Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
EMMY
By the end of the second week, Pop has stopped answering the phone like a normal person. He answers it like a man trying not to sound excited because excitement might spook the blessing.
“WHLR,” he says, standing in the doorway of the studio with the cord stretched across his chest. “No, ma’am, she ain’t available right now. She’s sleeping because she has common sense, unlike the rest of us.”
I lift my head from the desk. Pop covers the receiver with one hand. “You sleeping?”
“My eyes are closed.”
“That’s halfway there.”
“It’s noon.”
“You went off air at two.”
“And then you made me sit in your office for forty-five minutes while you read numbers at me.”
His mouth twitches. “Historic numbers.”
“They were still numbers.”
He points at me with the receiver. “Small-market stations don’t get historic numbers, Emmy Lou. We get modest numbers. Respectable numbers. Occasionally troubling numbers.”
I sit up, rubbing the crease the legal pad has left on my cheek. “Are we in troubling?”
“We’re in ‘a man from Knoxville used the phrase national interest, and I had to sit down’ numbers.”
My stomach flips. It has been doing that a lot lately, so I refuse to give the flip any authority.
Pop returns to the call, his voice going careful. “Yes, sir. I understand. Well, you can email me like everybody else, and I’ll pretend I know how to open it.”
I stare through the glass at the empty studio. The red light is off now. The mic waits on its stand, plain, black, and patient. Two weeks ago, it felt like stepping up to a witness stand. Now it feels like the one place where no one can make me smaller.
The clips are everywhere. Not the old clips. Not my face in an arena while the country studied whether I was about to break. These are different. Better. Mine.
A widow from Cedar Mill Road talking about setting two coffee cups out every morning.
A truck driver crying over twins he loves and the silence he also needs.
Me telling a woman from Pikeville that starting over isn’t the same as failing, even if both make you want to lie on the kitchen floor for a while.
Pop hangs up and turns slowly, one hand still on the phone. “That was a gentleman who used the word syndication like he knew what it meant.”
I make my face blank. “Pop.”
“I’m not saying anything.”
“You're vibrating.”
“I am a contained professional.”
“You are eighty percent coffee and bad ideas.”
He grins then, helpless and bright. “They’re listening to you, Sutton.”
The sentence should scare me more than it does. It does scare me. I’m not stupid.
But this is different. They’re not listening because my husband forgot how to choose me in public. They’re listening. That difference feels like a door opening.
I press my fingers to the edge of the desk. “I’m not ready to talk about national anything.”
“Good,” Pop says. “Neither am I. My blood pressure can’t afford geography.”
I laugh, and the laugh turns my stomach. Hard.
I swallow fast and reach for the paper cup beside me. Mint tea. Cold now. It doesn’t help, but holding it gives me something to do.
Pop notices. He may pretend to be a crusty old relic held together by nicotine patches and stubbornness, but he sees everything that matters.
“You all right?”
“Fine.”
His brows rise.
“Tired,” I correct.
That one is true enough to stand on. I am tired. I am also alive in a way I forgot was possible.
Pop looks like he wants to press. Then the phone rings again.
He sighs at it. “If this is another podcast, I’m telling them you joined a convent.”
I lean back in the chair and close my eyes. For one second, I let myself feel it.
The show is working. More than working. The station’s ad slots are filling. Pop got three sponsor inquiries yesterday from businesses outside the county. A woman in Kentucky sent a letter with a pressed violet tucked inside and wrote, You made the night less mean.
No one can take that from me. The thought is clean and almost frightening. No one can take that from me because I built it with my own voice.
Then my stomach rolls again, and the clean thought gets swallowed by heat and saliva. I barely make it to the bathroom.
June finds me sitting on the closed toilet lid at the Dogwood Diner two nights later with my forehead pressed against the cool metal stall divider.
Her shoes appear beneath the stall door. Black non-slip clogs, flour dusted over one toe. “You’ve been nauseous for weeks.”
“It’s stress.”
“You tried that one.”
“Coffee.”
“You switched to tea.”
“Tea betrayal.”
“Emmy.”
I close my eyes. There's a tone sisters use when they are about to love you without asking permission. June’s has been sharpened by years of running a diner, burying our father, and watching me insist I was fine from Nashville while my voice got thinner every month.
