“Heck of a year,” Henry said, handing me a beer.

I took a slow drink, thinking back on the year as I looked out over Paisley’s backyard. My backyard, I corrected myself. I still wasn’t completely used to living in this house. My perceptions had changed so drastically over the last year, but I still felt like I should be grateful to live in a shoe box. Our new, rambling horse ranch was as far from a shoe box as a person could get without moving into an actual palace.

It was strange to be back in Memphis. The world seemed so much bigger than it had before, but also smaller, somehow. As if seeing places like Paris and Beijing stripped them of their alien mystery, making them as vivid and real as the city I’d known all my life.

“Heck of a year,” I agreed.

“You ready for Sunday?” he asked me with a sharp look.

I shot a wry smile at him. “She’s got a lot more to worry about than I do. This doesn’t work out, worst-case scenario, I walk away with nothing. That’s what I walked into it with. She’s got a lot more to lose. Not that I want any of it if I don’t have her… I just mean that she is all I want. All I can see myself wanting in the future.”

“Hm.” Henry frowned at his beer thoughtfully, then turned his steely gaze at me. “Tyler, you and I are about to have a conversation that we should have had six months ago. I put it off because, frankly, I like you. I think you’re a solid dude.”

“Erm…thanks?”

“Yeah, shut up.” Henry inhaled sharply and blew it out, then took a deep swig of his beer. Squinting at me once more, he continued. “Paisley’s important. Not because she’s a star, not because she’s rich or beautiful or any of the other crap that the average fan thinks is important. She’s important because, through all of this stardom craziness, she’s maintained her sense of who she really is. She’s precious. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Completely,” I said earnestly. “Henry, you know me. I’d marry that girl if she was a penniless nobody. Hell, I probably would have asked her sooner if she was a penniless nobody.”

“Why do you say that?” he asked sharply.

I chuckled softly. “Because then my love wouldn’t have felt like an intrusion into her empire. I’ve wanted to marry her since that night you broke the news about the tour. The way she kept looking at me for reassurance even though the whole night was all about her world.”

“And you didn’t want to intrude on that?” he asked, furrowing his thick ginger brow.

I shrugged. “I didn’t want to intrude on her music. She’s not just a singer; she runs the whole Paisley Abbott brand, even though she doesn’t really know it. She tries to wait for direction, for somebody to tell her what to do. But really, she’s the one calling all the shots.”

“She’s doing that a lot more now,” Henry pointed out. “You’ve had an effect on her.”

I smiled at that. I’d been worried, once or twice, that I had nothing to give Paisley outside of the bedroom, but I’d been proved wrong over and over again.

“You know what’s funny? For months leading up to the tour, she kept telling me that I shouldn’t expect her to acknowledge my existence during her tour. She apologized in advance, and told me in no uncertain terms that if I couldn’t handle that, I should stay home.”

“Good thing you didn’t,” Henry said sagely. “That would have been a disaster.”

I shook my head with a little laugh. “I don’t think it would have been. Remember the night I asked her to marry me?”

“Sure,” Henry said. “You cut it kind of close, waiting until the week before we went on tour. What about it?”

“Well… You saw her say yes, and do the happy screams, jumping around with her sister and everything. It was completely different when we came home.”

“How so?”

“She sat me down with a bottle of wine and we had a very serious talk. I thought she was going to break up with me, honestly.”

“Right after accepting your proposal?” Henry asked wryly.

“Man, you should have seen the look on her face,” I told him, shivering at the memory. “I really thought… Anyway, what she told me was that I had no idea what I was getting myself in to. She said she accepted the proposal because it’s what she wanted, but if I changed my mind after the tour she wouldn’t hold it against me.

“She told me that she wasn’t going to settle for anyone who didn’t want to marry all of her, in every mood, in every environment, and if I couldn’t stand to be with her on the tour, then I would never last in a marriage with her.”

“Ah,” Henry said with a twinkle in his eye. “That explains a lot.”

“Like what?” I asked, my shoulders tensing.

“Like Germany.”

I squeezed my eyes shut and groaned. “Oh my God, longest night of my life.”

“Venue catches fire…”

“Paisley panics.”

“Bus won’t start…”

“Paisley’s hysterical.”

“Due on stage in Belgium two hours ahead of the written schedule…”

“Paisley loses her dang mind.”

Henry laughed. “I gotta tell you, man. Watching you curse everything from the first fish to crawl out of the ocean to the idiot director at the Belgian stadium was the funniest thing I ever did lay my eyes on.”

“Glad you were entertained,” I said sarcastically, rolling my eyes. “But no, man. I didn’t spend all that time calming her down and getting her to sleep because she’d leave if I didn’t. I did it because she needed me to.

