Chapter 6
Chapter Six
EMMY
The zipper catches on one of Cade’s old sweatshirts.
For a second, I just stand there with my hand on the duffel, staring at the gray cotton caught in the teeth.
It’s soft from years of washing, the cuffs stretched out, the collar ruined by a tiny rip from some motel laundry room in Kentucky before anyone knew his name.
I wore it the first winter we were married because the heat in our rental kept dying, and Cade said very seriously that a husband’s primary job was providing warmth and occasional tacos.
I loved him then in a way that made ordinary things feel permanent.
The zipper won’t move. I take the sweatshirt out. That's the first thing I leave behind.
The closet light hums above me. Around my feet, the marble floor is cold because I turned off the heat hours ago without meaning to. I have one duffel, my phone, my wallet, the keys to Daddy’s old truck, and the blue folder of sketches tucked against my ribs like something living.
Porch. Nook. Dogwood. A girl at nineteen drew herself a life with no cameras in it.
I don’t pack jewelry. I don’t pack gowns. I don’t pack the shoes a stylist labeled essential, though I can't imagine a less essential object than a heel chosen by someone who's never had to run from her own marriage before dawn.
In the bathroom, my reflection looks calm. That almost offends me.
My eyes are dry. My hair is pulled into a loose knot.
Cade’s T-shirt hangs off one shoulder, soft and familiar against skin that feels like it belongs to a stranger.
I look like a woman about to make coffee.
I look like a woman who might go downstairs and answer emails, approve social captions, or send reminders for vocal steamers and hotel call times.
Mrs. Tyler. Useful. Quiet. In place.
My phone lights up on the counter.
June
How far are you?
I type back:
Still here.
Her reply comes immediately.
I can come.
I stare at those three words until my throat tightens. My sister would do it. She'd leave the diner keys with somebody half-asleep, climb into her car, and drive all the way to Nashville just to stand beside me while I broke my own life open.
No. I need to do this myself.
The dots appear. Disappear. Appear again.
Okay.
Guest room’s made. Back door’ll be unlocked. Coffee when you get here.
That almost does it. Not Cade’s voice on that clip. Not the comments. Not the whole country putting my humiliation on a loop.
Coffee when you get here. A life waiting on the other side of leaving.
Downstairs, a truck door shuts. My body knows the sound before my mind has time to decide what to do with it.
Cade is home.
For one stupid second, everything in me reaches for him. Not the idea of him. Him. The man whose key turns in the lock with a familiar scrape, whose boots hit the entry tile in the rhythm I could pick out of a crowd, whose voice has been the weather of my life for thirteen years.
Then his words rise again, clean and ugly: The only reason I’m not with Melody is because I’m married.
My hand closes around the handle of the duffel.
“Em?” Cade calls. He sounds bright. Not sober-bright, exactly, and not drunk, but just lit from whatever room he came from.
He's buzzed on attention, on applause, on the relief of still being wanted somewhere.
His voice carries through the foyer with that warm, easy rasp that used to make me turn toward him before I even knew I was doing it. “Emmy?”
He sees me at the bottom of the stairs, and the smile falls off his face.
I stand there with the duffel in one hand and the blue folder tucked under my arm. The house rises around us, huge, white, and silent. Every light I didn’t turn on makes the place feel staged for an absence.
“What are you doing?” he asks. It is such a small question for such a ruined room.
“I’m leaving.”
He blinks once. Twice. His eyes move from my face to the bag, then to the folder, then back again. Confusion comes first. Then fear, fast enough to show me he isn't as far gone as I thought. He isn't gone enough to miss this.
“What?” He laughs once, but there's no humor in it. “Baby, what are you talking about?”
Baby.
“You haven’t been online,” I say.
His forehead creases. “No. I mean, not really. Duke’s been blowing up my phone, but I figured it was party stuff. What happened?”
Party stuff.
I look at my husband standing in the foyer of the house he bought instead of the one he promised me.
His hair is mussed. His black shirt is open at the throat.
There's a faint smear of someone’s glitter near his cuff, or maybe I imagine that because my mind has learned how to hurt itself efficiently.
He takes one step toward me. “Emmy.”
I lift my phone, and he stops.
“What did you say to her tonight?” I ask.
His face changes. Not guilt, exactly, but something sharper. Recognition with no map. “To who?”
I don’t answer.
His jaw tightens. “Melody?”
