A Song for Another Woman (Groveling, Angst & Second Chances #3)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

EMMY

The third row at the Country Music Awards is where wives sit when the producers want proof of a happy marriage. Close enough for the cameras, close enough for the crowd to recognize you, and far enough from the stage that no one mistakes you for part of the show.

I sit with my knees pressed together in a dress a stylist chose because it “reads supportive, but not try-hard.” Her words.

Not mine. The fabric is the color of champagne, which means it's technically beautiful and practically invisible under arena lights.

In my lap, I'm killing the program one thin strip at a time.

The paper gives quietly beneath my thumbnail. A small, soft rip. Another. Another.

Beside the stage, a camera operator shifts his weight and angles his lens toward me for the third time in five minutes. I stop tearing. I smile. Not big. Not desperate. Just enough. There's an art to looking proud while your stomach folds in on itself, and I've gotten very good at it.

“Coming up next,” the announcer says, his voice booming through the arena, “the duet that set country radio on fire this year…”

The crowd starts screaming before he even says their names. My hand closes around the shredded program.

Behind me, someone gasps, “Oh my God, it’s them.”

Them. Not Cade Tyler. Not my husband. Them.

“Cade Tyler and Melody Hunter with ‘Wildfire.’”

The arena goes dark. For one blessed second, no one can see my face.

Then the first guitar note rings out, low, rough, and familiar enough to make my body turn traitor.

My heart know that sound. I know Cade’s chords, including the slight drag in his timing when he wants a lyric to hurt.

I used to hear songs before the world did.

They were half-finished, sung into a phone at two in the morning, or hummed against my shoulder in motel rooms when we were too broke for room service and too in love to care.

Now I hear this one when everyone else does.

Onstage, a single spotlight finds Cade. The crowd rises like something pulled by a string.

He stands there in black, his guitar strapped across his chest, his hair a little too long at the collar because someone decided he looks younger that way. He lowers his mouth to the mic, and the whole arena quiets for him.

I remember when I was the one behind a microphone.

Not like this. Not arenas, not pyro, and not a nation leaning forward.

Just midnight radio in Harmony Ridge, Tennessee, with my voice slipping through old truck speakers, kitchen windows, and the back rooms of people’s lonely houses.

Emmy Sutton on WHLR, Backroad Country. I knew how to hold silence, and I knew how to make a stranger feel less alone.

Now a publicist has already leaned down at my shoulder tonight and whispered, “When they pan to you, look happy for him.”

For him. Not with him. That distinction has been swallowing my life in small bites for years.

Melody steps into the second spotlight, and the screaming changes pitch. She's twenty-five and golden under the lights, all long legs, blonde hair, and a white dress that looks poured onto her. She doesn't look toward the crowd first. She looks at Cade.

The opening verse belongs to him, and he sings it like a confession. His voice fills the arena, worn velvet and smoke, the exact sound that made bartenders stop polishing glasses in little rooms before anyone knew his name. I sit very still and watch my husband come alive.

That's the part no one warns you about. Jealousy is supposed to be hot, ugly, red-faced, and loud.

Mine is cold. It starts under my breastbone and spreads slowly, numbing everything it touches.

Because I know Cade alive. I know his eyes when a song has him by the throat.

I know the way his fingers go loose on the guitar between lines, along with the way his mouth softens when the music takes over and the rest of the world falls away.

I haven't seen him look like this at home in two years.

Not across the breakfast table. Not in our bed.

Not when I ask if he wants coffee and he says, “Sure, babe,” without looking up from his phone.

Not when I wait for him after sessions that run late, when late becomes morning and morning becomes me pretending I was never waiting at all.

But he looks like this for her.

Melody sings the second verse, walking toward him slowly, one hand wrapped around her microphone, her eyes fixed on his face. The camera behind them catches the angle perfectly. Her voice is clear and aching, and the audience melts for it.

I can feel the show building the story. Not just the song, but the story itself.

Cade and Melody under the lights. The duet that saved his year and made hers.

The chemistry everyone talks about like it's weather, like it simply happened and no one is responsible for standing in it.

It's the song every interviewer smiles through when they ask, “So where did all that fire come from?”

