Page 48 of A Song for Another Woman

“I won’t. I'll die first."

I believe her.

She gets up and crosses the room, sitting beside me on the couch. Not too close at first. Then closer when I lean.

When she puts her arm around me, I fold into her like I did the morning I arrived, except everything is different now. I am still Emmy Sutton.

But I'm not alone inside my own body anymore.

And somehow, some way, I'm going to have to figure out how to live with that.

Chapter Eleven

CADE

Emmy laughs through the cheap speakers on my laptop, and I have to put one hand flat on the kitchen counter to stay upright. Not because the laugh is loud. It isn’t. It’s small, surprised, caught between her and whoever called into the station at half past midnight. It’s the kind of laugh a person gives before they can stop themselves. A real one. I haven’t heard my wife laugh like that in years.

On the show, she says, “Different Earl, you’re going to have Pop threatening to change his name if you keep this up.”

An older man chuckles through the line, fuzzy with distance. Emmy gives him a second. She doesn’t rush to fill the air. She never did. Even when we were broke enough to count gas-station hot dogs as dinner, she knew how to let silence be a place a person could sit down.

I sit alone in a Nashville mansion with the lights off and listen to the woman I love come roaring back to life without me. The house around me is obscene in the dark.

Her voice softens. “Take care of yourselves, Harmony Ridge. And if you can’t do that, call me tomorrow and we’ll start again.”

The sign-off lands in my chest. The stream cuts to an old recording, something with fiddle and heartbreak and no polishtrying to hide the ache. I shut the laptop before the song can start. For a second, the silence feels heavy.

Then I grab my phone. I don’t think. Thinking is what I’ve been doing for weeks, and it hasn’t put one honest thing in Emmy’s hands. My thumb moves through contacts, then past her name because I know better now. She blocked me, and she had every right to. Still, habit drags me there first. Emmy Lou. The name sits on the screen like a door with my handprint still on it.

I don’t press call. Instead, I open my messages and start typing to Duke.

I want a full-page ad. Every paper that matters. Billboard too. Nashville, Knoxville, Harmony Ridge if they’ll sell space. Something simple. I’m sorry, Emmy. Come home.

I stare at it. It’s exactly the kind of thing Cade Tyler would do. Big. Expensive. Public enough that people would call it romantic because they wouldn’t have to live under the weight of it. Duke would hate the sentiment and love the attention. Silver Creek would turn it into a narrative by breakfast. Commentators would lean back in their chairs and say I’d finally made my move. Half the internet would applaud. The other half would dissect whether Emmy smiled correctly when she saw it. Her face would become content again.

My stomach turns. I delete the message one letter at a time. A billboard isn’t an apology. It’s a stage, and I’ve put my wife on enough stages she never asked to stand on.

I set the phone down hard and walk through the dark house, bare feet cold against the floor. Every room looks expensive and untouched. Emmy tried to tell me that once. Not in those exact words. She was gentler than I deserved.

“It photographs beautifully,” she’d said, standing in the great room with her arms folded, looking at the stone fireplace bigenough to roast something medieval. “But I don’t know where I’m supposed to curl up.”

I kissed her forehead. I told her we’d figure it out. Then I left for a session.

I remember that now with a clarity sharp enough to cut. I remember her in the little rental outside Nashville, sitting cross-legged on the floor in one of my shirts, eating cereal from a saucepan because we’d run out of clean bowls. I remember her at WHLR when I first met her, headphones crooked over her hair, one hand lifted to warn me not to talk while she faded out a caller. I remember her at the Whippoorwill, leaning against the bar with a sweating bottle of beer, watching me like she’d found something worth keeping before anyone else knew to look.

I remember the night my first single hit number one. I drove us out past the city because I couldn’t breathe indoors. We slow-danced in the bed of my truck to “Tennessee Whiskey” playing from her phone with the speaker crackling and the stars bright overhead. She laughed when I stepped on her foot, put both hands on my face, and said, “Don’t let them make you mean.”

I promised her they wouldn’t. God.

I sit on the edge of the bed I haven’t slept in right since she left and press the heels of my hands into my eyes. My wife didn’t leave because of one sentence. She left because I became the kind of man who could make her beg to be seen and then call it support when she disappeared quietly.

The phone starts ringing. Duke. I let it go. It rings again, then again. By the fourth time, I answer because ignoring Duke Ferris only makes him multiply.

“What?” My voice sounds like gravel.

“Finally.” Duke exhales hard. “I’ve been trying to reach you for two days.”

“I noticed.”