Page 11 of A Song for Another Woman

It's ours in the way a hotel room is yours if your suitcase is open on the luggage rack. My phone buzzes beside Cade’s green tea with honey. His assistant, Carly.

9:15 call moved to 9:40. Duke wants fresh Wildfire clip pushed by noon. Melody tagged Cade again.

I stare at Melody’s name until the screen dims. Then I do what I do. I open the scheduling app, move the call, confirm the driver, check Cade’s vocal rest block, and pull up his socials.

There are three new tagged clips from last night. Cade and Melody in a rehearsal room. Cade laughing with his head tipped back. Melody’s hand briefly on his sleeve. Nothing. Always nothing. A collection of nothings big enough to build a second life inside.

I choose the least intimate clip and save it to Cade’s drafts with a caption that makes him sound grateful and harmless.

Still feeling the love from awards week. Thank y’all for making this song part of your lives.

I delete the flame emoji Carly added. Then I put the kettle on and line up Cade’s vocal warm-ups on the kitchen speaker. He likes the same pattern before studio days. Steam. Straw phonation. Gentle scales. Honey, never lemon if he has to push above a G.

I know the maintenance schedule of my husband’s voice better than I know the sound of my own anymore. Once, people waited up to hear me talk. Not millions. Not arenas. Just enough lonely people between midnight and four to make a girl feel useful. Emmy Sutton on WHLR, sliding into dark kitchens and truck cabs and nursing stations, telling somebody to be careful on Route 18 because the fog was sitting low by Tandy Creek. I used to know how to fill a quiet room without making anyone feel alone in it.

Now I stand in a kitchen big enough for a cooking show and prepare my husband’s throat for another song everyone thinks belongs to another woman.

The drawer sticks. It always has, which is the only personal thing about the study.

I yank it harder than I mean to, and a stack of old folders slides forward. Insurance papers. House documents. Receipts from the tour accountant. A packet of warranty information for an espresso machine I still don’t know how to use.

Then I see the blue folder. My fingers stop.

It's cheap, bent at one corner, the kind of folder you buy three for a dollar at a grocery store in late August. I keep it under the useful things because I'm apparently still sentimental in secret. Inside are photocopies, not the originals. The originals are somewhere in storage, probably in a box labeled MISC because when we moved into the first big house, I let someone else pack my life.

The paper is thin and soft from being handled. Pencil lines blur where nineteen-year-old me pressed too hard.

A little house sits in the center of the first page. Not impressive. Not mansion-worthy. A porch wraps around two sides, wide enough for rocking chairs and muddy boots. The kitchen faces east because I wanted morning light over the sink. Above it, tucked under a sloped roof, is a reading nook with built-in shelves and a window seat just deep enough to nap in.

On the second page, I drew the yard. A dogwood tree stands off the porch steps, not centered. I wrotepink if we can find onebeside it, then crossed it out and wrotewhite is better in spring rain.

I sit down on the study floor and look through the remnants of my youthful dreams.

Cade held these pages in a motel room outside Knoxville thirteen years ago. We were eating gas station sandwiches on a bedspread with cigarette burns on it, and he'd just played a forty-minute opening set to a crowd more interested in darts than music. He looked at my crooked little drawings like I'd handed him blueprints for heaven.

“You designed this?” he asked.

“Don’t sound so shocked.”

He smiled, tired and handsome. “You're very specific about porch depth."

“Porch depth matters.”

He traced the roofline with one finger. “Someday I’m gonna build you exactly this.”

I told him he didn’t have to say things like that.

He looked up at me then, serious in a way that made my whole chest go soft. “I wouldn't say them if I didn't want to.”

He bought four mansions. One outside Nashville. One in Franklin we sold after eight months because Duke said it didn’t match the brand. A lake house we visit twice a year. A mountain place with a studio he uses when he wants to feel humble with a chef on call.

None of them have a reading nook over the kitchen. None of them have a dogwood. None of them are the house.

The study door opens. I jerk the folder closed like I’ve been caught with another man.

Cade stands in the doorway wearing black jeans, a faded T-shirt, and the distracted softness of someone already halfway into the day without me. His hair is damp from the shower.

“There you are,” he says. “I was looking for my capo.”