Page 1 of A Song for Another Woman

Chapter One

EMMY

Seat 4C is close enough to see the sweat at Cade’s hairline.

The third row at the Country Music Awards is where wives sit when the producers want proof of a happy marriage. Close enough for the cameras, close enough for the crowd to recognize you, and far enough from the stage that no one mistakes you for part of the show.

I sit with my knees pressed together in a dress a stylist chose because it “reads supportive, but not try-hard.” Her words. Not mine. The fabric is the color of champagne, which means it's technically beautiful and practically invisible under arena lights. In my lap, I'm killing the program one thin strip at a time. The paper gives quietly beneath my thumbnail. A small, soft rip. Another. Another.

Beside the stage, a camera operator shifts his weight and angles his lens toward me for the third time in five minutes. I stop tearing. I smile. Not big. Not desperate. Just enough. There's an art to looking proud while your stomach folds in on itself, and I've gotten very good at it.

“Coming up next,” the announcer says, his voice booming through the arena, “the duet that set country radio on fire this year…”

The crowd starts screaming before he even says their names. My hand closes around the shredded program.

Behind me, someone gasps, “Oh my God, it’s them.”

Them. Not Cade Tyler. Not my husband.Them.

“Cade Tyler and Melody Hunter with ‘Wildfire.’”

The arena goes dark. For one blessed second, no one can see my face.

Then the first guitar note rings out, low, rough, and familiar enough to make my body turn traitor. My heart know that sound. I know Cade’s chords, including the slight drag in his timing when he wants a lyric to hurt. I used to hear songs before the world did. They were half-finished, sung into a phone at two in the morning, or hummed against my shoulder in motel rooms when we were too broke for room service and too in love to care. Now I hear this one when everyone else does.

Onstage, a single spotlight finds Cade. The crowd rises like something pulled by a string.

He stands there in black, his guitar strapped across his chest, his hair a little too long at the collar because someone decided he looks younger that way. He lowers his mouth to the mic, and the whole arena quiets for him.

I remember when I was the one behind a microphone. Not like this. Not arenas, not pyro, and not a nation leaning forward. Just midnight radio in Harmony Ridge, Tennessee, with my voice slipping through old truck speakers, kitchen windows, and the back rooms of people’s lonely houses. Emmy Sutton on WHLR, Backroad Country. I knew how to hold silence, and I knew how to make a stranger feel less alone.

Now a publicist has already leaned down at my shoulder tonight and whispered, “When they pan to you, look happy for him.”

For him. Not with him. That distinction has been swallowing my life in small bites for years.

Melody steps into the second spotlight, and the screaming changes pitch. She's twenty-five and golden under the lights, all long legs, blonde hair, and a white dress that looks poured onto her. She doesn't look toward the crowd first. She looks at Cade.

The opening verse belongs to him, and he sings it like a confession. His voice fills the arena, worn velvet and smoke, the exact sound that made bartenders stop polishing glasses in little rooms before anyone knew his name. I sit very still and watch my husband come alive.

That's the part no one warns you about. Jealousy is supposed to be hot, ugly, red-faced, and loud. Mine is cold. It starts under my breastbone and spreads slowly, numbing everything it touches. Because I know Cade alive. I know his eyes when a song has him by the throat. I know the way his fingers go loose on the guitar between lines, along with the way his mouth softens when the music takes over and the rest of the world falls away.

I haven't seen him look like this at home in two years. Not across the breakfast table. Not in our bed. Not when I ask if he wants coffee and he says, “Sure, babe,” without looking up from his phone. Not when I wait for him after sessions that run late, when late becomes morning and morning becomes me pretending I was never waiting at all.

But he looks like this for her.

Melody sings the second verse, walking toward him slowly, one hand wrapped around her microphone, her eyes fixed on his face. The camera behind them catches the angle perfectly. Her voice is clear and aching, and the audience melts for it.

I can feel the show building the story. Not just the song, but the story itself. Cade and Melody under the lights. The duet that saved his year and made hers. The chemistry everyone talks about like it's weather, like it simply happened and no one is responsible for standing in it. It's the song every interviewersmiles through when they ask, “So where did all that fire come from?”

No one asks me. They don't need to.

The camera operator glides closer to my aisle, and my spine straightens before I tell it to.

Duke Ferris stands near the side of the stage with a headset on and his arms folded, watching the monitors instead of the performance. Cade’s manager has the calm face of a man counting money in his head. His gaze flicks from Cade and Melody to the screen, then to me. He gives someone a small nod.

The red light on the camera turns toward my row.

There it is: the wife’s reaction.