Crazy in Love: Vince Gill and Amy Grant

Grant's obsession with Gill caught her by surprise. She incorporates prayer and worship into her daily life, and had become, at 19, the burgeoning Contemporary Christian movement's most celebrated singer. Michael Blanton, part of her management team for 30 years, instantly saw what was happening. He and Grant sat up late one night in the middle of a tour and had a heart-to-heart. "Amy, what are you going to do?" he asked. "What are you going to do?"

"I could definitely see that she had made a soul connection that was different from anything she'd ever had," Blanton says. "She was working out the details of that in her mind, going, 'This is where I am in reality in my life, but now, how do I put this thing together?' It was an incredibly tough struggle. It brought into question everything about her faith and her desire to be a woman of integrity."

At first, Grant and Gill did nothing but brood. He wrote gorgeous songs of longing — "Whenever You Come Around," "When Loves Finds You" — that advanced his career but not his well-being. In private, Grant noted on a legal pad each time she was around Gill. "[Vince] just made a profound mark on me every time and confirmed there was somebody out there who gets me," Grant says.

There was no cheating, Gill insists, and neither spoke to the other about leaving their spouse. "We were both married, and though we were crazy about each other, we thought, 'Well, that's not our life.' " Friends sensed the attraction, found it painful to watch the two dancing around each other, and offered advice. "The hard truth was that we never thought for a minute that we would wind up together," says Gill. To that end, Grant and Chapman sought marital counseling.

One day in April of 1997, Grant was surprised to read in the paper that Gill had announced he was getting a divorce. Chapman, who by then was well aware of Grant's infatuation with Gill, glanced at the headline — it was on the front page — and turned to his wife, commenting that he was grateful someone had finally made the first move. "[It was] awful. Awful! Killed me for him," Grant remembers. "How painful to be married to somebody you know is so captivated by another human being."