Run, Rose, Run

Ethan is surly and silent all the way home. He worries about handing AnnieLee the guitar he made for her because it would be like giving her his heart, and he has doubts about this because he knows so little about her. In the car from the airport, he finally confronts her about the fact that she never shared with him any of the things about her Tennessee past that she shared with the journalist in LA.

AnnieLee points out the truck that refuses to pass them, and Ethan gets the tingle at the back of his neck that since his military days has alerted him to the presence of danger. They’re being followed. He then stages a “tactical vehicle intervention” (232) by driving in a manner that their pursuer couldn’t anticipate. AnnieLee grabs the steering wheel, leading them into a construction site. Ethan asks why she did that, and AnnieLee responds with tears.

A frustrated Ethan threatens AnnieLee that if she doesn’t and talk to him, he’ll leave her here. AnnieLee is reeling from the fact that she nearly got them both killed and doesn’t know what to say. She senses that the men likely won’t harm her while Ethan is with her but that they’re sending the message that “they weren’t going to leave her alone. That no matter where she ran, they’d find her” and “make her pay” (235).

Ethan says that he resents having to be her bodyguard and companion, staying in the parking lot of her motel to protect her night after night, without really knowing anything true about her. AnnieLee bitterly replies that Ethan was “on the clock” (236), as Ruthanna paid him by the hour. She dares him to quit, and Ethan says that if he does, she’ll have to find her own way home. She jumps out of the car and attempts to hitch a ride.

Ethan writes a song about how he’s “not the enemy here” (238) and would be a great boyfriend if she gave him a chance. His frustration about the AnnieLee situation leads to a creative flow of songwriting, and he doesn’t realize that Ruthanna is at his apartment, eavesdropping. She says she wants to repair the situation between Ethan and AnnieLee, saying that it sounds like a lovers’ quarrel. She wants Ethan to talk to Mikey Shumer and find out what he knows about the truck that was following them. Ethan hates Mikey Shumer because he’s exploitative and corrupt and commits to protecting AnnieLee from him.

Ethan has a run-in with Mikey Shumer’s bodyguards and needs to fight them in order to see the executive. He confronts Mikey and asks him whether he has been harassing AnnieLee. Mikey insists that he doesn’t hold a grudge and that Ruthanna is washed up in her career and thus getting paranoid. He offers Ethan an out from being Ruthanna’s “errand boy,” claiming that he could propel Ethan to fame and success. When Ethan refuses, Mikey dismisses him, saying that he doesn’t want to see him around there again.

The next morning, a sleepless AnnieLee walks by the river and finds herself humming the song she composed at Ruthanna’s, the “one about the girl who’d hated being ignored until she found out that being noticed was worse” (246). She can’t stop thinking about Ethan. She gets a call from her manager, Jack, who tells her that she has the opportunity to open for popular country singer Kip Hart.

Ruthanna advises AnnieLee to reject Jack’s offer because she’s a star in her own right and not an opening act to a man who doesn’t even write his own songs. To open for a man like Kip Hart, Ruthanna says, hurts the feminist cause. She points out that in the years of AnnieLee’s childhood, a third of songs played on country stations were sung by women, while now it’s only 10%. AnnieLee, however, thinks that opening for Hart could be a good promotional opportunity.

When she goes home, Ethan is there, and he hands her the beautiful guitar he has made for her. She’s beyond moved, and they both apologize for their fight. They begin to rehearse the song they co-wrote, Lost and Found.

AnnieLee works on songwriting at her cottage, and Ethan brings her lunch. She’s nervous about performing before Kip Hart and has been working at all hours to ensure that she’s good enough. Ethan nurtures her, and when she falls asleep from exhaustion, he carries her to her bedroom and then leaves.

Ethan offers to drive AnnieLee to Knoxville for the concert, but she feels that she won’t be fearless and shameless enough if he accompanies her.

In Knoxville, while she’s sitting in her dressing room, thinking about how stupid and yet catchy Kip’s songs are, Kip enters, ever the confident superstar. She feels self-conscious, especially when he says that her fronting him is a “buy-on” done by ACD to promote her (261). She feels jaded, considering that what she thought was about her talent was “about someone else’s cash” (262).

AnnieLee gets ready to perform in the sequined t-shirt Ruthanna originally bought for Sophia. She’s intimidated by the stage, especially because instead of the audience she sees “hundreds of blue, glowing screens” (263). Still, she tells herself that she belongs there, and her performance is a success, as she manages to speak personally to 6,000 people in the audience. She’s thrilled.

AnnieLee gets her car back to Nashville and wonders where Kip will ask her to play next. However, she gets a message from Jack that Kip was disappointed with her performance and won’t invite her back. Ruthanna translates: AnnieLee “outshone him” and bruised his ego by being so good.

When AnnieLee checks her Instagram, in addition to the admiring comments, she finds threatening ones from people who claim to know who she really is. She’s floored at the past coming back to her and determines to keep her gun closer.

Despite her popularity, AnnieLee is still scraping by financially, thanks to the expenses for publicists, and ACD is treating her with frostiness following her Kip Hart opening. At the Cat’s Paw, Ruthanna, Jack, and Ethan come and surprise her. To the crowd’s astonishment, Ruthanna sings. Annie Lee is moved, feeling a “deep-in-her-bones kind of contentment” (274) about the company she’s with. Then, Ruthanna reveals that Jack and ACD have proposed a 12-city tour for her—and Ruthanna will accompany her at the final performance in Las Vegas.

Ethan is driving AnnieLee’s tour bus, as ACD is too cheap to pay for a driver. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, AnnieLee insists that Ethan join her on stage, and they sing Ruthanna’s song “Big Dreams and Faded Jeans.” Ethan is nervous but thrilled to be singing at AnnieLee’s side.

