Savannah had never seen a man’s face turn so pale so fast.
The stage lights at the Ryman Auditorium blazed down on her, hot and white, making the rhinestones on her guitar strap scatter tiny rainbows across the soundboard. She’d just finished the last note of “Blue Kentucky Rain,” and the applause from the crowd was still rolling in. The judges were smiling. The cameras were tight on her face. This was supposed to be the moment her life changed.
Judge Gideon Thorne, country music royalty with a silver ponytail and a black Stetson, leaned into his mic. He wasn’t clapping. He was staring at her guitar.
“Miss Hartman,” he said, his gravelly voice cutting through the applause. “Where did you get that pick?”
Savannah blinked. Glanced down at her right hand. Between her thumb and forefinger was a flat, triangular sliver of polished bone, inlaid with a single chip of amber that trapped the light like a tiny sun. Her dad’s guitar pick. He’d pressed it into her palm three weeks ago at the Greyhound station in Knoxville, his hands shaking, his eyes wet.
“You play with this,” he’d told her. “You play with this and you’ll find her.”
She looked back up at Gideon Thorne. “My father gave it to me, sir.”
Gideon pushed his chair back from the judges’ table. The screech of metal on the stage floor made the front row flinch. “That’s not a pick,” he said, walking toward her. His boots echoed in the sudden, dead quiet. “That’s a guitar pick. Bone. With a Baltic amber inlay shaped like a teardrop. One of a kind. Made for one person.”
He stopped six feet from Savannah, and now she could see his hands trembling at his sides.
“That pick was stolen from my house in Hendersonville eighteen years ago.” His voice cracked on the last word. “The same night my daughter disappeared.”
Savannah’s blood turned to ice. The amber pick suddenly felt heavy enough to drag her whole arm down. She could hear a producer hissing something in her earpiece, but the words didn’t land. All she could see was Gideon Thorne’s face, the way his jaw was working, the way his eyes were boring into hers like he was trying to read something written on her bones.
“I’m not a thief,” Savannah said. Her voice came out small, swallowed by the cavern of the auditorium. “My dad—my adoptive dad—he gave it to me before I came here. He said if I made it onto the show, if I sang well enough, I’d finally get to meet my real mother.”
Gideon didn’t move. Didn’t blink. Behind him, the other two judges sat frozen, their mouths slightly open.
Savannah’s lips kept moving. She couldn’t stop them. “He said my mother was someone who loved music more than anything. Someone who’d given me up because she had no choice. And the pick was the proof. The thing that would make her know it was me.”
Gideon Thorne took one more step forward. Up close, Savannah could see a thin scar cutting through his left eyebrow, the deep lines carved around his mouth. He smelled like leather and cedar.
“What’s your daddy’s name, girl?”
“Lucas Hartman.”
Something shifted in Gideon’s face. A muscle in his cheek jumped. His gaze darted past Savannah’s shoulder, toward the wings of the stage, and his whole body went rigid.
Savannah turned her head and followed his stare. Two men in dark suits were slipping through the backstage door near the loading dock. One of them glanced back just once—a wiry man with a buzz cut and a nose that had been broken at least twice—and then the door slammed shut behind them.
Gideon shouted something Savannah couldn’t make out. Two security guards near the sound booth started running.
“Lucas Hartman,” Gideon repeated, his voice suddenly hoarse. “God almighty. That’s not his real name.”
“What?” Savannah’s chest was caving in. “What are you talking about?”
Gideon turned back to her, and his eyes—blue like a winter sky—were full of something she’d never expected to see on a television judge’s face.
Grief.
“Lucas Hartman,” he said, “is a man who used to work for me. Luke Hardesty. My rhythm guitarist for twelve years. The man who disappeared three hours before my wife called 911, hysterical, screaming that our baby girl was gone and the nursery window was wide open.”
Savannah’s knees buckled. She caught herself on the mic stand, and the feedback shrieked through the auditorium. Someone in the audience gasped.
“He’s not my—he wouldn’t—”
“He stole you,” Gideon said, and his voice broke completely. “He stole you, and he stole that pick off my wife’s dresser, and we never saw either of you again.”
