Chapter 9:

The rest of the tour flew bye. Deacon was right about that, like so many other things. She spent most of her free time going for walks or writing in her journal. The pain of losing him this time felt worse than any other. She had jumped to conclusions and thought the worst about the very best person she knew. If nothing else her broken heart was leading to some beautiful songs, some of the best stuff she had written in years. She decided to call her next album 'The Best Songs Come from Broken Hearts'. She knew Deacon would love the irony of that one.

They had pretty much gone back to their old routine. If not completely ignoring each other, they were at least cordial and professional. Everyone had noticed the change but only Bucky dared to ask. She wasn't one to spill her guts to anyone outside of Tandy or Deacon, but she trusted Bucky so one night over a couple glasses of whiskey, she told him the entire Claybourne James sage. She cried in his arms and he comforted her the best he could. He was heartbroken for them, like her, he really thought this would be it for them. After that Bucky tried his best to arrange her schedule to where she was least likely to run into Deacon or have to interact with him. She appreciated his gesture but at the end of the day they still had two girls to raise up and they couldn't completely cut each other out, just enough to hurt.

Thanksgiving had come and gone. Tandy was pretty subdued this year, as was Deacon. They almost seemed to find some sort of truce. Tandy felt awful about what happened, and her heart went out to both of them but most especially to the girls. After Deacon left for the tour, they had confided in her that this had been the best summer of their lives. Daphne was hoping they could do it again next year, not realizing all the turmoil going on around her but Maddie was much more keyed in. She cried after Daphne went to sleep telling her aunt that she knew something bad happened between her parents and she felt like everything was going to be broken again. It wasn't until then that Tandy realized how much Maddie was hurting over her parent's separation all these years. She may have been fourteen, but she was still a little girl hoping her parents would get back together once and for all. She didn't tell Rayna what Maddie had said but she did decide to lighten up on Deacon, this family had their share a pain and heartache and she didn't need to add to it.

Christmas had passed and Rayna was looking forward to a new year, a fresh start. Not only was she going to start recording her album but as of January second, she would also be the head of her own label. At first, she had planned to open a label under Edgehill but when the deal started to go south, Tandy suggested she buy her contract and catalogue and go out on her own. The last tour had gone well, and she had a good chunk of money, she could easily buy her contract and catalogue, but she couldn't do that and have leftover reserves to start a label. Initially, she wanted to get a loan using her house and catalogue as collateral, but Tandy cautioned her about overextending herself. She then sought out investors, but it seemed everyone she talked to was a man who wanted to tell her how to run her label. Very, very reluctantly, Rayna accepted the seed money from her father, Lamar. He assured her there were no strings attached, which she knew was the furthest thing from the truth but at least he was not asking to be physically or legally involved in the business. She figured she could handle that other emotional and familial strings that would come with the money. Bucky had decided to become a minor investor as well as her COO. Tandy too invested and surprised Rayna by leaving her post at Wyatt Enterprises to become her CFO. They still had a lot to work out, but Rayna was hoping that when she announced her album release, she would be announcing that it was the first album under her own Highway 65 label.

She was presently sitting in her den, legal documents laying out in front of her trying to make sense of all the papers she needed to sign. She just finished the last stroke of her name, on the lease for the new label headquarters, when her back door crashed open causing her to jump ten feet in the air off the couch.

"I hate you!" Maddie screamed as she ran into the kitchen.

"Maddie!" Deacon yelled as he ran through the door.

'Well at least she is mad at someone other than me for a change' she thought internally before making her way around the couch. "What is going on here?" she asked, stopping Maddie from rushing up to her room.

"I hate him, I never want to see him again," Maddie cried launching herself into her mother's arms.

Rayna looked up a Deacon who was standing in the middle of the kitchen, hands on his hips, looking completely overwhelmed. Daphne was standing behind him, leaning against the kitchen island, looking like she just lost her best friend. "What in the world?" she asked Deacon wondering what he could have possibly done to make them so upset.

"Did you know?" Maddie asked sobbing as she looked up at her mom.

"Know what sweetheart?" she looked down at her in concern.

"Did you know he has a girlfriend?" she asked another sob hitting her.

Rayna looked over at Daphne who now had tears streaming down her face as well. Then she looked up at Deacon trying to find an explanation for why their daughters knew he had a girlfriend. They had agreed that when this time came, they would talk to the girls together to avoid just this situation.

"Amanda's dad seen us out at dinner last night and Amanda told Maddie at school today."

