You are all wonderful, you know how to make a girl want to write! Thank you a whole lot for being so kind. I hope this doesn't hurt your hearts quite so much.

He almost wishes he still had the dog. He doesn't want company but it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to have someone to talk to who can't offer opinions he doesn't want and advice he's not going to listen to and someone whose only facial expressions are I-want-food or walk-me-before-I-pee-on-your-floor and not she's-toxic-for-you or how-did-you-not-guess-it-was-your-baby. It wasn't like he knew what he wanted - except he did, he wanted Rayna, he always wanted Rayna - but he knew what he didn't need, and that was everyone else exercising their mouths.

#

Her publicist turns up on a Tuesday. There has been talk, she says, and it's such an obvious statement it's ridiculous. Of course there's been talk, the biggest country singer in town gets in a wreck with the man she's been not-seeing for years and she's driving and he's drinking - so they say - and they're both nearly dead when they peel the side of the car back like a sardine tin. She'd been unconscious by the time the crowds had gathered but they were there, behind a line of police who tried to stop them taking pictures with their phones but word spreads fast in Nashville when it comes to Rayna Jaymes and Deacon Claybourne and when they turn his car into scrap metal and they're side by side in the middle of the night when it happens, well, there is talk. Bucky sits and looks into his coffee mug uneasily when the publicist tells her they want to put out an interview - nothing too strenuous, just a phone call to ask her some questions, and she'll mediate the whole thing - set some rumours to rest, address the gossip. What were they doing in East Nashville well after midnight, was she going home with him? Why was she driving his car, were they together - together together - before it happened? Rayna laughs loudly with no humour at all when the publicist says they want to ask her straight up whether Deacon is drinking again. Her four-letter reply would have to have been starred out if she'd agreed to do the interview before hell froze over.

#

The girls have learnt a new song. It's brand new, not a song she's heard before, and they grin as they tell her that's because they wrote it. They wrote it for her - it's a get well song, about band-aids and ice cream. She makes them sing it again, and her laughter is loud and real when she hears the line about all the dodgy novelty socks she's been wearing since she got out of the hospital. She feels the joy all the way through her veins, and she tells them she loves them more than Daphne loves the stuffed panda in the tutu that sleeps on her bed and more than Maddie loves that damn Juliette Barnes record. They play it again while they sit on either side of her, three spoons taking turns to dip into a tub of Strawberry Cheesecake Ben and Jerry's, and she knows there isn't a thing in the world more dear to her than their happy faces.

#

He walks to her house, he doesn't drive. He doesn't drive anywhere. It takes him a while - the fancy part of town is quite the walk - but it's not like he has anywhere else to be and the fresh air is more welcome than he could have imagined. He stands at the end of the path that leads to the front door but he can't bring himself to go any further. He does the same every day for a week.

#

Juliette calls her. It's quick, no rambling chat, just to say hi, see how she's feeling. It's strange, this Juliette-being-nice thing, and she can't get used to it. But she likes it, and she wonders where they will be when things are back to normal, whatever normal is supposed to be now. She wonders if Juliette will revert back into rhinestone-bitch or if maybe the events of late have changed her irrevocably. She calls her. Asks how she is. Tells her she's heard she played the Bluebird again, that she's re-hired Glen. And when she hangs up she moves slowly, breathing through the protests her body makes, to the record player across the room and digs through the discs in the box next to it. She finds the one she's looking for, the one Deacon all but threw at her in a bout of annoyance, and sits back down, pulling her Grandmother's blanket around her legs. Maybe Juliette really does have it in her. She picks up a pen and starts to write, and she doesn't stop until the girls come home from school and create their own lemonade and cookies whirlwind in the kitchen.

#

He has no idea what he's supposed to do now. Does he send her birthday cards? Should he be teaching her about staying away from boys and getting good grades in school? Who drops her off at her prom, him or Teddy? Or neither of them, are dads not supposed to drop their daughters off at their prom and make them lose all credibility? Does he have any say at all in her college education, where she gets her first job? He finds himself worrying about helping her with her homework - he's never been very academic. He can write a shit hot song but he isn't really sure what algebra is, he skipped those classes in school to sneak into the open mic afternoons at that bar in town that always looked like a fog machine had thrown up in it. He hasn't been to see her, he doesn't know how to and it isn't fair, on her, on Rayna. Rayna. He feels like his gut has been sliced open again when he thinks of her. He doesn't know where to start.

#

She has a scar that stretches from her chest about seventy-seven miles down her body. It is a neat line, impressively so, still red and inflamed, and it feels funny when she touches it. They told her it would heal to almost nothing - they've taken the stitches out, who knew how many stitches it takes to stop your stomach bursting back open? - eventually, and she isn't sure when 'eventually' is, but it looks better than it did. Daphne sees it one day when she's doing the stretches they taught her in the physiotherapy sessions, and asks with wide eyes if that is the only scar she has. She's been wearing a lot of jumpers since she came home.