Although he’s elated from their duet, Ethan feels the skin-tingling instinct that something’s off when they’re in the car after the show. AnnieLee doesn’t look worried, so he decides to head in the opposite direction. It’s clear to him that they’re being followed. This isn’t the first time he has felt this while they’ve been on tour. He senses that the person responsible isn’t Mikey but someone from AnnieLee’s past. When the car speeds past, Ethan doesn’t tell AnnieLee what he saw, determined to protect her.

AnnieLee is enjoying the towns she encounters on tour; however, the highways and the feeling that she should be looking over her shoulder are less pleasant. Ethan again alludes to her cageyness, about both her past and her feelings for him. She’s afraid to show Ethan the threatening Instagram messages she has received, which she knows aren’t—as her publicity team seems to think—from random strangers. While Instagram is a publicity vehicle, it’s also making it easier for anyone—including those with malicious intent—to find AnnieLee. The most menacing message has an attachment: a picture of the bed she left behind, a gleaming knife on top of it, with the caption “Rose watch out” (288).

AnnieLee is rattled by the note. Just before she gets on stage, she finds that her throat is dry and singing is difficult. She can’t remember the lyrics, and her legs start to shake. She wins the audience over but still feels vulnerable and calls Ethan. He joins her on stage, and they sing a song called “Love or Lust” from the same mike. Before exiting the stage, he picks up her hand and kisses it.

After the show, AnnieLee acknowledges that the reason having Ethan up there helped was that “it was as if they were lost in their feelings for each other, and nothing else—not even the audience—mattered” (293). She invites Ethan to her room for a drink. As she serves up whiskey, she admonishes herself to not let things get out of hand. She tells Ethan how much his work means to her. He distracts himself, tuning her guitar.

Then, she pats the bed and Ethan comes and sits by her. She puts her hand on his shoulder, and Ethan says he must tell her something.

He tells her that he had a wife, named Jeanie, whom he married young. They lived on an army base in Fort Bragg until Ethan was deployed to Afghanistan, where he watched his friends get killed. While he was away, Jeanie began seeing another man, who outranked him. Ethan fought against the tide, thinking they could fix the relationship, even though everything was difficult between them. However, one day, he came home to find Jeanie dead, just at the moment when he was ready to let her go and tell her to be happy with the other man. Jeanie had been strangled, and Ethan was arrested for her murder and spent six months in prison before his trial. While Ethan was acquitted, the case was never solved and he carried the “stain,” as no one looked at him the same way anymore.

He’s about to go to his room when Annie Lee confesses that she already knew the story because Ruthanna told her. She says that it was never going to scare her away.

Ethan asks to hear AnnieLee’s story. She feels that she absolutely can’t do it and searches around for more to drink before confessing that she’s not from Tennessee. She tells him that her father left when she was seven and her mother married a man named Clayton, who became mean. When her mother died, Clayton was left in sole charge of AnnieLee and her half-sisters. When she was 16, Clayton decided that AnnieLee had to teach her half-sisters because school would corrupt them. He beat them anyway because he thought they were already corrupt. However, AnnieLee “didn’t mention that Clayton was the only one guilty of anything in that family” (303). This took place in Caster County, Arkansas, and she doesn’t want to say more, but Ethan insists on knowing whether someone from there might be trying to get her now. She says she can’t tell him that—possibly ever.

Ethan kisses AnnieLee on the cheek and goes back to his room, and she passes out, drunk. She’s nervous because the last and biggest show in Las Vegas is that night. She confesses to Ethan that she’s petrified, and he tells her that when he was in his jail cell awaiting trial, he told himself, “Nothing can go wrong today, because everything has gone wrong already” (305). However, such thoughts, he says, are only for people who have been “hurt beyond what they think they can stand” (305). She says she might also be like that.

AnnieLee’s mood improves as they head to Las Vegas and check into the Aquitaine Hotel. Ethan and AnnieLee go out to dinner, neither of them mentioning their trauma. He then takes her to the placid lake by the Bellagio Hotel and tells her to make a wish. She wishes for five things: an incredible show; that Ruthanna will be proud of her; that she’ll always be able to write songs; that she and Ethan will have a future; and finally, that she can keep her secrets forever.

Ethan catches up with Ruthanna, who has been mobbed by fans before the gig. Although Ruthanna is more famous than AnnieLee, Ethan is more worried about the latter.

In her hotel room, AnnieLee worries about how little rehearsal time she and Ruthanna had together. Ruthanna got her an outfit far more feminine than her usual getup. Then, she hears a mute thudding noise and sees dark clothing and metal before a man is on top of her, holding her gun.

The man, who is familiar to AnnieLee, taunts her about thinking she could run away. He calls her Rose and admonishes her that she has repaid him badly for his care. Terrified, she tells him, “I won’t tell” (320). However, he accuses her of already singing about the secret he’s trying to hide. He tells her she belongs to him and that she can’t be trusted. She responds by slamming her stiletto heel into his eye socket. She runs to escape, but he has blocked the door with an armchair. Her only escape is “a balcony leading to nothing but air” (321).

AnnieLee hesitates but decides that if she must die, she’d prefer to do it on her terms rather than her assailant’s. She jumps, landing on a boxwood bush, and rolls onto the Aquitaine Hotel’s golden carpet.

AnnieLee awakes on a mattress in a dim, humid room. It’s as though everything that happened in Nashville is a mere dream. However, she sees Ethan next to her. A nurse tells her that she had extraordinarily good luck to survive a four-story fall. Ethan tells her that the concert has been cancelled and the police want to talk to her. He asks what she was doing on the balcony, and she orders him to get her things.