"Oh," was all Rayna could muster. She was crestfallen for her girls and for herself. "Come here," she said to Daphne, who ran to her mom as she held them both. "It's okay babies, it's okay," she said soothingly.

Eventually she got them calmed down enough to get them to their rooms, homework started. When she came down into the kitchen Deacon was pouring two cups of tea. She took a seat at the island and he placed a mug in front of her before leaning back against the countertop opposite her. She sat in silence as she slowly sipped her tea just looking at him.

Finally, he couldn't take it anymore. "Okay Ray, let me have it."

"There's nothing to say," she said and shrugged. "You couldn't know that Amanda's dad would see you out and tell her."

Deacon ran his hands over his face in frustration. "This is not how I wanted this to happen. We agreed that if things were ever serious, we would do this together, I meant it when I agreed to that Ray."

"I know Deacon." She looked down at her mug knowing she had to ask but didn't particularly care to be looking at him when he gave her an answer. "So, it's serious then?"

He sighed deeply and she didn't even need to hear the words to know it was true. "It's been about three months," he admitted.

"Three months!" she said her head snapping up. "That's…"

"The night after you left, Coleman brought that damn puppy of his over to the house and I guess we missed some glass or something and he cut his paw, I helped get him to the Vet and…"

"You picked up some woman in the waiting room at the Vet?" she asked for clarification. 'Hell, he moves fast' she thought.

"No! Stacie is the Vet… she's a Veterinarian," he finished lamely.

"Oh," she replied stupidly.

"It was, yeah know…," he hated having this conversation with her. "…I didn't mean for anything to happen, but we exchanged numbers and just started talking and…"

"Okay!" she blurted out begging him to stop. She really didn't need the details. "Well then why don't I get the girls and see if we can calmly talk about this and what it means for them. I think it was probably just a shock for Maddie, especially after spending so much time together this summer and you know Daphne feels everything Maddie does so…"

"Yeah, sure. I guess we should have sat them down and talked to them about the summer sooner, I think maybe we didn't realize we got their hopes up."

'Mine too,' they both thought to themselves.

It wasn't the easiest of conversations, but they were able to talk things through with the girls. When Maddie point blank asked them what happened this summer, that she had thought they were getting back together, Deacon explained that they were just spending time together as a family nothing more and he apologized for making her think otherwise. Rayna was grateful to him for taking the blame for that one, but the truth was she was just as guilty if not more.

The girls accepted that Stacie was going to become part of their life. Not every day but Deacon asked that they spend a little time with her, to get to know her, before making any judgments and if they felt strongly that she wasn't a good person for their dad or their family, they would talk about it together. Finally, when all the heavy emotions drained away, Daphne curled up on Deacon's lap to say goodnight. Maddie was still a little cold but gave her dad a hug before he left.

Rayna sat in the kitchen. She added whiskey to her tea and when she finished that she opted for straight whiskey. She found it ironic that whiskey was the poison that wrecked her relationship with Deacon in the first place and here she was trying to dull the pain of the most recent damage with a glass of Tennessee's finest. She was never a big fan of whiskey but did start to drink it more after she and Deacon split up. She pondered whether it was just a change in taste with age or some deeper Freudian attempt to remain closer to him, his poison becoming her balm.

It was official. Deacon Claybourne had moved on from Rayna James. She could picture the headline in the entertainment section of the Tennessean. Her heart hurt but no tears would come. Maybe she used them all up she thought. After twenty-six years maybe she cried all the tears allotted to their relationship. "Twenty-six years," she said aloud. Where the hell did all that time go?

She wasn't much older than Maddie when she met him, all of sixteen at the Bluebird. She had fallen for him in all of ten minutes and not just in the way a teenager falls in and out of love, but she fell for him to the depths of her soul. They gave their hearts away to each other before they even had a chance to learn who they really were as people. She wondered if that was a blessing or a curse. Maybe if they would have met when they were older, when he had his demons under control, and she knew who she was apart from her family. Maybe then they would have actually had a shot at staying together and raising their girls under the same roof, a happy stable home. Maybe they would have survived. That thought made her pause. They did survive, they survived all that life threw at them and still they couldn't make it work.

She would spend not just the rest of the night, trying to understand why they had failed, but the next few weeks. She poured all that pain and anger and hurt into her album and what should have taken her months to finish was all but complete in six weeks. Even her producer, Liam McGuiness, was astonished. He heard she was good, but he was hesitant to work with a forty-year-old mom of two, who was known as the wholesome Queen of Country. However, after those first few nights in the studio, he knew she was more than good, she was great. And while Rayna worked to wrap up her album for release, Liam was working to figure out how to stick around