Page 50 of A Song for Another Woman

“Cade.”

“I’m done.”

“You’re emotional.”

“Yes,” I say. “Finally.”

That shuts him up for half a second. I end the call before he finds another way to make sense sound like cowardice.

By morning, Duke has sent sixteen messages, four voice mails, two emails with subject lines in all caps, and one legal memo I don’t open.

Cy shows up at ten with coffee and a face that says he expects me to be either drunk or stupid. Maybe both. He finds me in the music room with a duffel bag open on the floor. He looks at the bag, then at me. “You running away from home?”

“This isn’t home.”

His mouth shifts. Not a smile. Not pity either. Cy has never offered me soft landings when I’ve earned pavement. “Where you going?”

“Harmony Ridge.”

That gets a reaction. Small, but real. His brows pull together. “To Emmy?”

“No.”

"That's interesting."

“I mean it. I’m not going to her sister’s house. I’m not showing up at the station. I’m not standing outside the diner hoping she has to look at me.”

Cy studies me for a long second. “Then what are you doing?”

“I rented a cabin.”

His eyes narrow. “You rented a cabin.”

“Edge of town. Old place off Mill Creek Road. Month to month.”

He steps farther into the room. “You sure you’re not doing this so she’ll hear about it?”

I zip the duffel slowly. Clothes. Boots. Toothbrush. The old Martin guitar I wrote my first decent song on waits in its case by the door. Everything else in this house can stay where it is. “I want her to know I’m leaving the machine,” I say. “I don’t want her to have to deal with me.”

Cy nods once, slow. “Good.”

That single word almost levels me. I brace both hands on the duffel. “I kept thinking there had to be some right thing I could do. Some perfect apology. Some proof big enough.

“She used to tell me things,” I say. “Small things. The caller who requested Patsy every Thursday. The diner pie June pretended wasn’t store-bought crust when she was learning. How the dogwood outside her daddy’s place bloomed late one year and she took it personally.” My throat tightens. “Somewhere along the way, I stopped being the person she told.”

Cy doesn’t rescue me from that.

“I’m going to listen,” I say.

“To the show?”

“To her.”

He nods again. “That’s a start.”

It isn’t absolution. It isn’t encouragement dressed up pretty. It’s just a start, and that’s all I have any right to touch.

The Lonesome Strings call happens from the driver’s seat of my truck in a gas station parking lot forty miles outside Nashville. I owe them my voice, at least.