Page 10 of A Song for Another Woman

I look across the room and see her. Champagne dress. Hair swept back. One hand around a glass she isn’t drinking from. She stands near the edge of a conversation, smiling at something a label executive’s wife says, but even from here I can tell the smile isn’t reaching her eyes.

My body turns toward her.

For one clean second, I know exactly what to do. Cross the room. Put my hand at the small of her back. Leave with her. Let the cameras photograph the back of my jacket for once.

Emmy looks up. Our eyes meet. Something in her face opens, barely.

Duke grips my elbow. “Now, Cade. They’re waiting.”

I glance toward the cameras. Melody is already there beneath the lights, laughing for a photographer, waving me over like the night belongs to both of us.

I look back at Emmy. I lift one finger.

One minute. I’ll make it up to her.

I let Duke pull me toward the flashbulbs.

By the time I look across the room again, Emmy’s smile is back in place, perfect and distant, and I tell myself that means she understands.

I tell myself I have time.

I don’t.

Chapter Three

EMMY

The marble island is cold under my forearms. It's always cold. Morning, afternoon, midnight. The whole kitchen could be on fire, and this marble would still feel like something lifted from a mausoleum and polished for a magazine spread.

“Mrs. Tyler?”

I lift my head. Brenda, the housekeeper, stands by the pantry doors with a tablet tucked against her chest. She's kind, efficient, and terrified of scuff marks. “Do you want the flowers replaced before Mr. Tyler gets back?”

I look at the arrangement in the center of the island. White roses. White orchids. Branches stripped of leaves and made elegant by someone who's never loved a messy thing in her life.

“They look fine,” I say.

“They’re starting to brown at the edges.”

I almost laugh. “Go ahead and replace them.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Ma’am. Mrs. Tyler. Cade’s wife. I try to remember the last time someone in this house called me Emmy without needing something from me afterward.

The refrigerator hums. Somewhere beyond the kitchen, a vacuum starts up, soft and expensive. This house eats sound.Cade calls it good acoustics when he’s being generous and too damn big when he comes home tired enough to be honest. It has twenty-two rooms, four guest suites, a glass wine wall, heated bathroom floors, and a staircase that looks beautiful in photos but feels foolish to climb in socks.

A decorator chose most of it. The matte black fixtures. The hand-knotted rugs. The giant abstract painting in the front hall that looks like a storm cloud rendered with zero personality. Cade liked the way the house photographed, and Duke liked the way it said superstar without saying new money. No one asked what I liked.

That isn't entirely fair. Cade asked once, early on, standing in this kitchen with a bottle of champagne in his hand and a real estate agent waiting discreetly near the foyer.

“What do you think, babe?”

I remember looking at all the white stone and glass and thinking of fingerprints. Thinking of Sunday biscuits. Thinking of dog hair we didn’t have because a dog would be complicated with touring.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

He grinned like I'd given him something. “Then it’s ours.”