“She needed me a lot on that tour, seemed like. Not for anything big—I didn’t have to prop her up or hustle up a bowl full of green candy or anything, I just needed to be there. Every time she started to freak out, she’d look for me. All I had to do was look at her and wink or smile, something stupid easy, and she’d be good to go.”

“She always gets a little neurotic on tours,” Henry said. “It’s a lot of stimulation, a lot of stress on the body with all the time changes and everything. She did a lot better than I thought she would. Pretty sure that’s your doing.”

“I’d like to think so,” I said honestly. “But I think she might just be growing into her superstar pants.”

“Only thing getting into her superstar pants is you.” Henry’s eyes twinkled, and I punched him on the arm. He switched back to his brotherly talk after that. “What was your parents’ marriage like, Tyler?”

“Practically nonexistent,” I said flatly. “My mom took off on my eighth birthday. My dad was a drunk. I always figured the two were linked.”

“Ouch. Sorry to hear that.” Henry frowned into the distance. “So, what’s your model?”

“What do you mean?”

“For your marriage? Who are you modeling it after?”

I thought about that for a while. Dan’s marriage had been a hot mess from beginning to end, starting with physical attraction and ending when she realized that she’d spent most of her life with a guy who wouldn’t speak to her outside the bedroom. Jude was married again, but I didn’t see him as a good role model for anybody. A smile flickered over my lips as I went back a little farther.

“Billy and Jeanne,” I said with a grin. “They worked hard, side by side, until they had their twins. She stayed home because they couldn’t afford decent childcare, so he started picking up extra cash in the ring. She hated it, but she didn’t stop him or give him any kind of ultimatum. She always told him that she was scared he would die in the ring, and he always told her that he wouldn’t.”

“He didn’t, did he?” Henry asked with a wince.

“He almost did,” I said, far enough removed from the memory to talk about it easily. “I almost beat him to death. Got stuck in a primal thing, didn’t see the tap out. Anyway… He spent a few weeks in the ICU, and another four months in the hospital. Six months in rehab. Not once in that whole eleven months did Jeanne say, ‘I told you so’. Not one single time. She just took care of the kids all by herself and visited him in the hospital every day. When he got home, she took care of all three of them.”

“Sounds like a bit of a one-way street,” Henry offered.

“Nah, man,” I grinned. “See, I patched the finances for them while he was in the hospital, but he didn’t know that. She didn’t want to bother him with the mystery of who was sending her cash, she just told him that everything was fine and they were taken care of. He didn’t believe her. He thought she was living with her parents, who he doesn’t like much because of how they treated her growing up.”

“Complicated,” Henry murmured.

“Yeah. So he starts looking around for ways to provide for his family without getting out of bed or risking re-injury.”

Henry raised his brow in question as he took a swig.

“He started a blog,” I laughed. “Who’d a thought a big street fighter like Billy could write? But he did it, and he did it well. Blogged about Memphis and had his friends take pictures for him. He earned himself a thousand followers in the first few weeks, then he started going after small businesses.”

“Going after?”

“Offered them a detailed spot on his blog. Three-hundred word advertisements with a captive audience. He did the research, put in the time, and figured out that he could charge a ridiculous amount for it. Then he went and taught himself marketing, and his follower numbers just skyrocketed. By the time he made it back home, he was pulling in a cool four thousand every month, just by highlighting different low-key joints around Memphis. Might not sound like much to you bigwigs,” I teased, elbowing him. “But that’s near triple what he was making with his nine-to-five and the fights.”

Henry whistled appreciatively. “Sounds like you saved his life,” he said.

“I didn’t think about that. I guess maybe I did. Wish I could’ve done it without almost killing him.”

“Well, you live and you learn,” Henry said with a smile. A comfortable lull in the conversation was filled with sips of beer and killdeer cries. “So what do you want to do for your bachelor party?”

* * *

Friday night rolled around too quickly. After a lot of discussion, me and the boys had decided that Friday was better than Saturday for the bachelor party, since it would give us a whole day to recover before the wedding. I use the term “boys” loosely; Sky came along with us, and I still wasn’t entirely sure what Sky’s deal was. I had followed Paisley’s lead in the matter, though, and just accepted whichever role Sky decided to play on any particular day. Dana had gone to the bachelorette party, which befuddled me all the way down to my boots, but I didn’t think about it too hard.

Flanked by Henry on one side and Billy on the other with Sky trailing behind, I led my small cluster of friends down into the basement where I had earned my living for so many years. I could taste the adrenaline in the air, feel the excitement like electricity on my skin. Billy and I shared an elated grin.

“You used to fight here?” Henry asked, his eyes glowing.

