Chapter 6 #2
He looks toward the duffel and swallows and never have I seen a man want to murder a duffel bag, but I think he might just if the situation weren't so precarious.
“Where are you going?”
“Home.”
“This is your home.”
The laugh comes then, small and exhausted. “No. This is a stage for photos and optics.”
His mouth trembles.
I look around at the high ceilings, the polished floors, and the entry table no one has ever thrown keys on because apparently even keys need a tray chosen by a decorator. I have lived here. I have slept here. I have waited here. I have never rooted.
“I’m going to June’s,” I say.
His eyes sharpen. “I’ll drive you.”
“No.”
“Then I’ll call a car.”
“No.”
“Emmy, it’s almost morning. You’re upset. Please don’t get behind the wheel like this.”
There he is: practical, worried, and reaching for the one piece of the situation he can manage.
“I’m taking Daddy’s truck.”
He looks toward the garage. The old blue pickup sits in the third bay, absurd beside Cade’s sleek black cars.
I kept it because selling it felt like losing my father twice.
Cade used to joke that the truck was one pothole away from a country song.
Tonight, it's the only vehicle in this house that feels honest.
“Please,” he says, the word rough now.
I look back at him. He is Cade Tyler, loved by millions, wanted by rooms, lit by stages, polished by managers, and photographed from the good side. He's also my husband in the foyer at four in the morning, terrified in his wrinkled shirt, finally looking at me like I am not guaranteed.
It hurts so much I nearly sit down. Instead, I slide my phone into my pocket.
“I’m not doing a public split,” I say.
He blinks. “What?”
“I’m not making a statement tonight. I’m not going on record. I’m not posting anything for people to chew on.”
“Emmy—”
“I’m not calling lawyers yet.”
His whole body reacts to yet. I see it, and I let him.
“I’m not fighting you over money. I’m not fighting you over houses. You can keep the Nashville mansion, the beach house, the ranch, whatever else Duke likes to list in profiles so people know how well the dream paid off.”
“I don’t care about any of that.”
“You did yesterday.”
He shuts his mouth, leaving the silence clean.
“You can keep the narrative too,” I say. “I’m sure Duke will know what to do with it.”
Pain moves across his face. “Don’t put him between us.”
“He’s been between us for months. So has Melody. So has every camera you let point at me while you called it a bit.”
His shoulders drop. I shift the duffel higher.
“I’m leaving,” I say. “That’s all I can do tonight.”
He steps toward me again, slower this time, palms open. “Can I just hold you for one second?”
My body betrays me with memory. It remembers him at twenty-five, broke and sunburned, sleeping with one hand on my hip in a motel bed.
It remembers his mouth at my temple. It remembers dancing with him in the Whippoorwill when the floor stuck to my boots and I thought happiness could be built out of music, rent money, and nerve.
I want that man so badly I almost let this one touch me. Then I remember sitting in seat 4C with the camera light turning red.
I step back. “No.”
He stops. The word is small, but it changes the air anyway.
I've said no to interviews, to dresses, to parties, to another drink, and to one more photo. I have said no politely and gently in a voice people could step over. This no has a spine. Cade hears it; I can tell by the way he lowers his hands.
“I love you,” he says.
My eyes burn. I wish he hadn’t said it. I wish love were enough to make a home where there's only damage. I wish I could climb inside those three words and find shelter, but I've lived there too long already. The roof leaks.
“I believe you did at one point,” I say. That wrecks him. I can see it on his face and it hurts, but I'm used to swallowing hurt.
I walk past him. For one second, his body turns like he might block me, but he doesn’t. That may be the first kind thing he's done tonight.
In the garage, the air smells faintly of gasoline, dust, and expensive leather from cars I never drive.
Daddy’s truck waits under a thin cover, dull blue paint and chrome pitted with age.
I pull the cover off and fold it badly. My father would have fussed at me for that, and the thought cuts so cleanly I have to swallow.
Cade stands in the doorway behind me, not coming closer. “You don’t have to do this alone,” he says.
