Page 8 of A Song for Another Woman

Cy’s eyebrows lift.

“She’s been with me since before any of this worked. She knows the performance. Hell, she was a performer too. Not arenas, but she knew how to turn herself on for people. Backroad Country, midnight to four. Emmy Sutton on WHLR.” I hear my voice warming because that version of her still does something to me. “She could make some trucker in Kentucky feel like she was sitting right there in the cab with him. She knows there’s the voice on the radio and the person who comes home.”

Cy studies me. “Does the person come home?”

I look away.

“That's what I thought,” he says.

I push off the wall. “We’re making a record.”

“You’re making excuses.”

Anger rises, fast because it’s easier than shame. “You got something to say, say it.”

“I just did.” He steps closer. “You got a wife who loved you when nobody cared if you could fill a room, and now that everybody cares again, you’re treating her like she’s supposed to clap and eat whatever shit's left over.”

I stare at him. For one second, I see Emmy in the kitchen, foil over dinner. Emmy in bed, asking which version of me is coming home. Emmy sitting through another industry dinner where strangers talk around her because they think wife is a job title.

Then Melody opens the studio door and sticks her head out. “You coming?” she asks me. “Bridge is still wrong.”

The second passes.

I look at Cy. “One more hour.”

His mouth tightens like he expected exactly that and hated being right.

The bridge gets fixed at 1:12 a.m. It happens by accident, the way the good ones usually do. Melody is standing close because we’re both reading from the same lyric sheet, and the room has gone soft with exhaustion. The session players are slumped in chairs. The engineer is nursing cold coffee. Cy has his steel across his lap, but he isn't playing.

“No,” Melody says, tapping the page. “You’re still hiding.”

“I’m singing my ass off.”

“You’re singing loud. That’s not the same.”

I should be annoyed. I am annoyed. I’m also awake in every part of me.

She takes the pencil from my hand and writes one line beneath mine. The room goes quiet when I read it.

It’s not perfect, but it breaks something open. I take the pencil back and change two words. She changes one of mine. I change it back. She laughs under her breath and looks up at me.

“Now you're getting it,” she says.

The praise hits me harder than it should. Not because she says it like a woman wanting a man, but because she says it like a room finding the version of me I thought I’d buried under platinum records and careful choices.

I look down at the page. “Run it.”

Nobody moves. Melody doesn’t either.

Her shoulder brushes my arm. Her phone is on the music stand beside us, dark screen turned upward, probably still recording, probably catching the ceiling and our voices and nothing worth noticing. Her face tilts toward mine.

There’s a pause a better man would end.

I half-step back. Not enough.

Melody’s eyes flick to my mouth, then back up. Testing. Waiting to see if the story everybody is writing might become useful in private too. My wedding ring feels suddenly tight.

“Melody,” I say, soft. Too soft.