Page 64 of A Song for Another Woman

“That’s reassuring.”

The cabin is quiet except for the rain ticking against the tin awning and the low hum of the small recording rig I shipped in and set up myself. No engineer. No producer. No assistant bringing coffee I didn’t ask for. Just a battered microphone, a laptop, two guitars, and every ugly truth I spent years dressing up until it sounded like something people could applaud.

The lyric sheet in front of me reads:

She was radio light in a nowhere room.

I scratch outlight. Too pretty. Emmy would hate it.

I write:

She was nineteen and asking better questions than men twice her age.

Cy leans forward. “That one.”

I don't answer because my throat is too tight. I remember her that night at WHLR, sitting across from me with headphones too big for her head and one finger pressed to the board while she asked me about a song nobody else had cared enough to finish listening to. I'd been broke, sweating through my shirt, and trying to act like confidence could cover hunger. Emmy looked at me like I was already worth hearing.

I sing the line once, rough and quiet. The room changes. Not in the dramatic way people like to talk about in interviews. No lightning or divine visitation, just the plain shift of a lie leaving the room.

Cy’s gaze drops to his boots. “Hell.”

The first song was about the interview. The second was about the drawer. Not her body, not her smile, and not the things a man reaches for when he wants the world to know he desired his wife. I write about the sketches instead. The porch she drew with careful pencil lines. The reading nook labelednot storage. The dogwood she wanted if she could find one. I write about keeping those pages in a drawer through four mansions and never once building the home she asked for before the world knew my name. There is no chorus big enough to hide that.

The third song is about that stupid night. Not the one where she heard the wrong thing. The one where I let her suffer in plain sight.

I don't want to write it. I try three times to make it about the award show, about cameras, and about the way a room can turn a woman into a symbol while she’s still sitting there breathing. Every version lets me stand too far away from it.

So I write:

I watched them turn their lights on you

and still I didn’t move.

The pen stops in my hand.

I see Emmy on that jumbotron, her face calm enough to pass for grace if you didn't know her. I knew her. I knew the stillness around her eyes and the way she held pain like a glass too full to lift. And I still stood at that microphone with Melody tucked against my side and thanked my wife like she was part of the crew.

My stomach turns. I pick up the guitar again.

Duke calls while the rain is still coming down. I let it ring through once, then twice. On the third time, Cy says, “He’ll just keep going until one of us dies.”

I answer and put him on speaker.

“Tell me you have not done what I think you’ve done,” Duke says. His voice fills the cabin, polished and furious. He sounds like Nashville. He sounds like a conference table and a contract slid across glass.

“Depends what you think.”

“I think you uploaded three unreleased songs to a free website under your own name with no Silver Creek clearance, no publishing conversation, no rollout, no preorder, no video, and no way for me to stop the hemorrhage.”

“Then I did what you think.”

A pause. Not silence, as I can hear him breathing through his nose. Cy closes his eyes.

“Cade,” Duke says, too carefully, “you are giving away hits.”

“No.”

“You are. I’ve heard the first two, and so has half of my office because apparently the entire internet found them in twenty minutes. These are hits.”