“I’m okay,” I say.
“No, you’re upright. Different thing.”
I lift my head because that one sounds too familiar. “You need new material.”
“You need a doctor.”
“I need crackers.”
“You need both.”
She goes quiet. Too quiet. My skin prickles before she says anything else.
“When was your last period?”
For a second, I’m not inside my body. I’m standing somewhere above it, watching a woman in a diner bathroom blink slowly at a door lock.
I know the answer. Not the exact date, because I’ve been very busy pretending dates aren't real, but I know enough.
“It’s late,” I say.
“How late?”
“One day.”
June says nothing.
“Two,” I add.
Still nothing.
“Four,” I whisper.
The silence after that isn't empty. It's packed tight with everything I haven’t allowed myself to count.
June exhales. “Okay.”
“No,” I say immediately.
“Emmy.”
“No. It can be stress. It can absolutely be stress. Women miss periods because of stress all the time. There are articles.”
“You looked up articles?”
I stare at the latch.
June’s voice softens. “Honey.”
That's what does it. Not the nausea. Not the missing days. Not the way my hands have started drifting to my stomach before I snatch them away.
Honey. A word small enough to fit through the crack I’ve been plastering over with work.
I open the stall door. June stands by the sink, her apron still on, her hair escaping its bun.
“I can’t,” I say. “If it is—” I stop. My throat closes around the rest.
June doesn't say anything. She just stands there, waiting for me to come to whatever conclusion I'm traveling toward.
“He can’t know.”
Her face changes then, but she doesn’t argue. Not yet. “Let’s find out if there's anything to know first.”
We drive to the Walmart outside town because Harmony Ridge has exactly one pharmacy, and Mrs. Jameson works the evening register with the alertness of a woman who can identify shame by brand and basket contents.
June drives. I sit in the passenger seat with my hood up and sunglasses on even though it’s nearly ten at night.
“You look very casual,” June says.
“I look invisible.”
“You look like you’re about to be on wanted posters plastered across the country.”
“Drive the car.”
The parking lot is bright, ugly, and blessedly anonymous. People push carts under white lights. A teenage employee wrangles baskets near the entrance. Somewhere, a child cries like the world has personally betrayed him.
June puts the car in park. “Stay here.”
“I can go in.”
“Sure. You can also announce it over the intercom.”
I sink lower in the seat. “Two tests.”
“Only two?”
“June.”
“Fine. Two. Water?”
“I’ll throw up.”
“Crackers?”
“I’ll throw those up too.”
She studies me for one long second. Then she reaches over and squeezes my hand once. Hard. “I’ll be fast.”
The automatic doors swallow her.
I sit alone beneath the parking lot lights and try not to breathe too deeply because the car still smells faintly like fryer oil from the diner and June’s vanilla hand lotion.
The radio is low. Then the opening notes of “Tennessee Whiskey” slip through the speakers.
My eyes close before I can stop them. No. Absolutely not.
Memory doesn’t care what I allow. It puts me back in a room before Wildfire, before Melody, before my face became something strangers replayed.
Not the mansion. The little rental outside Nashville with the uneven floor and the window unit that rattled if it rained.
Cade had come home from a writing session, exhausted and lit up, and this song had been playing from his phone on the dresser.
He had looked at me like coming home was still the best thing that happened to him.
Slow. Aching. The kind of love that made the rest of the world feel far away and silly.
His hands gentle at my waist. His mouth at my temple.
My laugh catching when he pulled me closer and said, “Maybe this time, Emmy Lou.”
Maybe this time we made a baby.
He used to say versions of it with a grin against my skin, with hope under the joke.
In hotel rooms, in the back of his truck, in the small blue bedroom of our first house after his second single climbed the charts.
Maybe this time. Wouldn’t that be something?
You think she’d have your eyes? You think he’d get my rhythm?
Lord help the child if they get your stubborn.
Then Wildfire took off. The jokes got quieter. Then they stopped.
Not all at once. Nothing ever disappears all at once. It thins. It loses volume. It becomes a thing you realize you haven’t heard in months while standing in a parking lot with your sister inside buying pregnancy tests.
