Chapter 2
Chapter Two
CADE
The red light over the studio door comes on, and for the first time in longer than I want to admit, I feel my pulse answer it.
Not the polite kick I get before a show. Not the muscle-memory lift when the band hits the downbeat and fifty thousand people remember they paid too much for beer to stand there quiet. This is lower than that. Meaner.
Music used to feel like this.
Cy sits behind the pedal steel with his hat tipped low and his eyes on me like he’s waiting to see whether I’ll run from it.
The drummer taps one stick against his thigh.
The bass player rolls his shoulders. Melody Hunter stands on the other side of the mic, barefoot on the studio rug, one hand wrapped around a paper cup of tea and the other holding her phone up toward us.
“For the socials,” she says, smiling at the screen. “Say hi, Cade.”
I lift two fingers without looking straight into the camera. “Hi, Cade.”
She laughs, bright and easy. Pretty laugh. Good for a room. Good for a camera. That matters, and I hate that I know it matters.
“Okay,” Cy says dryly. “Can we make music now, or are we all waiting on the little heart button?”
Melody lowers the phone, but she doesn’t put it away.
She never really puts it away. It lives in her hand, propped against coffee mugs, wedged in the corner by the console, catching snippets of every room she walks into.
I barely register it anymore. Everybody’s recording everything now: songs, jokes, dinner, heartbreak.
Proof that you existed and looked good doing it.
Duke says that’s the game. Duke says a lot of things.
I shift my guitar higher against my ribs and look down at the lyric sheet on the stand. Half of it is scratched out. A third verse is gone. Two lines are circled so hard the pen nearly tore through paper.
Tell me you felt it before I burn alone.
I wrote that at 2:17 this morning after staring at the wall for an hour and telling myself I should go home.
Home, where Emmy had probably put dinner in the warmer again.
Home, where my wife knows how I take my coffee, how I hold my breath when I hate a mix, and how to tell from my shoulders whether a review landed too hard.
Home, where everything is kind, familiar, and quiet.
The studio is none of those things.
“Run it from the top,” I say.
The engineer’s voice crackles through the talkback. “Rolling.”
Melody glances at me, eyes lit. “Don’t be careful.”
There it is. The thing she brought into the room on the first day Silver Creek shoved us together and called it strategy.
Don’t be careful. Don’t smooth it down. Don’t make the chorus radio-ready before it’s bloody.
She's twenty-five and hungry in a way I remember too well.
She argues with melody lines. She changes words without asking permission.
She looks at a bad lyric like it insulted her mother.
She makes me mad. She makes me better. Those two things feel close enough some days that I stop checking the distance.
Cy slides into the intro, steel bending the air until it aches. My fingers find the opening chord, and Melody steps closer to the shared mic. We sing the first verse together.
The room changes.
I feel it happen through the floorboards, through the wood of the guitar, and through the locked-in stillness of session players who have heard every version of every song and know when something has decided to live.
Melody’s harmony comes in under mine, sharp enough to draw blood.
My voice does something it hasn’t done on the last three albums. It reaches. It wants.
Not her.
That’s the part the media and fans don't seem to be able to understand, including me on bad nights when I let the room get too warm and the hour get too late. I’m not aching for Melody Hunter.
I’m not staring across the microphone thinking about her mouth, her hair, or the fact that the whole industry has already started whispering her name beside mine like they found a match and deserve credit for striking it.
I’m addicted to the look on everyone’s faces when I stop being a legacy act.
That’s uglier. Less forgivable, maybe, because it means I know exactly what I’m doing. At thirty-eight, you learn the difference between applause and hunger. Applause says they still love you. Hunger says they still need you.
For two years, maybe three, I’ve been living off applause.
The albums sold. The tours filled. Radio played the singles because I’m Cade Tyler and because there are entire families who have made my voice part of their holiday drives, their Friday nights, their first dances, their divorces.
Loyalty is a beautiful thing until you hear it clapping politely for a song you know is hollow.
Three albums. Same midtempo ache. Same gravel in the verses. Same big chorus meant to rise over a stadium. Same interviews about roots, gratitude, and finding new shades of old truth.
I was out of shades. I was out of truth.
Then Melody walks into Studio B with a notebook full of crossed-out lines and says, “This hook is lying.”
