One night at that rented lakehouse, Emma and I sat alone together on the dock, stars scattered across the still water beneath us. Do you ever regret it, she asked. Regret what, I said. The Mercedes, she said. I took a long pause before answering. Sometimes I regret that it was necessary, I said. What’s the difference, she asked. I wish my family had been different, I said. I wish they had stood up for me instead. But they didn’t. So I stood up for myself instead. The regret is that they made me choose. Not that I chose. Do you miss them, she asked. The family you had. I miss who I thought they were, I said. Not who they actually turned out to be. That’s sad, she said. Yeah, I said. But I’m not sad anymore. What are you then, she asked. At peace, I told her.
Peace was not the same thing as happiness. It wasn’t victory, and it wasn’t satisfaction. It was quieter than all of that, steadier too.
My professional life kept growing steadily afterward. A third EP, Surface Tension, pulled three hundred forty thousand streams in its first month. Session work on four Grammy nominated albums followed. A teaching position at Belmont University. A feature interview in Premier Guitar magazine, where a luthier eventually built a custom signature model using wood reclaimed from trees damaged near a lake. The theme was impossible to miss, and I didn’t try to hide it. When they asked what losing the Gibson had taught me, I told them simply that I’d lost a guitar once, and it had taught me that instruments are tools, not identities. What you create matters more than what you own. Music doesn’t sink, even when everything else around you does. That quote traveled further than I expected, probably because people understood it was never really about a guitar at all.
