Chapter 8 #2
I watch her lean into the phrase home wrecker while pretending to step away from it, and something hot and acid rises in my throat.
I want to go back in time and punch myself.
Not her. Me. For every time I saw the shape of this forming and told myself it was harmless because I knew the truth.
As if truth does a damn bit of good when you leave your wife standing alone under a spotlight while everybody else writes the lie for her.
I scroll. My name is everywhere. Melody’s too. Emmy’s is attached like a bruise.
Then I see it. A blurry photo from a gas station in Harmony Ridge.
Emmy in a ball cap, shoulders tucked into a loose sweatshirt, turned partly away from whoever took it.
June’s car is at the pump behind her. The picture is bad quality, shot through glass or across a parking lot, but I know the angle of Emmy’s neck.
I know the way she holds herself when she's trying not to take up space.
She looks tired. Not dramatic. Not shattered for the camera. Just tired in a way I have no right to see because some stranger decided her pain belonged online.
My hand closes around the laptop until the screen wobbles. For one clear second, there's no anger at her. No injured pride, and no defense. There is only the fact that my wife looks like that because of me.
I shut the laptop so hard the sound cracks through the kitchen. Then I sit there breathing like I've run miles.
The pounding on the front door starts just after noon.
At first I think I imagined it. The house is gated, and the security panel is armed. Nobody gets up here without a code unless they're paid to stand outside and keep people away.
The pounding comes again. “Open the damn door,” Cy shouts.
Of course. He's one of the few people with the code. Emmy insisted on that after his divorce, back when he used to show up at odd hours with a guitar and the haunted look of a man who'd spent too long alone. She said any house of ours should have a way in for the people who loved us.
I wonder if she regrets that now.
I open the door. Cy Boone stands on my porch in a black T-shirt, boots dusty, steel-gray hair shoved under his hat, looking madder than hell. He takes one look at me and doesn't soften.
“If you’ve come here to see if I’m alive, you got your answer,” I say.
He pushes past me. “I don’t give a shit if you’re alive. I just wanted to see if you were done being the dumbest motherfucker on planet earth.”
I close the door slowly. “Good to see you too.”
“Don’t start with charming. I’m immune.”
“Clearly.”
He turns in the middle of the foyer, taking in the house, the shirt I've been wearing too long, and the phone dead on the side table. “Jesus, Cade. You look like rich misery.”
I laugh once, mean and empty. “Glad you came all this way for poetry.”
“I came because you won’t answer the phone.”
“I didn’t feel like getting lectured.”
“That’s unfortunate, because I drove over here specifically to lecture you.”
I run a hand over my face. “She blocked me.”
“Good.”
The word hits so hard my head snaps up. “Excuse me?”
Cy folds his arms. “I said good.”
“My wife left me because of an edited clip, and you’re saying good?”
“No. Your wife left you because you made her life hurt for a year and then acted surprised when she finally believed the pain.”
My jaw tightens. “You know damn well I didn’t cheat.”
“I do.”
“Then maybe lead with that.”
“Why? You want a parade for not sleeping with the twenty-five-year-old who’s been making eyes at you on every stage in America?”
Heat rushes up my neck. “That’s not what this is.”
“No? Then what is it?”
“It was work.”
Cy’s mouth goes flat. “Try again.”
“It was a song. It was a narrative. It was Duke and the label and the damn numbers. Yes, I should have shut parts of it down, but Emmy knows me. She knows I would never choose Melody over her. I don't know why she couldn't just believe me when I told her it wasn't what it sounded like."
Even I hate how petulant that sounds.
Cy looks at me for a long moment. Then he says, “Maybe because for at least a damn year you’ve been choosing Melody over and over again. I suppose for her, she was just waitin’ to hear it.”
The words go through the room like a slammed door. I stare at him. “That’s not fair.”
“No,” he says. “What wasn’t fair was your wife being led through side doors while Melody got the red carpet because it photographed better.
What wasn’t fair was Emmy sitting in the audience while every camera in that arena hunted her face like she was part of the act.
What wasn’t fair was you thanking half of Nashville by name and giving your wife one little afterthought while your arm was still around another woman. ”
My stomach turns. “I thanked her.”
