Page 29 of A Song for Another Woman

Tears blur the road, and I wipe them away with the heel of my hand, angry at the inconvenience. “Not now,” I say to no one.

My voice fills the cab, hoarse and familiar.

I used to talk into darkness for a living. The thought appears without permission. WHLR. Backroad Country. Midnight callers and truckers and lonely people who trusted a voice they couldn’t see. Emmy Sutton, before Tyler became the name everyone used first.

I don’t know what's left of her. Maybe nothing. Maybe enough.

The highway opens ahead of me, blacktop turning silver under the first pale wash of morning. Grief rides beside me, and fury does too. They aren't quiet passengers. They press at my ribs, take turns with the radio off, and remind me of Cade’s face, Cade’s voice, and the warmth of his hand hovering in the air when I wouldn’t let him touch me.

Underneath both, small and shocking, is relief.

I hate it at first, then I don’t. It isn't happiness or freedom yet, but it's the first breath after holding still too long. It's the strange lightness of no longer waiting for a man to come home and tell me whether my pain counts.

I drive.

The sun breaks slowly, laying gold along the low fields and the trees. Mile by mile, the houses get smaller. The billboards thin out. Nashville drops behind me like a dress I can finally unzip.

When the sign for Harmony Ridge appears, my hands start shaking. Not badly, but just enough.

I pass the old county road, the gas station with the hand-painted bait sign, and the pasture where fog sits low over the grass. Everything is familiar and not. Seven years is long enough for a place to change and short enough for your body to remember every turn.

Then the water tower rises over the tree line: HARMONY RIDGE, TENNESSEE. Blue letters. White tank. Dawn behind it.

I slow without meaning to.

The blue folder rests beside me, buckled in and safe. My wedding ring glints on my hand, still there for now. My phone is dark. My heart isn't fixed. Nothing is fixed.

But the road keeps going. And for the first time in seven years, I am driving home.

Chapter Seven

EMMY

June’s couch has a permanent dip in the middle. I curl into that dip before sunrise and stay there until noon. Not sleeping. Not awake, exactly. Just existing with my cheek pressed to a pillow printed with little blue flowers, my wedding ring still on my hand, and my phone face down on the coffee table like it might bite if I look at it too long.

From the kitchen, June asks, “You want eggs?”

“No.”

“Toast?”

“No.”

“Coffee?”

That one hurts. My throat closes around the answer, because Cade used to bring me coffee in bed when we were broke, happy, and still gentle with each other. One sugar, too much cream. He always stole the first sip and said he was testing it for poison.

June appears in the doorway wearing her Dogwood Diner sweatshirt, her dark hair twisted up with a pencil, and the expression she gets when somebody is about to learn something the hard way.

“Coffee,” she decides. “You don’t have to want it. You do have to hold it.”

“I’m not helpless.”

“No,” she says. “You’re concussed by your own life. Different thing.”

She brings me a mug anyway and sets it in my hands, then tucks the blanket higher around my shoulders. She doesn’t say Cade’s name. That’s the first kindness of the day. The second is that she doesn’t ask me what happened.

June already knows enough. She saw the award show. She saw the clip. She saw the internet turn my face into public property. By the time Daddy’s old truck rattled into her driveway at dawn, she had the back door unlocked, the porch light on, and the guest room made.