The passenger door opens, and I flinch. June slides in and drops a paper bag into my lap. The weight of it is nothing. It feels like it could split the car in half.
“Got two,” she says. “And crackers. And a ginger ale.”
“I told you—”
“I know. I panic-bought.”
The tests ride in my lap all the way home like a bomb waiting for the right room.
The song ends before we leave the parking lot. I keep my eyes closed anyway.
June waits in the hallway while I pee on both sticks because marriage may strip you down in public, but apparently pregnancy tests still deserve privacy.
The bathroom at June’s house is tiny, blue, and over-warm. There’s a chipped soap dish shaped like a shell by the sink, a towel with little embroidered lemons hanging crooked from the rack, and my own face in the mirror looking pale under the light.
I set both tests on the back of the toilet. Then I wash my hands for too long.
“You okay?” June asks through the door.
“No.”
The first test turns positive so fast it feels like a mistake. The second follows, and it feels like time just…stops.
For a moment, I can’t hear anything except the sink dripping. One drop. Then another. Then my own breath, broken and too loud.
I press both hands over my mouth.
A baby. Cade’s baby. Our baby.
The realization nearly sends me to the floor.
A tiny life inside me. A future I once wanted so badly I made myself casual about it because wanting too openly felt like asking fate to humiliate me.
A piece of the man I left. A piece of the girl I was when I believed love, if it was real enough, could not be misplaced.
“Emmy?” June’s voice is very gentle now.
I open the door. She sees my face, then the tests behind me, and her eyes shine.
“Oh, honey.”
“Don’t,” I whisper.
She nods once, swallowing whatever she was about to say. Then she takes the tests, wraps them in toilet paper like evidence that might bite, and sets them in the trash.
Afterward, we sit in the living room with all the lights off except the lamp beside the couch. My tea sits untouched on the coffee table. June folds herself into the chair across from me, knees tucked under her, watching me without crowding.
I hold one hand flat against my lower stomach. There's nothing to feel. Not yet. Still, I hold it there.
“I thought this would be different,” I say.
I stare at the dark television screen. “Not perfect. I’m not stupid. I know babies don’t arrive inside perfect moments. But I thought if it happened, he’d be here.”
And he would have been ecstatic. That's the cruelest part.
Cade Tyler can be selfish. He can be blind. He can let applause teach him terrible habits. He can stand next to another woman beneath arena lights and forget that his wife is bleeding quietly in the third row.
But if I told him I was pregnant, he would come apart with joy.
I can see it so clearly that it hurts worse than the truth.
Cade dropping to his knees in some kitchen.
Cade laughing with tears in his eyes. Cade pressing his hand to my stomach before there was anything to feel.
Cade arguing names with me like it mattered that instant.
Cade calling Cy. Cade buying too many books.
Cade talking to my belly in a voice so tender it would make me forgive things before I was ready.
My throat aches.
“He would come running,” I say.
June leans forward. “Maybe he should.”
“No.”
“Em—”
“No.” The word is quiet, but it has a spine in it. I look at her. “Not yet.”
She sits back slowly.
“If he knows, I’ll never know why he comes.” My hand tightens over my stomach. “He may have set fire to our marriage without meaning to burn it all the way down, but he’s still Cade. There’s no version of him that finds out about a baby of his and stays away.”
“That’s not nothing,” June says. “And I hate him plenty right now, so understand what it costs me to say that.”
A small, painful smile moves through me and dies.
“But if he comes because of this,” I whisper, “I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering. Did he choose me, or did he choose the right thing? Did he want his wife, or did he want to be a father who didn’t fail twice?”
June’s eyes fill.
“I can’t be chosen by default again,” I say. “I can’t survive it.”
June wipes under one eye with the heel of her hand. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“I don’t like it,” she says. “But it’s your body. Your marriage. Your baby. Your timing.”
“You can’t tell anyone,” I say.
“I won’t. I'll die first."
I believe her.
She gets up and crosses the room, sitting beside me on the couch. Not too close at first. Then closer when I lean.
When she puts her arm around me, I fold into her like I did the morning I arrived, except everything is different now. I am still Emmy Sutton.
But I'm not alone inside my own body anymore.
And somehow, some way, I'm going to have to figure out how to live with that.