Duke almost chokes on his coffee. I almost tell her to watch her mouth. Instead, I look at the hook and realize she’s right.
Now we hit the chorus, and the song lifts so hard the hairs on my arms stand up. Melody grins mid-line. I grin back before I can stop myself. Not flirtation. Recognition. The reckless, stupid joy of a door opening inside a room I thought was bricked shut.
From the corner, Cy watches me like he can see the bill coming due.
At nine-thirty, Emmy texts.
Still at the studio?
I read it while Duke plays the rough mix through the big speakers for the third time, nodding like he’s hearing dollar signs in B minor. I type, Wrapping soon.
Then Melody says, “The second chorus still feels too behaved.”
I look up. She’s sitting cross-legged on the couch, phone angled against a water bottle, recording us listening to ourselves. Her hair is falling out of the knot on top of her head. She looks tired, stubborn, and young.
Duke points at her. “That. That’s why this works.”
“What works?” Cy asks.
“The push-pull.” Duke’s eyes move between Melody and me. “People are going to eat this alive.”
“It’s a song,” I say.
“It’s a story,” Duke corrects. “Songs get played. Stories get replayed.”
Cy’s jaw shifts.
I should answer Emmy. I should say, I’m sorry. I know I promised dinner. I’ll be home in thirty. Instead, I set my phone facedown on the console.
“One more take,” I say.
Cy exhales through his nose. We do six.
By the time I get home, the kitchen is dark except for the light over the stove. Dinner sits covered beneath foil, neat as a reprimand Emmy would never make out loud. I stand there with my guitar case still in my hand, listening to the quiet house. Our house is too big for quiet.
I find Emmy asleep on the couch in one of my old shirts, a book open against her chest. Her hair is tucked behind one ear. There’s a crease between her brows, like even rest has started asking something of her.
Guilt moves through me, clean and unpleasant.
I should wake her. I should apologize properly. I should sit on the edge of the couch and tell her the song is good, maybe really good, and I’m scared of how much I need it to be. Instead, I ease the book from her hand, kiss her forehead, and whisper, “I’m home, babe.”
She makes a small sound and turns her face toward the cushion.
In the morning, I’ll tell her.
In the morning, the label calls before breakfast. The world finds “Wildfire” before we even finish the final mix.
Melody posts a ten-second clip of us arguing over a lyric, both of us laughing because neither one of us will back down.
Nothing happens in it. We’re six feet apart.
I’m holding a pencil. She’s saying, “You can’t rhyme fire with desire unless you want me to die in this room,” and I’m telling her half of country music is built on worse crimes.
By noon, the clip is everywhere. By dinner, Duke sends me a screenshot of the numbers with no words, just three flame emojis.
By midnight, somebody has slowed the clip down to the half second where Melody touches my forearm to get my attention, and the comments are full of people who think they’ve discovered electricity.
I show Emmy the harmless version in bed because I want her to laugh. She watches it with the phone held carefully in both hands.
“She records a lot,” she says.
“Everybody does now.”
“She posts a lot of you.”
I take the phone back too casually. “It’s promo.”
Emmy turns on her side, facing me. In the dim light, her eyes look darker than usual. “Is it?”
The right answer isn't complicated. The right answer is, I’ll talk to Duke. I’ll tell Melody to stop feeding it. I’ll make sure nobody gets to turn you into the woman standing outside the joke.
What I say is, “You know how this works.”
Her face changes a little. I see it. Then I choose not to.
“Em,” I add, softening my voice, reaching for her hip under the blanket. “You were radio. You were the voice people stayed up for. You know better than anyone there’s an on-air version and a real version.”
“I know that,” she says.
“There’s stage Cade and your Cade.”
She looks at me for a long second. “I miss knowing which one is coming home.”
Then my phone lights up on the nightstand with Duke’s name, and I look. Emmy rolls onto her back.
I tell myself I’ll fix the look on her face after this call.
Cy corners me outside Studio B two weeks later, while Melody is inside filming herself pontificating about how bad studio coffee is.
“You’re getting sloppy,” he says.
I lean against the wall and rub at the back of my neck. “Good morning to you too.”
“It’s almost midnight.”
“Then good almost midnight.”