Early in Streets of Nashville, Ezra MacRae is out walking on Music Row late on a Saturday night. He’s a bit drunk, having been out celebrating his first taste of success as a Nashville songwriter. As he moves along the sidewalk, aware of an approaching storm, he complains to the night that Kate Hathaway didn’t come out to share in the celebration. What Ezra says suggests that, from his point of view at least, they’ve had an interesting and complicated relationship since being introduced by Gabriel Tanner, with whom Ezra also has an interesting and complicated relationship.

Throughout the middle sections of the novel, Kate and Ezra meet a few times in the process, Ezra hopes, of mending their relationship, which broke due to some unnamed indiscretion Ezra committed but can’t remember because he was blackout drunk at the time. But when Burl Davies, his publisher, is murdered, Kate calls to talk, perhaps to console him or perhaps just to gossip, and she ends up coming over with groceries to cook for them—more than once. They eat together and enjoy going to bed together, and they seem to enjoy their conversations both in kitchen and bed.

Readers might notice two things about this time of trying to heal a fractured relationship. First, despite what the meals and the sex might suggest, Kate is certainly not the touchy-feely kind. Even in the midst of their sexual and culinary adventures, she remains on guard and unsure about Ezra, and she doesn’t mind telling him so. On the phone before their first meeting after the shooting at Ave Canora, she tells him, “‘I’m not sure we’re friends anymore’” (71).

The other thing readers might notice about these two is that Ezra doesn’t quite know how to behave around her. She’s doing all this very friendly stuff with him—cooking for him, commanding him into bed (she really does, but he isn’t resistant), keeping him company in a dark time (but not such friendly company as she might’ve been). Still, he’s cautious about what to expect from her visits and what he might say to her during her visits.

As a writer, I like Kate. I like her a lot. But I don’t know what to make of her any more than Ezra does. And I’ve known her longer than he has. She’s part of Gabriel’s story in Gabriel’s Songbook (Pisgah Press, 2017), in which her character is little different—hard edges intact—from how she came to me in Streets of Nashville. She’s redheaded and a chainsmoker. She’s a hard-nosed front-office person, a gatekeeper, in the Music Row offices of Gabriel’s somewhat shady publisher and producer, for whom she’s still working in Ezra’s story.

The last time Kate appears in Streets of Nashville is the Sunday evening Ezra is attacked by Officer Murdoch Perras. Ezra is managing the kitchen while the meal cooks and Kate showers. Perras appears at the back door and forces his way inside. He wrestles Ezra to the living room floor and is choking him with deadly intent, when Kate comes out of the bathroom with her pepper spray and rescues Ezra. Tough as her exterior is, this traumatizes her so that with very little else to say, she leaves Ezra’s apartment and at that point exits the novel. I thought it only made sense that she would disappear, given the trauma and her tenuous, even somewhat antagonistic relationship with Ezra. Add to this the fact that Ezra is falling for Sally Evans. Knowing that Kate will reappear in the third Ezra MacRae novel, currently titled Antaeus, I wasn’t bothered by her exit.

What didn’t occur to me was that readers might develop a different relationship with Kate. The first indication that this might be the case was when a Goodreads reader posted a four-star review, rounded up from “3.75!” The reader reluctantly gave the novel four stars because she seems to have found it a really good read. She took the novel to task for “completely abandoning a character who cared for and seemed to love the main character, who stood up for him in a climactic fight, and is never heard from again.” Almost a dealbreaker for this reader. She writes, “[H]onestly this was so distracting for me i wanted to rate the book 3 stars but i blasted through this book so that didn’t seem fair.” Fair enough, I think. I appreciate fairness, and if I understand her last phrasing, she enjoyed the novel on the whole to the extent that the “blasted through” bit somewhat made up for Kate’s disappearance.

This wasn’t a one-off complaint.

In the more formalized setting of the North Carolina Literary Review, Andrew K. Clark expressed the same concern, albeit with a little more restraint, thankfully. He writes,

If I have one criticism of the novel it would be that an important character when the novel opens doesn’t figure into the closure the novel offers for other characters, after playing a pivotal role in a particularly traumatic scene. I wanted to know how she dealt with the trauma and her resolution alongside the other characters. (61-62)

Again, fair enough. In my mind, she dealt with the trauma by disappearing from Ezra’s life as she’d disappeared from it at the beginning of the novel due to “some St. Patrick’s Day indiscretion that he couldn’t remember and she couldn’t seem to forget.”

One more. A few days ago, one of my favorite students from the Fall 2025 creative writing class came to interview me for an assignment she had in a Spring 2026 class. After we completed the interview, she told me that she’d read Streets of Nashville once our class together was over. She really liked it, she said. But, like the Goodreads reader and Mr. Clark, she wanted to know what had happened to Kate Hathaway. She was glad to know she wasn’t the only one with that question, and I explained that Kate was so traumatized by the horrific fight in Ezra’s apartment that she removed herself from his life until a later time beyond the end of the novel. My student understood and liked that explanation.

But I was left with the realization that readers can understandably have questions that can be expressed via disappointment. They necessarily don’t have the long-range view of the story and characters that I do, so I should probably keep that in mind going forward. I mean, if I like Kate and have an interest in what happens to her, then I shouldn’t be surprised—in fact, I should be gratified—when readers like her and don’t like to see her leave the story as if forgotten.

Duly noted, y’all.