Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
CADE
I wake up reaching for a woman who isn't there. My hand lands on cool sheet. Smooth cotton. Too expensive. Too clean. The kind Emmy once teased me about because apparently I'd become a man who slept on fabric with a thread count instead of a personality.
Her side of the bed is untouched.
For one stupid second, my body doesn't understand what my brain already knows.
I turn my head toward the bathroom, listening for the shower.
I wait for the soft opening of a drawer, the low hum she makes when she's half-awake and trying to remember where she put her earrings.
I wait for coffee, or for the little creak in the floor near the closet she always stepped over like the house might appreciate the courtesy.
Nothing.
The bedroom is enormous around me. Gray walls.
Cream rug. A bench at the foot of the bed no one has ever sat on because it looks like it belongs in a magazine and not under human weight.
The drapes hang perfectly. The nightstands match.
There isn't one damn thing in this room that would tell a stranger my wife ever lived here except the faint dent in the pillow beside mine. Even that will be gone soon.
I stare at it until my chest starts doing something I don't want to name.
“Emmy,” I say. My voice falls flat in the room.
I sit up hard, like motion might fix the emptiness. The house stays quiet. Not peaceful. Quiet the way a studio is quiet after the band leaves and all that's left is coiled cables, stale coffee, and the smell of work that used to feel important.
For the first time since “Wildfire” hit, I don't know what I'm supposed to do next. Worse, I don't want to do anything.
My phone is on the floor where I dropped it sometime before sunrise. I pick it up and call her before pride can get its boots on.
It rings once. Voicemail.
I hang up and call again. Once. Voicemail.
By the fifth time, even I have to stop pretending the signal is bad.
Emmy Sutton Tyler doesn't miss calls by accident.
Not from me. Not even angry. My wife has spent years making sure Cade Tyler never fell through a crack in his own life.
She answered from grocery aisles, from hair appointments, from cars Duke sent without asking her, or from the back of arenas while someone was telling her where to sit. Now she's cut the line.
Blocked.
I set the phone facedown on the bed and stand. The room tilts a little, though I'm not drunk. I was last night. Not enough to excuse a single thing, but enough that my body has a dull ache and my mouth tastes like old whiskey and panic.
In the bathroom, her things are still lined up on the counter. Skin cream. Toothbrush. A perfume bottle with a gold cap. I pick it up, then put it down without spraying it because I can't stand the idea of making this room smell like her when she isn't here.
Downstairs, the kitchen is spotless. There are no coffee grounds spilled by the machine. No grocery list in Emmy’s handwriting. No mug abandoned near the sink because she got distracted answering one of Duke’s six hundred questions about my schedule.
I open the fridge. Three waters. Cut fruit in a glass container. Some green juice I hate that Emmy bought because she said my blood was probably ninety percent gas station coffee. I close it.
This house photographs beautifully. It has appeared in two magazine profiles and one documentary segment where I said something easy about wanting a place to come home to. I want to punch that man in the mouth. Emmy was right. This isn't a home. It's a stage with better countertops.
My phone starts ringing upstairs. For one wild second, hope hits so hard I grip the edge of the island. Then the ringtone stops and starts again.
Not hers. Different tone. Duke.
I leave it.
The ringing stops. A voicemail appears. Then another call, then another.
I walk to the living room and stop in the doorway. The television is a black mirror. I can see myself in it: wrinkled shirt, hair wrecked, jaw dark, eyes not quite right. I look like a man after a long night. I don't look like a man whose wife just left him. That kind of damage ought to show more.
Duke’s voicemail plays because my thumb does it before I can think.
“Cade. I know you’re sore. I know this is personal. But you need to ride the wave right now. Just for right now. We can control the language if we move fast. Call me.”
I delete it.
Another one plays. “Listen to me. Do not make a statement without me. Do not go online. Do not call her in a way that can be leaked. We’re getting sympathy in some markets, heat in others, but the song is exploding. I need you clear-headed.”
I throw the phone onto the couch. It bounces once and lands screen-up, bright with missed calls. Duke. Duke. Duke. Cy.
That one I look at. I let it go to voicemail anyway.
