The Guitar Player Ch. 05

Once the crowd was more or less quiet, I got down on one knee and pulled a small box from my pocket. I opened it to show a two-carat diamond ring. Then I asked Dawn to be my wife. Her mouth dropped open, and she screamed, "YES!" Then I took her into my arms and kissed her gently. The crowd went wild.

When we parted, the audience was still cheering. We smiled and waved for a few moments and then started into our last song of the evening, True Love. That night, the song was very special. Months after that performance, I watched the video, especially the shots of the people in the audience. I didn't see very many dry eyes.

We planned to get married two months after the Grammys. But some months ago, we had decided to put Atlanta in our rearview mirror. Neither of us particularly liked living in or near a big city. We talked about moving back to Tifton, but my parents had recently moved to Florida. So, we decided to follow them there and bought a house in the middle of the state. It was about a half-hour away from Orlando. About a week after we settled into our new home, the lawsuits all came to an end. As I expected, everything was to be split 50/50. All that was left was for the accountants to finish their audit. My attorneys were apologizing that they hadn't gotten me more, but I was thrilled. The fight was over, and Tanya was out of my life.

But then a real bombshell hit when the accountant's report came out. Todd had embezzled about two million dollars. The accountants had finally drilled their way through Todd's records to prove the thief. Not only was Todd arrested, but Tanya immediately began divorce proceedings. While Tanya's career was not in danger of ending, her big dream of going to the top with Todd had crashed and burned. You would have thought that I would have been ecstatic, but I just felt sad and tired about the whole mess. Besides, my own life was on the verge of collapsing, and I didn't even realize it.