Does it? If he’s heard the song... You know him. You know how private he is, how protected.

Yes. And on some level, she knew that if he ever did hear the song, he would probably view it as a betrayal. And maybe part of her wanted that. Had wanted to pour out her own pain and anguish, to make everybody understand the intimacy of it. What he had taken from her. Not her virginity, it was deeper than that.

She had never slept with another man before, and she hadn’t slept with one since, because she had been afraid of being hurt.

That was the part that got her.

That he knew what it had meant to her to give herself to him.

Yeah, she could see how maybe he would be upset that she had advertised that. But hell, people didn’t know that it was him. Well. They did know that it was him. There were entire online forums dedicated to analyzing every single part of the song. If her scarf was a metaphor, or if it was real. If she was writing about the bull rider that she had been seen with on the coast that summer she’d gotten famous. Or if it had been a whirlwind affair in the studios with Harry Styles.

She had never met Harry Styles. But somehow, there were rumors about the two of them. Imaginary Tansey had a way more interesting love life than actual Tansey, who had one lover and a broken heart.

Your heart is not broken anymore. You just feel fragile because you are facing down your problematic past.

But yes, there were a lot of rumors. And many of them were true. It had been especially jarring to read a thread about lyrics where somebody had correctly identified the blood was about a miscarriage or a pregnancy scare. And it wasn’t like it was subtle; it was just reading people trying to get deep into her words, rather than just applying their own experiences to it. Because to an extent, she had imagined that the song itself and what it could mean to people would be more interesting than what it had meant to her.

But somehow, she herself had become an object of fascination and... And that meant that people had wanted to know what the song meant for her.

But she had never said his name out loud. His name hadn’t passed her lips once since they had parted that last day.

All that to say, she felt like she didn’t fully deserve his rage, but she also couldn’t deny that she had known it would be there.

Deep down, she had known, because she knew him. If he hadn’t thought she would write a song about it, then he had never really known her. Hadn’t been paying attention. Not even when she had played him the song about her dad, the first song that had made her famous. The one that he had encouraged her to record. He had been an audience of one the first time she had ever played a song that had come so deep from her heart like that. And he had been the one who had said it was the key to her fame.

He’d been right.

As famous as the song about her dad had made her, the one about her heartbreak had taken things into the stratosphere.

That forced her to think about why she was here, and she’d rather not do that. So she focused instead on the blazing blue of his eyes.

She’d seen those eyes look a lot of ways.

But never angry. Not like this.

“Well. Good for me then. Because yeah, it would be kind of a bad idea for this to be the last place that I was headed, with you being the owner and all. That is a totally traceable murder. I wouldn’t attempt it.”

“Lucky for you, I’d rather have the notoriety of having you have stayed here, than I would getting rid of you.”

His voice was hard, and it was like some of the anger was slowly beginning to subside. There was something flat there. Something unreadable. Except... She didn’t trust it.

“What?”

“You’re going to make sure that everybody knows that you stayed here. Wrote a song here or some shit.”

“Right. So I’m going to tell everybody that I stayed at my ex... Sorry. Is it better if I just keep your name out of everything? Because we can go ahead and address the number-one hit in the room if you want.”

“I don’t want to talk about that shit. Except to say that you and I both know that whether you ever confirmed it or not, people know it’s about me. I’m the one that gets yelled at by crazy fans walking down the street. You can deny it, you can refuse to address it, but the best thing you could do is show everybody that we’re fine.”

But they weren’t fine. Nothing in her was fine. She felt utterly and absolutely rattled. And this was her retreat...

And it was never going to be again after this. Because he owned it now. She could never come here again.

If this was fate, fate was a bitch.

Or maybe this was all balancing the cost of what she’d been given. Maybe poor country girls didn’t get to have fame and money if they weren’t also given heartbreak and exes they couldn’t forget.

“You know, that’s quite the weird, blackmail-sounding thing that you can’t make me do, but I think I would rather just leave.”

“You’re welcome to try. But the weather has picked up. Everybody else was smart and didn’t come up. All my staff left. Because it was the smart thing to do. You were the only fool that decided to make the trek up.”

“And I can make the trek back down.” She turned around and started to head for the door. She pushed it open, and the wind just about blew it back. She shoved it, and headed back out into the night. Fuck all this, and him too. Him specifically.

Maybe there was a song in this.

That was the real problem. She couldn’t think of a song. And she didn’t want anyone to know that. She was completely dried up. She had written the greatest breakup album of all time. With a song that had reached into people’s souls and taken hold of them. Had taken on a life of its own. She had done the same writing the song about her dad. She knew how to grab on to pain. She knew how to grab on to pain and turn it into something real and relatable.

And now she was famous and successful and...

And she was still sad. Because it had given her money. It had let her buy a house for her mom. But it hadn’t given her a relationship with her dad.

And she was alone. And she couldn’t figure out how to trust people any more than she could before.

Hell, it was even worse. Because the only person she had ever trusted was Flint. The only person that she had ever hoped might be more than he seemed was Flint.

And he had proved that he wasn’t. And then she had gotten famous. And her ability to trust people had become even more compromised because people could actually get things from her. They actually wanted things from her, and that? That made everything feel fraught. It made everything feel impossible.

And now it felt like there were no more songs. Because all she had was old, lingering pain that she didn’t want to keep writing about, and the thrill of a success story that she couldn’t quite access. It made her feel ungrateful. It made her feel small and sad. To be standing in the spotlight and still feeling like she was shrouded in darkness. She was beginning to feel terrified that it would all go away. Because the only thing worse than the idea of staying in the spotlight, bombarded with all the fame, was what would happen if it went away.

Because one thing was sure. It was exposing to write a song like she had about her and Flint. But it gave her a way to expel some of that pain. It gave her a way to talk about it. She didn’t have anyone in her life that she could talk about it honestly. The only person had been... Flint. And then it had ended. So she had written songs about him instead. And talked to the world about how he had let her down. There was a catharsis in that.

She battled the wind and walked down to her truck, forced the door open. All of her bags were still inside. The door to the hotel opened, and she saw Flint, up the stairs, looking down at her, backlit by the lights from the inside.

And he came down the stairs, heading out after her, the wind whipping the T-shirt he was wearing, tightening it over what she knew was a very firm body. And she did not need to be looking at him right now; she was trying to run away from him.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he shouted. “You were lucky to make it up here okay—you are not driving back down in this.”

“You lost any right to have an opinion on what I do,” she yelled back.

“Did I lose it, or did we agree to dissolve it?”

Well. There was the rub. With the wind and the snow blowing between them, and ferocity and fear burning in his blue eyes.

“I was protecting myself. If you were worried about anything other than your own feelings in that moment, you would’ve known that.”

“You should’ve said it all to me,” he said.

The song. That was what he meant. That she should have said all those things to him, and not the world.