A minute later, his voice fills the room, low and rough. “Pick up the damn phone, Cade.”
That's the whole message. I almost laugh, but nothing comes out.
For a while, I do nothing. I sit on the edge of a sofa Emmy never liked because she said it made guests perch instead of settle. I stare at the blank television. I don't turn it on. I don't open my laptop. I don't look at the world. The world has already taken enough of my marriage.
I keep seeing the garage instead. Emmy in that old blue truck, hands tight on the wheel. The folder buckled into the passenger seat. Her face when she said, I believe you did at one point.
I love you, I'd said. I said it like those three words were a handhold.
She looked at me like they were a memory.
Anger comes first because anger is easier to hold than the other thing.
She didn't listen. She wouldn't let me explain.
She had one ugly piece of audio, and that was enough for a verdict.
How could she believe I would do that to her?
To us? How could Emmy, who knows me down to the bone, think I wanted Melody Hunter over my wife?
I pace the living room, my bare feet silent on polished wood. “She knows me,” I say out loud, like there's somebody here to agree.
The house doesn't.
A voice in the back of my mind says, quiet and mean, Does she?
I shove it down.
She was supposed to know it was a play. The stage stuff.
The interviews. Melody tilting her head and saying things just close enough to dangerous that everybody leaned in.
Duke called it heat. The label called it momentum.
Lonesome Strings called it market alignment, which is a stupid phrase that somehow came with enough zeroes to make a grown man forget his own name.
And me? I called it work. I called it strategy. I called it a bump in the road when my wife stood in this house with pain plain on her face and asked me to take one clean look at what was happening to us.
The voice in my mind gets louder. You knew.
I stop pacing. Because I did. Not all at once, and not in a clean, brave way.
But I knew in flashes. In the half second after Melody leaned too close and I didn't step back fast enough.
In the silence after Emmy asked why her backstage pass had changed and I told her it was probably just an innocent mistake.
In the car after the awards show when Duke said the wife-cam clip was unfortunate but useful, and I told myself I would deal with him later.
Later. That word has been the cheapest thing I ever gave Emmy.
By the second day, the house has started to smell wrong.
Not bad, just empty. Air conditioning, lemon cleaner, and the faint stale bite of coffee I made and didn't drink.
There are plates in the sink because I put them there and then couldn't make myself rinse them, which would have driven Emmy quietly insane.
I call her again. Straight to voicemail.
I text:
Please call me.
No answer.
I need to know you’re safe.
Nothing.
Then, because pain apparently makes a man stupid in new directions, I type: Emmy, you have to let me explain.
I stare at it for a full minute before deleting it. She doesn't have to let me do anything. That realization makes me so angry I nearly throw the phone again, because it sounds too much like truth.
Duke leaves six more messages. Cy leaves three.
On the third morning, I break. Not because I'm ready, but because not knowing has become its own room, and I'm trapped in it.
I open my laptop at the kitchen island. The first thing I see is Emmy’s face.
Not her real face. Not the one soft with sleep or sharp with concentration, nor the one that used to turn toward me from the crowd before anyone knew my name.
This is the awards show clip. Her smile held in place like a door braced against wind.
The caption says:
THE WILDFIRE WIFE CAM GETS WORSE EVERY TIME.
I close my eyes. When I open them, the page is still there.
There are edits now. Slow motion. Zooms. People circling the moment Melody hugs me at the podium. People reading my speech like scripture. People pretending concern while replaying my wife’s humiliation for sport.
Some defend her. Some pity her. Some blame her for not leaving sooner, and some blame her for leaving at all.
I see one comment calling her bitter, and for a second I consider making a fake account just to tell a stranger to keep my wife’s name out of their mouth.
My hands actually move toward the keyboard.
Then I stop, because I can hear Emmy in the foyer: You can keep the narrative, too.
I sit back, sick.
A video autoplays. Melody in an interview from yesterday, hair soft, eyes wide, hands folded like she's being very brave.
“I never wanted to be a home wrecker,” she says in that sweet little aw-shucks voice that's always played well on camera.
“I think people see chemistry and they want to make it messy, but Cade and I just have this artistic connection. I respect marriage so much.” She gives a tiny, wounded laugh after she says it.