#

The band have always thought Maddie is Deacon's. They've never said anything, none of them. Rayna has played with the same band for years, she trusts them, they're good friends, they're good musicians. Deacon had been in his final rehab stint - and Jesus was it a long one - when she'd started craving sunflower seeds. She hates sunflower seeds. She did then, she does now. Deacon loves them. He's never gone on the road without an obscenely large stash of them in his bag, right from their very first tour together when all they had to class it as a 'tour' was a beat up guitar and an old mini bus they borrowed from his cousin and drove from place to place trying to get gigs. She'd been sick with Maddie, really sick, for months. The band couldn't get through a rehearsal without her running for the side of the stage and throwing up the breakfast she hadn't been able to finish. They'd taken to keeping a bucket next to the steps for when she couldn't get as far as the bathroom, which she'd stopped protesting about after the first few weeks and a few close calls. They'd been jovial with her about all the green faces, but had exchanged worried glances and brought her glasses of water and the vitamin tablets Adria had taken when she'd had her first baby. They knew she was fragile, and not just because she was starting to get a swollen belly and a thumping pain in her back. They'd been there through it all, the last minute panics when Deacon still hadn't turned up and the crowds were on their third beers getting restless and Rayna was pacing and insisting that he would show up, he would. They'd seen her sob so hard she'd made herself sick for very different reasons when he'd been gone for hours and they couldn't find him, and seen her cold and seething when he'd eventually shown up passed out behind the bins in the parking lot of some bar so filthy you needed a tetanus shot with your whiskey chaser. They'd been worried about him too, they'd been as close to him as they were to her for a long time and he'd left a gaping hole in their tour, but they knew they were only aware of the half of what he was putting Rayna through. Bucky had shot her a look when she'd tucked into the seeds. She couldn't keep anything down, even water made her queasy, but the way she'd munched on them like she was starving had made him stop what he'd been doing and smile at her. 'What are you looking at?' she'd asked around a mouthful and Johnny the drummer had been the one to let out a low whistle and pluck one from the packet. 'You sure that isn't Deacon's kid in there?' he'd asked, grinning at the rest of them and popping the seed into his mouth, and when her face had turned white he'd looked mortified. That was the first and the last time any of them mentioned it. To her, at least.

#

Teddy kisses her when she's wearing the Superwoman jumper Tandy bought her as a joke for Christmas. She's sitting on a chair in the kitchen that he'd pulled up to the counter when she'd insisted she help with dinner because it had been weeks since she'd done anything. He hands her one of the blunt knives and gets her chopping the soft vegetables, not the carrots or the onions, and when she has trouble with the courgette he comes up behind her and closes his hand over hers, and she should see it coming but she doesn't. She is only thinking about the courgette and how good it feels to be useful even if it's the kind of useful that isn't real, like when she lets Daphne stir in the chocolate chips even though she could do it faster and she knows half the packet will end up smeared around her mouth and will never make it into the cookie dough. Teddy's hand stops what it's doing and doesn't move from hers, and when she turns to look at him with a question on her lips he presses his own to them instead and she never does get it out. It takes her a moment because she is frozen with the surprise of it, but she stops him, pushing him away gently with the hand that isn't holding the knife. His look of disappointment makes her stomach drop and she tells him she's sorry and she means it, she is sorry, but he walks away and turns his back on her and carries on chopping the onions with the proper knife, the one for people who haven't still got the shakes six weeks after they were tipped upside down on the side of the road. 'Is there anything you won't forgive him for?' Teddy asks, still slicing, and she waits for him to go on. 'You almost died Rayna. And still….' He doesn't need to say anything else so he doesn't. She cuts the courgette into tiny pieces.

#

Coleman didn't know. Not officially, anyway. He'd had his suspicions, they were partly his motivation for telling Rayna she had to extract Deacon from her life, but she never told him and he didn't ask. It was for his own good, he says, her letting him go, he would never have gotten dry if she hadn't, if he hadn't told her all the reasons she had to and given her such good ones - ones that made her feel guilty and selfish and irresponsible - that she had no choice. She was fire to him, and he kept playing with it. Coleman had known she was good for him too, that amongst all the fire was a girl who loved him fiercely and would tap dance to the end of the earth for him. But he would never have stopped if he'd known every time that she would be there, that he could manipulate her into scraping his sorry bollocks from the gutter again and again. She was all he wanted anyway so if she was on the end of his puppet string no matter how many times he tried and failed and failed harder, why would he keep trying? Deacon doesn't look at him as he listens to his explanation. He sits on his porch steps and stares straight ahead at the woman watering her hydrangeas across the road. He doesn't know what part he's more furious about, and he doesn't know what part hurts most. He doesn't have Coleman to thank that she didn't cut him loose for good.