I open the driver’s door. It creaks like an old porch swing. “I've been doing this alone for a year, Cade. One more night won't kill me."
The duffel goes on the passenger floor, and the blue folder goes on the seat beside me. I buckle it in before I realize what I’m doing, the strap crossing over paper and cardboard like the sketches need protection more than I do.
Cade makes a sound behind me, but I don’t look back. If I do, I'll see his face. If I see his face, I will remember every version of him except the one who left me alone in front of the whole world. I can't afford that kind of generosity right now.
The truck turns over on the third try. The engine catches with a rough, stubborn growl that vibrates up through the steering wheel and into my hands. I laugh once under my breath. It sounds awful, but it sounds alive.
The garage door rises, and cold pre-dawn air spills in.
Cade steps into the edge of my mirror, barefoot now. He must have kicked off his boots without thinking. His hair is a mess, and his arms hang at his sides.
For one suspended moment, we are both still. Then I put the truck in reverse.
He doesn’t chase me. He doesn’t pound on the window. He doesn’t perform the kind of desperation a camera would love. He only stands there and watches me go.
Nashville is quiet before sunrise. That feels unfair, somehow. A city that loud should have the decency to look guilty when you leave it. Instead, the streets are washed in gray, traffic lights blinking over empty intersections, the glass towers holding the last of the night in their windows.
My phone sits facedown in the cup holder. It buzzes once. Then again. Then keeps still. I don’t look.
The truck smells like old vinyl, dust, and the peppermint gum Daddy used to keep in the console.
My hands grip the wheel at ten and two like I'm sixteen again and he's in the passenger seat telling me not to ride the brake down the hill.
The blue folder slides slightly with every turn, caught by the seat belt.
Porch. Nook. Dogwood.
I should cry, but I don’t.
I make it past the expensive neighborhoods, past the sleeping studios, and past the exits marked with names that used to mean opportunity when Cade said them out loud.
I make it onto the highway with the sky thinning at the edge, and only then does my chest finally unlock.
Not all the way, but just enough to hurt.
A sound comes out of me. Not a sob, not yet, but more like my body testing whether grief still has access. It does.
Tears blur the road, and I wipe them away with the heel of my hand, angry at the inconvenience. “Not now,” I say to no one.
My voice fills the cab, hoarse and familiar.
I used to talk into darkness for a living. The thought appears without permission. WHLR. Backroad Country. Midnight callers and truckers and lonely people who trusted a voice they couldn’t see. Emmy Sutton, before Tyler became the name everyone used first.
I don’t know what's left of her. Maybe nothing. Maybe enough.
The highway opens ahead of me, blacktop turning silver under the first pale wash of morning.
Grief rides beside me, and fury does too.
They aren't quiet passengers. They press at my ribs, take turns with the radio off, and remind me of Cade’s face, Cade’s voice, and the warmth of his hand hovering in the air when I wouldn’t let him touch me.
Underneath both, small and shocking, is relief.
I hate it at first, then I don’t. It isn't happiness or freedom yet, but it's the first breath after holding still too long. It's the strange lightness of no longer waiting for a man to come home and tell me whether my pain counts.
I drive.
The sun breaks slowly, laying gold along the low fields and the trees. Mile by mile, the houses get smaller. The billboards thin out. Nashville drops behind me like a dress I can finally unzip.
When the sign for Harmony Ridge appears, my hands start shaking. Not badly, but just enough.
I pass the old county road, the gas station with the hand-painted bait sign, and the pasture where fog sits low over the grass. Everything is familiar and not. Seven years is long enough for a place to change and short enough for your body to remember every turn.
Then the water tower rises over the tree line: HARMONY RIDGE, TENNESSEE. Blue letters. White tank. Dawn behind it.
I slow without meaning to.
The blue folder rests beside me, buckled in and safe. My wedding ring glints on my hand, still there for now. My phone is dark. My heart isn't fixed. Nothing is fixed.
But the road keeps going. And for the first time in seven years, I am driving home.