Page 26 of A Song for Another Woman

“I know.” My fingers tighten on the folder. “That’s always the problem. You never mean it the way it lands, so I’m supposed to carry the bruise and the explanation.”

He flinches. Good. No, not good. Nothing about this is good.

“I was trying to shut it down,” he says, words coming faster now. “She pushed me. She wanted me to admit there was something between us, and I was saying that was the narrative. That’s what people wanted. I was saying?—”

“You were saying our marriage is the thing in your way.”

“No.” His voice cracks. “No, Emmy, God, no.”

But I have his voice in my hand. I have months of my own reflection on screens. I have the weight of every room where my pain was managed, corrected, softened, and set aside because Cade Tyler had momentum. The edited clip might be missing a tail, but my life hasn't been edited. I was there for all of it.

“You want to be with her?” I say. “Then be with her. I’m not going to be the reason you can’t. I’m out.”

He looks like I've struck him. Maybe I have. Maybe leaving is the only way I can save both of us now.

“Emmy, I don’t want her.”

I shake my head once.

“I don’t,” he says. “I swear to you. I have been stupid and selfish and?—”

“Don’t.”

“—and I should have come home, I should have called you, I should have killed the story the second it started, but I did not cheat on you.”

The words hang there. I look at him. Really look.

There was a time when that sentence would have saved me. I can feel the old version of myself inside me, thin, tired, and hungry enough to grab at it.He didn’t cheat. See? Breathe. Make coffee. Try again. Take the smaller wound and call it mercy.

But the woman standing in this foyer is too tired to survive on technicalities.

“I believe you,” I say.

He freezes. I didn’t know I was going to say it until it was already in the room, but it's true in a way I hate. Maybe nothing physical happened. Maybe he never touched her. Maybe the line is missing something that would make him look less cruel.

His eyes fill with sudden, terrible hope, but I kill it before it can reach me.

“And I’m still leaving.”

His face opens, devastated and uncomprehending. “Why?”

The question is so honest it almost bends me.

“Because I shouldn’t have to be grateful you didn’t do the worst possible thing.”

He draws back like the sentence has found bone.

“I have been standing beside you while the whole country decided whether I was gracious or pathetic,” I say. “I have smiled on camera while people turned my face into a joke. I have watched you come alive for a song everyone thinks belongs to another woman, and every time I asked you to see what it was doing to me, you told me it wasn’t real.”

His eyes shine. “I was wrong.”

“Yes.”

“I know that now.”

“No, Cade.” My voice stays even, but my chest is shaking under it. “You know it now because I have a bag in my hand.”

He looks toward the duffel and swallows and never have I seen a man want to murder a duffel bag, but I think he might just if the situation weren't so precarious.