Page 5 of A Song for Another Woman

The red light over the studio door comes on, and for the first time in longer than I want to admit, I feel my pulse answer it.

Not the polite kick I get before a show. Not the muscle-memory lift when the band hits the downbeat and fifty thousand people remember they paid too much for beer to stand there quiet. This is lower than that. Meaner.

Music used to feel like this.

Cy sits behind the pedal steel with his hat tipped low and his eyes on me like he’s waiting to see whether I’ll run from it. The drummer taps one stick against his thigh. The bass player rolls his shoulders. Melody Hunter stands on the other side of the mic, barefoot on the studio rug, one hand wrapped around a paper cup of tea and the other holding her phone up toward us.

“For the socials,” she says, smiling at the screen. “Say hi, Cade.”

I lift two fingers without looking straight into the camera. “Hi, Cade.”

She laughs, bright and easy. Pretty laugh. Good for a room. Good for a camera. That matters, and I hate that I know it matters.

“Okay,” Cy says dryly. “Can we make music now, or are we all waiting on the little heart button?”

Melody lowers the phone, but she doesn’t put it away. She never really puts it away. It lives in her hand, propped against coffee mugs, wedged in the corner by the console, catching snippets of every room she walks into. I barely register it anymore. Everybody’s recording everything now: songs, jokes, dinner, heartbreak. Proof that you existed and looked good doing it.

Duke says that’s the game. Duke says a lot of things.

I shift my guitar higher against my ribs and look down at the lyric sheet on the stand. Half of it is scratched out. A third verse is gone. Two lines are circled so hard the pen nearly tore through paper.

Tell me you felt it before I burn alone.

I wrote that at 2:17 this morning after staring at the wall for an hour and telling myself I should go home. Home, where Emmy had probably put dinner in the warmer again. Home, where my wife knows how I take my coffee, how I hold my breath when I hate a mix, and how to tell from my shoulders whether a review landed too hard. Home, where everything is kind, familiar, and quiet.

The studio is none of those things.

“Run it from the top,” I say.

The engineer’s voice crackles through the talkback. “Rolling.”

Melody glances at me, eyes lit. “Don’t be careful.”

There it is. The thing she brought into the room on the first day Silver Creek shoved us together and called it strategy. Don’t be careful. Don’t smooth it down. Don’t make the chorus radio-ready before it’s bloody. She's twenty-five and hungry in a way I remember too well. She argues with melody lines. She changes words without asking permission. She looks at a bad lyric like it insulted her mother.

She makes me mad. She makes me better. Those two things feel close enough some days that I stop checking the distance.

Cy slides into the intro, steel bending the air until it aches. My fingers find the opening chord, and Melody steps closer to the shared mic. We sing the first verse together.

The room changes.

I feel it happen through the floorboards, through the wood of the guitar, and through the locked-in stillness of session players who have heard every version of every song and know when something has decided to live. Melody’s harmony comes in under mine, sharp enough to draw blood. My voice does something it hasn’t done on the last three albums. It reaches. It wants.

Not her.

That’s the part the media and fans don't seem to be able to understand, including me on bad nights when I let the room get too warm and the hour get too late. I’m not aching for Melody Hunter. I’m not staring across the microphone thinking about her mouth, her hair, or the fact that the whole industry has already started whispering her name beside mine like they found a match and deserve credit for striking it.

I’m addicted to the look on everyone’s faces when I stop being a legacy act.

That’s uglier. Less forgivable, maybe, because it means I know exactly what I’m doing. At thirty-eight, you learn the difference between applause and hunger. Applause says they still love you. Hunger says they still need you.

For two years, maybe three, I’ve been living off applause. The albums sold. The tours filled. Radio played the singles because I’m Cade Tyler and because there are entire families who have made my voice part of their holiday drives, their Friday nights, their first dances, their divorces. Loyalty is a beautiful thing until you hear it clapping politely for a song you know is hollow.

Three albums. Same midtempo ache. Same gravel in the verses. Same big chorus meant to rise over a stadium. Same interviews about roots, gratitude, and finding new shades of old truth.

I was out of shades. I was out of truth.

Then Melody walks into Studio B with a notebook full of crossed-out lines and says, “This hook is lying.”