#

Tandy takes her on her first trip outside. It feels like she has been in a prison, she realises when she is no longer breathing in air conditioning or the expensive pot pourri that lives in the bowl next to the couch where she feels like she's spent forever. She'd been apprehensive about going out, some strange and irrational worry that Tandy tells her isn't irrational at all, she's been through a lot, but once she is there it's wonderful. They drive to the park they used to play in as children, and eat cream buns on a bench. It's the second time she's been in a car since the accident, once on the way home from the hospital, and she digs her nails into the seat so hard her knuckles turn white.

#

Stacey turning up on his doorstep throws him. Truthfully, if a little guiltily, he hasn't thought about her once, but Scarlett told him she'd called her when he was in the hospital, she'd heard the news, she was worried. She hadn't been to visit him in there and he's glad, he wouldn't have been able to get out more than a couple of words because he was too busy hoping desperately that Rayna would one day flip her hair over her shoulder again like he loved watching her do and everything else in his whole life was laughably insignificant in comparison. She doesn't ask to come in, but he offers and she stands self-consciously inside the front door. She asks him how he is and when he tells her he's fine, a little stiff, nothing more, she makes small talk and all he can think is that she's stood in the exact spot he'd kissed Rayna goodbye the morning after she'd told him she loved him and his world had reduced and expanded only to what her skin felt like under his fingertips. He doesn't want Stacey to stand there. He makes her coffee so she will move into the kitchen.

#

Bucky brings her demos. They listen to them together, the songs that Scarlett and Will have been recording that they will filter down and brush up and choose for each of their albums. Rayna is excited. She can't wait to get back to work, and the corners of his eyes crinkle when she tells him so. He can't wait either, he admits, and she sees in his eyes the sincerity. She doesn't miss the fear it is laced with that he has felt for seven weeks straight. She kisses him on the cheek and presses play on the next track.

#

It's been fifty-three days since he's had a drink. He's back there now, in the small numbers. He is repulsed when he counts them, and he counts them often, more times a day than the number of days themselves. Counting them helps him to stay sitting carefully on the wagon holding onto the sides and making sure he doesn't topple off. He won't though, he knows he won't. Not after what's happened. Not after looking at Rayna's eyelashes resting against her cheeks for so long that he had begun to be afraid he might forget the exact colour of her eyes. He counted her bruises like he counts his days. He doesn't even want to look at a bottle of Jack.

#

She picks up her phone and scrolls to his number. She has it on speed dial - she always has - but she doesn't actually want it to ring, she just wants to look at it, so she fishes it out of her contacts. She wishes she could hit the call button.

#

Teddy hates Deacon. Hates him. Not the kind of vague dislike you feel for people who cut in line in front of you at Taco Bell, or people whose children drip ice lollies on your Louboutins in the playground. Not even the kind reserved for friends who betray you or family members who only turn up when they want something and talk shit about you the rest of the time. Teddy hates Deacon. Rayna has always been aware of this fact, but even when they've been staring each other down a hair's breath from launching fists into faces and it's all because of her and she's really never meant for any of it to be that way, she's known it was what it was. What it is now is different. What it is now is that Deacon has fucked up, big time, the kind of big time Teddy has waited for so he can say 'SEE?', and open his arms for her to run into, but the woman Teddy has always wished would love him back still loves the fuck-up instead and he knows now what it feels like to lose her even if you can't lose what was never yours. What it is now is that Teddy has taken not only the woman Deacon loves but his child and Deacon has missed walking down an aisle holding her hand and spinning her around in a white dress and he's missed tooth fairies and bedtime stories and sleepless nights he would give anything to have back. Deacon isn't too fond of Teddy either.

#

His sister turns up not long after Rayna's release from the hospital. She tells him while she hoists a picnic basket of homemade jams and an entire bag of saltwater taffy, the flavour they used to eat as kids, from the backseat of her banged up old Beetle that it took her this long to come see him because she's been sorting a few things out. It turns out that 'a few things' was her quitting her job and packing up her life and moving it and all the bamboo bangles she bought on that trip to Indonesia into Scarlett's spare room. She's here to keep an eye on him, he knows it even though she doesn't say it, but she's the only one who doesn't tell him he should stay away from Rayna, or that he shouldn't, or that he'd better have nipped the drinking in the bud, or anything at all. His tongue turns blue from the taffy and he laughs for the first time since before I think you might be my father when she holds up a compact mirror to show him.

#

He picks up his phone. The voicemail from her is still on it, the one she left him when her father was in the hospital, the one that tipped everything on a slide that was to bring them back to where they belonged. He listens to it. And then he sits on his porch steps and listens to it again, and again. It is dark outside when his battery beeps at him to tell him to stop. Some things never change, he'd told her. Damn right.