No one asks me. They don't need to.

The camera operator glides closer to my aisle, and my spine straightens before I tell it to.

Duke Ferris stands near the side of the stage with a headset on and his arms folded, watching the monitors instead of the performance. Cade’s manager has the calm face of a man counting money in his head. His gaze flicks from Cade and Melody to the screen, then to me. He gives someone a small nod.

The red light on the camera turns toward my row.

There it is: the wife’s reaction.

I lift my chin. I make my mouth soft, proud, and peaceful. It's the kind of face America can look at and decide there's nothing to see here. Inside, I'm gripping the armrests hard enough to hurt.

Cade and Melody reach the chorus together, and their voices lock. That's the word everyone uses. Lock. Like fate. Like magic. Like two people finding the exact place they fit.

I hate that they're right. The harmony is beautiful. It's so beautiful I want, for one clear and unreasonable second, to stand up and walk out just so I don't have to be fair about it.

They move closer. Cade’s guitar hangs between them, but barely. Melody tilts her face up as she sings the line everyone has been quoting all summer: Tell me you felt it before I burn alone.

The arena screams. Cade looks down at her. Not at the audience, and not at the cameras. At her.

Their foreheads don't touch. They almost touch, which is worse, because almost gives people room to imagine. Almost makes the whole country complicit.

My chest feels too tight for the dress.

A woman behind me whispers, not quietly enough, “Is that the wife?”

The girl with her says, “I think so.”

I keep my eyes on the stage. The wife. Not Emmy Sutton, who once took calls from truckers at 1:12 a.m. and knew which regular had lost his dog, which single mom needed a birthday song for her son, and which old man called every Thursday and pretended it was an accident.

Not the woman who sat on Cade’s motel room floor with a legal pad and helped him rewrite the bridge to “Low Country Mercy” because the first version was trying too hard.

Not the person who knew him when his boots had holes in them, back when he still apologized to every sound tech by name.

The wife. A footnote with hair and earrings.

The camera finds me on the jumbotron, and my own face appears above the stage, twenty feet tall and lit too bright. There's a noise from the crowd, a tiny shifting wave of recognition, and my stomach drops through the floor.

I'm smiling. Thank God.

My face is doing what it's been trained to do. My eyes are bright but not wet, and my shoulders are relaxed. I look like a woman generously watching her husband sing a love song with someone else.

The shot lasts maybe two seconds, but it feels longer than my entire marriage. When the screen cuts back to Cade and Melody, the crowd roars its approval like I passed some test.

The song climbs toward the final chorus.

Cade steps away from his mic and shares Melody’s.

The move is rehearsed. I know that. I saw the rehearsal schedule on Cade’s calendar because I still manage pieces of his life no one thanks me for managing.

I know there were lighting notes, camera marks, and blocking. I know it's a performance.

I also know he didn't ride over with me tonight.

He had “pre-show obligations.” Melody had the same ones, apparently, because the two of them arrived in the same black SUV while I came fifteen minutes later with a Silver Creek Records assistant who spent the whole ride reminding me which entrance had fewer photographers.

I know I no longer have the laminate that gets me backstage without someone checking a list. I know the guard tonight glanced at my face, then down at his clipboard, before saying, “Mrs. Tyler, you’re seated out front.”

Out front. Where the wives go.

Onstage, Cade and Melody hold the last note. It stretches and stretches with their faces close, her hand sliding to his forearm as if she needs him to stay upright through the emotion of it. Cade’s eyes close, his jaw tightens, and the vein in his neck stands out.

The crowd loses its mind.

I used to be able to spark that in him. That thought lands so plainly it almost feels spoken. I used to.

The note breaks, the lights flare, and the arena jumps to its feet.

I stand because everyone around me stands, and because a camera is near enough to catch me if I don't. My palms come together. The program shreds cling to the champagne fabric in my lap, little white pieces stuck to me like evidence.

Cade laughs into the applause, breathless and boyish, and Melody throws her arms around his neck. He catches her. Not politely, and not with the careful half-hug men give women when they're trying to prove there's nothing to see. He catches her like joy knocked him backward.

The applause keeps going, and I clap until my hands sting.