Chapter 2 #2
He doesn’t smile. Cy has known me since I had two good songs, one bad truck, and no health insurance.
He played steel on the first demo I recorded in a room that smelled like mildew and fryer oil.
He stood beside me at my wedding and cried harder than Emmy’s sister, though he threatened my life if I ever repeated that.
When he looks disappointed, I feel twelve years younger and twice as stupid.
“You’re not chasing that girl,” he says.
My head comes up. “Watch it.”
“I am watching it. That’s the problem.”
“There’s nothing going on.”
“I know.”
Cy folds his arms. “You think I’d be this calm if I thought you were sniffing around Melody Hunter?”
“I’m not.”
“No. You’re sniffing around being twenty-five again.”
I laugh, but it sounds rehearsed. “That’s poetic for you.”
“You’re chasing the first year. First buzz. First room that shut up when you opened your mouth. First time strangers knew the words.” His voice stays low. “And Emmy’s paying the tab.”
The hallway hums around us. Through the studio glass, Melody holds her phone up, panning across the players, the takeout containers, and my guitar in the corner. Proof of life.
“Emmy gets it,” I say.
Cy’s eyebrows lift.
“She’s been with me since before any of this worked.
She knows the performance. Hell, she was a performer too.
Not arenas, but she knew how to turn herself on for people.
Backroad Country, midnight to four. Emmy Sutton on WHLR.
” I hear my voice warming because that version of her still does something to me.
“She could make some trucker in Kentucky feel like she was sitting right there in the cab with him. She knows there’s the voice on the radio and the person who comes home. ”
Cy studies me. “Does the person come home?”
I look away.
“That's what I thought,” he says.
I push off the wall. “We’re making a record.”
“You’re making excuses.”
Anger rises, fast because it’s easier than shame. “You got something to say, say it.”
“I just did.” He steps closer. “You got a wife who loved you when nobody cared if you could fill a room, and now that everybody cares again, you’re treating her like she’s supposed to clap and eat whatever shit's left over.”
I stare at him. For one second, I see Emmy in the kitchen, foil over dinner. Emmy in bed, asking which version of me is coming home. Emmy sitting through another industry dinner where strangers talk around her because they think wife is a job title.
Then Melody opens the studio door and sticks her head out. “You coming?” she asks me. “Bridge is still wrong.”
The second passes.
I look at Cy. “One more hour.”
His mouth tightens like he expected exactly that and hated being right.
The bridge gets fixed at 1:12 a.m. It happens by accident, the way the good ones usually do.
Melody is standing close because we’re both reading from the same lyric sheet, and the room has gone soft with exhaustion.
The session players are slumped in chairs.
The engineer is nursing cold coffee. Cy has his steel across his lap, but he isn't playing.
“No,” Melody says, tapping the page. “You’re still hiding.”
“I’m singing my ass off.”
“You’re singing loud. That’s not the same.”
I should be annoyed. I am annoyed. I’m also awake in every part of me.
She takes the pencil from my hand and writes one line beneath mine. The room goes quiet when I read it.
It’s not perfect, but it breaks something open. I take the pencil back and change two words. She changes one of mine. I change it back. She laughs under her breath and looks up at me.
“Now you're getting it,” she says.
The praise hits me harder than it should. Not because she says it like a woman wanting a man, but because she says it like a room finding the version of me I thought I’d buried under platinum records and careful choices.
I look down at the page. “Run it.”
Nobody moves. Melody doesn’t either.
Her shoulder brushes my arm. Her phone is on the music stand beside us, dark screen turned upward, probably still recording, probably catching the ceiling and our voices and nothing worth noticing. Her face tilts toward mine.
There’s a pause a better man would end.
I half-step back. Not enough.
Melody’s eyes flick to my mouth, then back up. Testing. Waiting to see if the story everybody is writing might become useful in private too. My wedding ring feels suddenly tight.
“Melody,” I say, soft. Too soft.
Her smile fades at the edges, but she doesn’t retreat. “What?”
I should leave. I should call it. I should say, clearly enough for the room and the phone and the whole hungry machine, Don’t do that again. I’m married. My wife is not a prop in whatever this is.
Instead, I clear my throat and turn toward the band. “From the bridge,” I say.
Cy closes his eyes. Melody steps back.
The room exhales, and we work until three in the morning.
On the drive home, I grip the steering wheel and tell myself nothing happened. It's technically true. It's also completely chicken shit.
By awards week, “Wildfire” has turned into something no one can control and everyone keeps pretending they planned.
The song is number one. Then it stays number one. Interviewers ask where the fire came from with the same smirk every time. Melody ducks her head and says, “Ask Cade,” like the answer is intimate. I laugh because laughing is easier than correcting.
Duke claps me on the back afterward and says, “Perfect. Keep it loose.”
“People are getting the wrong idea,” I tell him once, in the back of a black SUV while Emmy’s name glows on my phone. I don’t answer because Duke is mid-sentence.
Duke looks genuinely unmoved. “People buying the wrong idea still counts as buying.”
“She’s my wife.”
“She’s secure,” he says. “She knows the business.”
That should irritate me. It should scare me, hearing Emmy reduced to a stable element in a campaign. Instead, it relieves me.
Because if Emmy knows the business, then I don’t have to explain why I missed dinner again.
If Emmy understands performance, then I don’t have to look too hard at what I’m allowing onstage.
If Emmy has been my biggest supporter since the beginning, then support becomes something I can depend on without looking too closely at the struts.
At the awards, the performance lands like a match in dry grass.
The lights. The shared mic. Melody’s hand on my arm. The crowd rising before the last note dies.
I feel young under those lights. Young, necessary, and forgiven for every stale song, every soft review, and every private fear that I had become a monument to a man who used to be good.
When they call our names for the award, Melody throws herself into me. I catch her. I know where the cameras are. I know Emmy is somewhere in the room.
I don’t look for her fast enough.
At the microphone, the words come out hot, grateful, and reckless. I thank everyone: Duke, the label, the band, and Melody, for bringing the match.
The crowd loves that. I can feel them loving it.
Then I remember Emmy.
My gaze cuts toward the audience, but the lights are too bright to find her. “And my wife, Emmy,” I say, the words suddenly too small for the room. “Thank you for always supporting me.”
It isn’t enough. I know it as soon as I say it. Unease flickers at the edge of the high.
Then Melody’s arm slides around my waist, Duke is grinning from the wings, the band plays us off, and the machine swallows the moment whole.
The after-party is all heat, noise, perfume, and liquor. People touch my shoulder like they helped raise me.
Duke moves me through the room with one hand at my back. “Cameras by the step-and-repeat. Then People. Then CMT. Then we’ll get you and Melody together for a few.”
“I need to find Emmy.”
“In a minute.”
I look across the room and see her. Champagne dress. Hair swept back. One hand around a glass she isn’t drinking from. She stands near the edge of a conversation, smiling at something a label executive’s wife says, but even from here I can tell the smile isn’t reaching her eyes.
My body turns toward her.
For one clean second, I know exactly what to do. Cross the room. Put my hand at the small of her back. Leave with her. Let the cameras photograph the back of my jacket for once.
Emmy looks up. Our eyes meet. Something in her face opens, barely.
Duke grips my elbow. “Now, Cade. They’re waiting.”
I glance toward the cameras. Melody is already there beneath the lights, laughing for a photographer, waving me over like the night belongs to both of us.
I look back at Emmy. I lift one finger.
One minute. I’ll make it up to her.
I let Duke pull me toward the flashbulbs.
By the time I look across the room again, Emmy’s smile is back in place, perfect and distant, and I tell myself that means she understands.
I tell myself I have time.
I don’t.