#

Scarlett calls before she arrives. She brings cupcakes, one for Rayna - Deacon told her red velvet and cream cheese were her favourite, bastard, she's been resisting them for years - and one each for Maddie and Daphne, chocolate with mint frosting. She has never been inside Rayna's house before, and the way she tries not to stare makes Rayna smile. 'Would you like some tea?' she asks. She has made a lot of tea lately. People stop by every day, and she is finally strong enough to pull the lid from the tin of sugar without using every last drop of energy she has. She leaves Scarlett to look as much as she wants to while she sets the kettle to boil. She has come over to tell her about the new music she's been writing, she says, how much she is looking forward to Rayna being well again so they can talk albums and tours and which single to release first. But she also tells her, sandwiched none too subtly in between, that she has been going to see Deacon a lot. What she says is that she has been making sure he's ok, but Rayna knows that what she means is she's been making sure he isn't swimming in the bottom of a whiskey glass. She is terrified that is the place he has returned to, but she has had no one other than Coleman to ask, and she worries that Coleman lies to her when he says Deacon is fine, that he's protecting her from a far uglier truth while she recovers. So she asks Scarlett. The relief overwhelms her. It's been fifty-five days. Rayna knows it's the real reason Scarlett came over, but she asks her to play the new songs for her, and while she sits and listens with a smile on her face, she is grateful.

#

She used to tell him she hated that she loved him, she'd say it over and over again while he pinned her against the wall and kissed her neck and made everything feel so much better. She hated that she loved him. She hated that he tasted of spirits and cigarettes and that he would beat the shit out of any man that looked at her the wrong way and a lot of men looked at her the wrong way, and she hated that he always told her he was sorry between bouts of vomit in the bathrooms of nameless grimy motels they'd be staying in. Sorry means not doing it again, she would tell him, something her mother used to say when she would eat all the little marshmallows in the Lucky Charms box when she thought no one was looking and would promise never to do it again when she was caught. She hated that everyone told her how stupid she was being, she hated that he'd left her, the Deacon she knew that was everything to her, that he'd become this Deacon who was a stranger, she fucking hated that more than any of it. She hates now that it's happened like this, hates it, but she can never hate that she loves him still. She doesn't need them to tell her anymore that she's a lost cause, because she tells herself. Over and over again. He came back to her, the Deacon she knows that is everything to her.

#

It's windy outside the day he comes. The manicured trees in the garden are blowing every which way, and Rayna wriggles closer to Tandy on the couch under the blanket they share. The knock at the door comes when Richard Gere is halfway up the fire escape, and it is Tandy who answers it. Rayna hears muffled voices, one her sister's and the other pleading. Deacon's face is anxious when he walks into the room behind a dubious-looking Tandy, and his eyes fix on Rayna immediately and lock with hers. She feels the breath leave her patched-up lungs and barely hears Tandy tell him 'Just a few minutes, she needs to rest.' She has done nothing but rest. She has done nothing but wait for him, and now he is here. He sits down carefully, and she thinks he is still delicate but she realises quickly he is taking care for her sake. She must look worse than she thought, because he swallows a lot as he takes in her face, looks over her arms where they rest on top of her covers, almost winces at how hollow her collarbone has become. But there is something else in his expression too, in the way he drinks in her eyes, the small tentative smile on her lips. 'Ray,' he says, just a whisper. Just a few minutes turns into the rest of the day, and Tandy has to be coaxed into leaving him there with her sister who still has to be helped into bed at night. They don't talk - there is so much to say that they say nothing at all, nothing more than ascertaining the other is healthy. They sit. The DVD menu stays on the screen so long it starts again by itself, so they watch Pretty Woman, and he chuckles when Vivian pings the snail across the table. Rayna thinks it's the best sound she's ever heard. She offers him half of her blanket and he accepts, sitting close enough that he isn't touching her but that she can feel the heat from his leg. They are greedy; they take in the others' breaths, he revels in how she wraps her arms around herself, she loves the hole in one of his socks when he puts his feet up on the coffee table. Then the movie finishes, and he makes her tea, and watches her as she blows on it to cool it down. She studies his face, notices how worn he looks, the burst capillaries in his eyes that belie how bad things have been for him. And then he reaches his hand out and silently traces the healing cut that spans from her ear down to her chin with his forefinger, so gently she is amazed she can feel it. But she does feel it. She feels it in every single nerve ending her body possesses, right down to her little toes. 'I'm so sorry,' he tells her in a voice so broken he couldn't say anything else even if he knew what else to say. As the sun sets outside he strokes the bruise on her forearm, the stubborn one that just won't go away, touches the lump on her hand where one of her many drips had been, and she leans her head on his shoulder. When he leaves he doesn't say goodbye, he doesn't need to. The look he gives her as he closes the door tells her he will be back.