far cry from the career I’d always imagined.
When my then-boyfriend Everett first joined the Marines at eighteen, I’d headed to Nashville and worked my way through the bars on Broadway singing bluesy, meaningful songs. Not always ballads, but always me. The real me. Shy until something funny happens that makes us laugh like family. Free-spirited and wild one minute, present for Sunday night family dinners the next. Deep when the mood struck me, but not so serious you’d want to drop me at the library on your way to the bonfire.
Everett and I were happy back then. Physically apart, because he was off serving our country and I was in Nashville with my daddy’s old guitar and, thankfully, a pot to pee in but not much else. It was easy to write songs about being grateful for what I had, because even though it wasn’t much, it was something. It was everything.
And then I got my big break, and it all fell apart.
This person I was now—Laney Cole, lover of rhinestones with too much bounce in her boots—had so much more by way of money and so much less by way of … well, anything else that mattered. I even had a fake boyfriend. He was another artist on my label, and our entire relationship was for show—for both of us. It’d been arranged by our managers just to promote our tours, and even though he was a great guy, his presence in my life only served to make me feel like even more of a phony.
But I couldn’t rain on Paisley’s parade about any of that. She’d worked too long and too hard to make what she assumed were my wildest dreams come true. It wasn’t her fault the spotlight wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
“You really think it would be good for the tour?” I asked, pinching the bridge of my nose.
“I know it would be. This tour is going to be your best one yet. I can feel it. And having some publicity of you actually being a small-town girl would be great for tour and album sales.”
Ah, the tour. Another example of how far my music had strayed from where I came from. Like everything else I did these days, the tour was flashy and excessive. Everything about it was as grandiose as the stadiums I sang in, and to me, seemed like the exact opposite of what a real small-town girl would do.
But the label didn’t seem to care about that little tidbit, and I’d made them—and myself—a ton of money singing these big top versions of my songs with all the diamond-encrusted cowboy boots and little glittery dresses. And with every album I released over the last six years, I felt like I was drifting farther and farther away from the artist I was when I’d played in bars on Broadway. The money increased, but the soul? The magic of the music? Not so much.
I watched Jeanie twist a lock of my long blonde hair around her curling wand, then let out a long sigh, unable to meet my manager’s eyes. “Paisley, what if I’m just … done?”
“Done?” she repeated with a snort. “You’re not an egg, Laney. You’re a country music superstar with two Grammys, three platinum-selling records, and millions of fans. Think about what you mean to all those girls who run out to buy your albums. You’ll never be done.”