The cameras were eating this up. Savannah could see the red lights blazing, the wide eyes of the stagehands, the producer in the wings practically having a coronary. But none of it felt real. None of it felt like it was happening to her.
She thought of her dad—Luke, Lucas, whatever his name was—standing with her in the Greyhound station at five in the morning, shoving a crumpled envelope full of twenties into her jacket pocket. His eyes had been so sad. He’d hugged her so tight her ribs had ached.
“You go find your mama,” he’d whispered into her hair. “You’re a good girl, Savannah. You’re the best thing I ever did wrong.”
She’d thought he meant the money. The contest. The risk.
She hadn’t understood. Not even a little.
Gideon Thorne reached out and took her hand—the one holding the pick—and turned it over. His callused thumb brushed across the amber teardrop.
“My wife,” he said quietly. “Claire. She played this pick at every show we did for twenty years. Her daddy carved it from a deer antler he found in the Smokies. She swore it was good luck.”
Savannah was crying now, fat silent tears cutting tracks through her stage makeup. “She’s my—”
“Yeah.” Gideon’s voice was barely a whisper. “She is.”
And then, on live television, in front of four million people, Gideon Thorne pulled Savannah into his arms and held on like she might vanish into thin air. He smelled like leather and cedar and something that might have been hope.
The crowd erupted. The producers were waving their arms. The cameras were circling like sharks.
But in that moment, under the hot white lights of the Ryman stage, all Savannah could think about was a woman named Claire. A woman who played a bone guitar pick. A woman who, eighteen years later, was finally about to get her daughter back.
—
The drive to Hendersonville took forty minutes. Gideon called Claire from the car, and Savannah could hear the scream on the other end of the line, the kind of sound that started somewhere deep and primitive and didn’t stop until the air ran out.
Gideon had his driver take them to a white farmhouse with a wraparound porch and a barn in the back that had been converted into a recording studio. The gravel crunched under the tires. The porch light was on, even though it was barely past noon.
Claire Thorne was standing in the doorway.
She was smaller than Savannah had imagined. Barefoot, in faded jeans and a man’s flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Her hair was silver-blonde and pulled into a messy ponytail. She had the same blue eyes as Gideon, and right now they were running rivers down her cheeks.
Savannah got out of the car holding the bone pick in her palm. She didn’t know what to do with her hands. She didn’t know what to say.
Claire walked down the porch steps, one at a time, like she was afraid the ground might give way under her feet. She stopped three feet from Savannah and just looked at her.
“You have your grandfather’s hands,” Claire said. Her voice was wrecked. “He was a fiddler. Played the Opry back in ’62.”
Savannah looked down at her own fingers, still trembling. “I play the guitar. A little banjo. Luke—he taught me.”
At the name, Claire’s face tightened. But she didn’t look away.
“Is he still out there? Luke?”
Savannah shook her head. “He got on a bus to Montana. He said he’d done what he needed to do. He left me a note saying I was better off without him.”
Claire’s mouth pressed into a hard line. Gideon came up behind her and put a hand on her shoulder. “We’ll find him,” he said, and his voice carried a note of something Savannah couldn’t read. A promise. Maybe a warning.
Claire took a breath. Then another. Then she reached out and touched Savannah’s cheek with the tips of her fingers, feather-light.
“I sang to you every night for three weeks,” Claire whispered. “In the hospital nursery. They said you couldn’t hear me, that babies didn’t work that way. But I sang anyway. ‘You Are My Sunshine.’ Over and over. And you’d stop crying. Every single time.”
Savannah’s throat closed up. She tried to speak and nothing came out.
So instead, she pressed the amber teardrop pick into Claire’s hand and curled her mother’s fingers around it.
Claire looked down at the pick, then up at Savannah, and then she pulled her into an embrace so fierce and desperate that Savannah felt something crack open inside her chest—some old, locked-away thing she’d never had a name for.
“You are my sunshine,” Claire sang, so quietly that no one but Savannah could hear it. “My only sunshine.”
Savannah closed her eyes and let the words wash over her. The porch light burned gold behind her eyelids. Somewhere in the barn, a mockingbird was running through someone else’s song.
And for the first time in eighteen years, she was home.
