Page 24 of A Song for Another Woman

How far are you?

I type back:

Still here.

Her reply comes immediately.

I can come.

I stare at those three words until my throat tightens. My sister would do it. She'd leave the diner keys with somebody half-asleep, climb into her car, and drive all the way to Nashville just to stand beside me while I broke my own life open.

No. I need to do this myself.

The dots appear. Disappear. Appear again.

Okay.

Guest room’s made. Back door’ll be unlocked. Coffee when you get here.

That almost does it. Not Cade’s voice on that clip. Not the comments. Not the whole country putting my humiliation on a loop.

Coffee when you get here. A life waiting on the other side of leaving.

Downstairs, a truck door shuts. My body knows the sound before my mind has time to decide what to do with it.

Cade is home.

For one stupid second, everything in me reaches for him. Not the idea of him. Him. The man whose key turns in the lock with a familiar scrape, whose boots hit the entry tile in the rhythm I could pick out of a crowd, whose voice has been the weather of my life for thirteen years.

Then his words rise again, clean and ugly:The only reason I’m not with Melody is because I’m married.

My hand closes around the handle of the duffel.

“Em?” Cade calls. He sounds bright. Not sober-bright, exactly, and not drunk, but just lit from whatever room he came from. He's buzzed on attention, on applause, on the relief of still being wanted somewhere. His voice carries through the foyer with that warm, easy rasp that used to make me turn toward him before I even knew I was doing it. “Emmy?”

He sees me at the bottom of the stairs, and the smile falls off his face.

I stand there with the duffel in one hand and the blue folder tucked under my arm. The house rises around us, huge, white, and silent. Every light I didn’t turn on makes the place feel staged for an absence.

“What are you doing?” he asks. It is such a small question for such a ruined room.

“I’m leaving.”

He blinks once. Twice. His eyes move from my face to the bag, then to the folder, then back again. Confusion comes first. Then fear, fast enough to show me he isn't as far gone as I thought. He isn't gone enough to miss this.

“What?” He laughs once, but there's no humor in it. “Baby, what are you talking about?”

Baby.

“You haven’t been online,” I say.

His forehead creases. “No. I mean, not really. Duke’s been blowing up my phone, but I figured it was party stuff. What happened?”

Party stuff.

I look at my husband standing in the foyer of the house he bought instead of the one he promised me. His hair is mussed. His black shirt is open at the throat. There's a faint smear of someone’s glitter near his cuff, or maybe I imagine that because my mind has learned how to hurt itself efficiently.

He takes one step toward me. “Emmy.”