Page 83 of A Song for Another Woman

His palm is warm, rough, and careful enough to make my eyes close. For a moment, nothing happens. Cade doesn’t complain and doesn’t laugh it off. He just stands there with his hand under mine, breathing unevenly, tears slipping down his face in silence.

Then the baby moves again, small and certain.

Cade drops to his knees. His hand stays where I put it, trembling against my belly.

“Hi,” he whispers.

The word shatters something I thought had already broken clean through.

He laughs once, crying openly now. “Hi, baby.”

I put my free hand in his hair because my body decides before my pride can hold a meeting about it. Cade freezes, then he turns his face into my palm and breaks all the way.

“I’m so sorry,” he says. “I’m so sorry I wasn’t there. I’m so sorry I made you do this without me. I’m so sorry, Emmy.”

His hand spread, broad and shaking. “I’m going to spend the rest of my life making sure you never feel alone again.”

I look down at him. The man who left stages behind before he knew. The man who gave up money before he knew. The man who moved to my town, built my house, saved our bar, and sang to an empty spot for months before he knew there was a baby tucked beneath my heart.

The proof has been here longer than the confession.

I bend carefully until my forehead rests against his. Cade’s breath catches.

“I love you,” he says.

“I love you too.”

He closes his eyes again, and for once, there’s no audience to cheer for him when he falls apart. Only me. Only the baby. Only the house he built before he knew how badly we’d need somewhere to stand.

Chapter Twenty-One

CADE

Her forehead rests against mine, and I don’t move. I don’t trust myself to.

Emmy’s hand is still in my hair. Her fingers tremble against my scalp, soft, familiar, and impossible after all these months of empty rooms and locked doors. My palm stays spread over the small curve of her belly, waiting for another movement like a man waiting for mercy.

“I love you too,” she just said.

The words are still in the room. I’ve stood under spotlights with fifty thousand people screaming my name, but nothing has ever made me feel less steady than four quiet words from my wife.

I close my eyes. “Say it again.”

Her breath catches. I hate myself a little for asking. Not because I don’t need it, but because I do.

Emmy’s fingers tighten in my hair. “I love you.”

My hand shakes against her belly. “God.”

I bow my head until my mouth touches the back of her hand, the one resting over mine. I kiss her knuckles once, then twice, and she makes a small sound that goes straight through me. Notdesire first. Grief first. Then desire, low and hot and careful, rising out of the place where grief’s been sitting for months.

I lift my head. “Can I kiss you?”

Her eyes shine in the porch light, brown, wet, and braver than I deserve. “Yes.”

I stand slowly because she’s right here, the baby is right here, and my body has a lot of old habits I don’t get to obey without asking anymore. When I reach my full height, Emmy tilts her face up to me.

For one second, I remember every kiss I took for granted: kitchen kisses, hotel hallway kisses, half-asleep kisses before flights, quick pecks while looking at my phone, her mouth offered to me while my mind was already somewhere else.