“Hell yeah, man. Five nights a week, for years.”

“He never lost,” Billy grinned. “I didn’t either. That’s why they wanted us to duke it out.”

“And then Tyler killed your streak,” Sky said with morose fascination.

“Sure did, man. Best thing that ever happened to me, too.” Billy winked at me, and I shook my head.

He didn’t look too different from the way he had before. He had a circular scar on his skull where they had drilled to relieve the pressure, and his nose had a new lump in it, but I almost couldn’t tell. He’d broken his nose so many times before I got to him that it was virtually unrecognizable from his school pictures. A new scar ran across his upper lip, and his dental inserts glowed under black light.

I was just glad he was walking straight again.

Reaching way up, I clapped a hand on his shoulder and shook him gently. He still didn’t know that I was the one who had paid his hospital bills, but I suspected that he suspected.

“Here we go,” Billy said excitedly, bouncing on the balls of his feet. “Man, look at that! Ugh, I’d love to get in there.”

His face lit up like a kid’s as the fighters circled each other. I felt that wave of calm which always flowed over me in the seconds before a fight, that laser-point focus. The adrenaline began to trickle through my limbs, pooling in my fists, making them heavier than they had any right to be. The first punch landed with a crunch on the side of the other guy’s head.

Billy whooped, dancing back and forth as close to the ring as he could get. My stomach turned over as flashes of Billy’s broken face filled my mind’s eye. I pushed the images away, forcing the lively Billy into my vision. See, I told myself. He’s fine.

Turning back to the ring, I found myself admiring one guy’s footwork and the other guy’s speed. Slowly, the adrenaline trickled away as my body caught up with what my brain was chanting: We aren’t fighting today.

“This is great!” Henry shouted next to my ear. “My dad would have loved this!”

Mine would have, too, I thought grimly.

I tried to shake off thoughts of my father, but they refused to go away. How much had I changed since I last saw him? I was taller. Bigger. Faster. I could fight, I could work, I could cook well enough to pass. I’d traveled the world. Outgrown old friends, like Dan, and my old kill-or-be-killed way of life. I’d fallen in love. If I could change that much in ten years, maybe my Dad could too.

What would Paisley do? I knew the answer. She showed me every day. Every time she reached out to her mother or let Jude’s crude language slide off of her unruffled feathers. Every time she dropped a hundred in a panhandler’s pot, insisting that if even one person did something good with it, she didn’t care how many squandered it. Everyone got a clean slate with Paisley.

“I’ll be right back, guys,” I told them. “I need to make a call.”

“Calling your girl during your bachelor party is la-ame!” Billy called after me, a huge grin on his face.

I sneered at him, but didn’t correct him. Billy knew enough to ask questions I didn’t want to answer, not yet anyway.

Out on the quiet street, I looked down at my phone, swallowing hard. I remembered the number. But what if he’d changed it? What if he was already dead? When I took off, he’d been doing his damnedest to drink his way into an early grave.

“So you’ll dial a wrong number. Not the end of the world.” Still, my fingers refused to move over the keys. “Man up, ya wuss.”

I dialed, goaded by my own insult. My mouth went dry as I held the phone to my ear and listened to it ring.

“Hello?”

My heart sank. It wasn’t him, it couldn’t be. This voice sounded robust and sober, two things my dad most certainly was not.

“Hi, um… I’m trying to get a hold of Steve Macintyre. Would you happen to know where I could reach him?”

“You just did. This is Steve.”

My breath was gone. Time seemed to stop. All I could hear was the rush of blood thundering in my ears. Dad.

“Can I help you?”

Polite. How and why was he being polite? An unwanted phone call from someone who didn’t talk. Why wasn’t he losing his temper?

“Are you still there, sir?”

“Um, yeah, sorry,” I cleared my throat a couple of times, trying to catch my bearings. “It’s, uh… It’s Tyler, Dad.”

Silence. It stretched on and on, but I couldn’t bring myself to take the phone from my ear to see if he’d hung up on me. An eternal minute later, I heard him suck in a gasp. I almost grinned. He’d had the exact reaction I had.

“Tyler?” he said, pronouncing each syllable as if he couldn’t believe it. “My boy?”

“Yeah.” I cleared my throat again as it tightened up on me. “Look, Dad, I’m um… I’m getting married. Day after tomorrow. She’s… She’s real important to me. I want the day to be perfect for her.”

“I saw the announcement,” he said with a tremor in his voice that I’d never heard before. “Don’t worry, son. I won’t interfere.”

“No, Dad, I…” Was I really going to do this? I’d already started. I always finished what I started, damn it. “I’m calling to ask you if you’ll come.”