There it is. The name between us, finally taking up the amount of room it's been taking for months.
“You said, ‘The only reason I’m not with Melody is because I’m married.’”
He goes still.
I say the rest because I need him to hear it from my mouth. I need him to know what sentence he handed me. “‘If I wasn’t married, I’d be with Melody.’”
All the color drains from his face. “No,” he says.
I almost laugh. It would be easier if I could. “No?”
“That’s not—” He drags a hand through his hair, eyes darting like the right door is somewhere in the room if he can just find it. “That’s not what I said.”
“It is exactly what you said.”
“No, it’s not the whole thing.”
I tap the video before my courage can think better of it. The sound fills the foyer.
Melody’s voice first, thin and bright from a bad phone recording. Then Cade’s, low and clear: The only reason I’m not with Melody is because I’m married.
His face folds in on itself.
The clip keeps going: If I wasn’t married, I’d be with Melody.
Then silence. Cade stares at the phone like it's bitten him.
For the first time since the video found me, I let myself watch his face instead of the screen. I watch the bloodless shock, the quick horror, and the way his mouth opens and closes around words that can’t get out cleanly. He looks wounded by his own voice.
Good, some cold part of me thinks.
Then the part of me that still loves him aches because I know that face. I know the boyish panic under the famous man. I know the way his hands flex when he wants to fix a thing by reaching for it.
He reaches now, but I step back. His hand stops in the air.
“Emmy, listen to me.”
“No.”
“Please.”
“No.” My voice is quiet, which seems to scare him more than shouting would have. “I’ve been listening to you for a year.”
His throat works.
“I listened when you said I was imagining it,” I say. “I listened when you said the cameras didn’t matter. I listened when you said it was just a bit. I listened when you told me not to make it weird. I listened every time you made my own hurt sound like a misunderstanding.”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
“I know.” My fingers tighten on the folder. “That’s always the problem. You never mean it the way it lands, so I’m supposed to carry the bruise and the explanation.”
He flinches. Good. No, not good. Nothing about this is good.
“I was trying to shut it down,” he says, words coming faster now. “She pushed me. She wanted me to admit there was something between us, and I was saying that was the narrative. That’s what people wanted. I was saying—”
“You were saying our marriage is the thing in your way.”
“No.” His voice cracks. “No, Emmy, God, no.”
But I have his voice in my hand. I have months of my own reflection on screens.
I have the weight of every room where my pain was managed, corrected, softened, and set aside because Cade Tyler had momentum.
The edited clip might be missing a tail, but my life hasn't been edited. I was there for all of it.
“You want to be with her?” I say. “Then be with her. I’m not going to be the reason you can’t. I’m out.”
He looks like I've struck him. Maybe I have. Maybe leaving is the only way I can save both of us now.
“Emmy, I don’t want her.”
I shake my head once.
“I don’t,” he says. “I swear to you. I have been stupid and selfish and—”
“Don’t.”
“—and I should have come home, I should have called you, I should have killed the story the second it started, but I did not cheat on you.”
The words hang there. I look at him. Really look.
There was a time when that sentence would have saved me. I can feel the old version of myself inside me, thin, tired, and hungry enough to grab at it. He didn’t cheat. See? Breathe. Make coffee. Try again. Take the smaller wound and call it mercy.
But the woman standing in this foyer is too tired to survive on technicalities.
“I believe you,” I say.
He freezes. I didn’t know I was going to say it until it was already in the room, but it's true in a way I hate. Maybe nothing physical happened. Maybe he never touched her. Maybe the line is missing something that would make him look less cruel.
His eyes fill with sudden, terrible hope, but I kill it before it can reach me.
“And I’m still leaving.”
His face opens, devastated and uncomprehending. “Why?”
The question is so honest it almost bends me.
“Because I shouldn’t have to be grateful you didn’t do the worst possible thing.”
He draws back like the sentence has found bone.
“I have been standing beside you while the whole country decided whether I was gracious or pathetic,” I say.
“I have smiled on camera while people turned my face into a joke. I have watched you come alive for a song everyone thinks belongs to another woman, and every time I asked you to see what it was doing to me, you told me it wasn’t real. ”
His eyes shine. “I was wrong.”
“Yes.”
“I know that now.”
“No, Cade.” My voice stays even, but my chest is shaking under it. “You know it now because I have a bag in my hand.”