“You barely thanked her,” Cy snaps. “There’s a difference, and she felt it in front of millions of people.”
I look away.
He steps closer. “You know how many shows she sat through this year watching you and Melody all but make love to each other onstage?”
“It was blocking.”
“It was humiliating.”
I flinch.
Cy’s voice drops, which is worse than when he yells.
“Every night, Cade. Every performance. Every interview where somebody asked about that chemistry and you grinned instead of saying, ‘Careful. My wife is the love of my life.’ Every time Melody floated some sweet little home-wrecker joke and you let it hang because the room laughed and the numbers went up.”
“I was going to fix it.”
“When?”
I say nothing.
Cy nods like that's the answer. “That recording may be missing context. I know it is. But you didn’t just snap her heart in half with one bad sentence. That was the final tear. You’ve been stomping on Emmy’s heart for at least a year. Nobody’s got a heart strong enough to survive all that.”
The foyer blurs. Not with tears, not yet, but with memory.
I see her in the bedroom doorway, asking if I could take one clean look at what was happening with Melody. I hear my own voice: It’s just a bump in the road. It’ll all settle down after the rollout.
I see her in a champagne dress on a giant screen, smiling while I made her smaller than my career.
My knees don't give, but something in me does. And then, because grief is cruel, the good years come too.
Emmy in the back of my pickup in a field outside Nashville after my first single hit, laughing against my mouth because the radio was playing my song. We were too poor for champagne, so we drank gas station soda from the bottle and made love under a quilt she kept behind the seat.
Emmy at the Whippoorwill in Harmony Ridge, boots sticking to the floor, dancing with me when I was still playing three-hour sets for less than a hundred dollars and free wings. She knew every word before anyone else did. Sang them back at me like faith.
Emmy in the audience at my first arena show, both hands pressed to her mouth, proud enough to break me open. I sang the bridge to her because the whole world had gone bright, but she was the only thing I could see.
I sit down on the bottom stair because standing suddenly feels ambitious. “What the fuck have I done, Cy?” I ask. My voice sounds scraped raw.
Cy exhales through his nose. For the first time since he walked in, his anger loosens around the edges. He sits beside me, leaving one stair between us.
“Well,” he says, “you’ve been a stupid shit, that’s what.”
I press the heels of my hands into my eyes. A laugh breaks out of me, ugly and wet. “That your professional opinion?”
“Personal and professional.”
I lower my hands.
He looks at me, steady. “But I imagine you could try to fix it.”
“How?” The word comes out like I'm asking for mercy. Maybe I am.
Cy leans his forearms on his knees. “By finally making her the most important part of your life instead of chasing after the dumb shit that don’t matter.”
I look around the foyer: the high ceiling, the polished floor, the table chosen by a decorator because Emmy and I were too busy becoming people we didn't recognize.
Somewhere in this house is a drawer with my copy of her old sketches.
I know because I kept them. I kept them and then built everything except the one thing I promised.
The phone on the side table lights up again. Duke.
For a few seconds, I watch it ring. Then I stand, cross the foyer, and turn it off.
The silence that follows isn't peace. It isn't forgiveness, and it isn't even a plan. It's just the first honest thing I've done in days.
Cy stays on the stairs, watching me.
“I don’t know her dreams anymore,” I say. The sentence cuts deeper out loud. Cy doesn't rescue me from it.
I look toward the kitchen, where Emmy used to stand in the morning light, making coffee in a house that never deserved her. “I should.”
“Yeah,” Cy says quietly. “You should.”
I nod once, though it doesn't fix anything. Nothing fixes anything right now.
My wife is in Harmony Ridge, tired and hiding under a ball cap because strangers are hunting her face.
She's blocked my number. She has every right to.
And I'm standing in a silent mansion I built instead of the home I promised, realizing I've been calling love a feeling while letting every choice say otherwise.
I don't know how to get her back. I don't even know if I deserve to try. But for the first time since the wave hit, I understand the wave for what it is. Not music. Not fire. Not fate. A thing that carried me because I stopped planting my feet.
I look at Cy. “Then I learn.”
His eyes narrow. “Learn what?”
I swallow. “Her,” I say. “From scratch. On her terms.”