Page 66 of A Song for Another Woman

By sunset, the songs are everywhere.

I don't touch my own phone because I can't. The screen keeps lighting up against the table anyway: texts, calls, alerts, names I haven’t seen since award season, and names I hope never to see again. Silver Creek. Duke. Reporters. Artists who already want to do covers. People who smell blood and call it interest.

Cy reads softly. “They’re saying ‘Wildfire’ wasn’t about Melody.”

My hands go still on the guitar strings.

“People are pulling old interviews,” he says. “That WHLR clip from when Emmy interviewed you. Someone found it.”

I close my eyes. Her voice comes back to me from thirteen years ago, warm through cheap station headphones:Cade Tyler is here with us tonight, and he’s got a song that sounds like it’s already been waiting on you awhile.

I'd fallen a little in love with her before the first commercial break.

Cy scrolls. “They’re comparing lyrics.”

I huff out a breath that almost hurts. “People need hobbies.”

“They’ve got one. It’s you.” He pauses. “And her.”

That makes me look up. He turns the phone so I can see without taking it. A post sits on the screen, already shared toomany times to count:We owe Emmy Sutton Tyler an apology. The muse was the wife. The whole time.

Below it are stills: Emmy at nineteen in the WHLR booth, Emmy at the awards in that champagne dress, Melody under the stage lights, and me looking like a man who mistook applause for proof.

I push the phone gently away. I don't want strangers defending Emmy because they discovered a better story. I don't want another crowd gathering around her pain, even if this time they're ready to make the light shining on her a little softer. But I also know what I did. I let the world misread my life because the misreading was profitable. Now I give them the truth with no price tag and no doorway back to me.

Cy sits across from me. “She won’t play them.”

Every night, I hear her. Her voice comes from the little radio on my kitchen counter, steady as a hand on a fevered forehead. She takes calls from women who are trying not to go back, men trying to learn how to apologize, lonely truckers, tired nurses, and old widowers who call just to hear someone say their name.

And sometimes, between songs, she says things that sound like instructions:Sorry is easy. Changed is the only currency that spends.

I've started measuring my days by that sentence.

“She doesn’t have to play them,” I say.

Cy studies me. “Then why put them out?”

“Because for two years, every song I wrote let people make her smaller.” My voice comes rougher than I expect. “I can’t walk into her station. I can’t call. I can’t stand outside the diner holding a speaker over my head like an idiot and call that respect.”

Cy’s mouth twitches. “Please don’t.”

“So I make songs that don’t need her permission to exist and don’t require her labor to carry them.”

“That’s a thin line.”

“I know.”

“You sure you’re on the right side of it?”

No. That's the answer I don't say. There are mornings I don't know whether anything I do is repair or just another way of wanting. Wanting can dress itself up. Wanting can learn all the right words and still reach.

I pick at the edge of the bandage on my palm. “She can hate them,” I say. “She can never listen. She can turn off every radio in town if she needs to. But I helped make a world where everybody thought another woman brought me back to life.” I swallow. “The time to correct that assumption is long past.”

Cy nods once, slow.

The cabin settles around us as rainwater drips from the eaves. Somewhere beyond the trees, Harmony Ridge moves toward midnight, toward her voice.

I turn back to the microphone. The last song waits on the screen. It's the simplest one, which makes it worse. No bridge designed to kill a stadium, no clever turn, and no place for my voice to climb until people mistake volume for feeling. Just the exact inventory of what I did.