Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
EMMY
June’s couch has a permanent dip in the middle.
I curl into that dip before sunrise and stay there until noon.
Not sleeping. Not awake, exactly. Just existing with my cheek pressed to a pillow printed with little blue flowers, my wedding ring still on my hand, and my phone face down on the coffee table like it might bite if I look at it too long.
From the kitchen, June asks, “You want eggs?”
“No.”
“Toast?”
“No.”
“Coffee?”
That one hurts. My throat closes around the answer, because Cade used to bring me coffee in bed when we were broke, happy, and still gentle with each other. One sugar, too much cream. He always stole the first sip and said he was testing it for poison.
June appears in the doorway wearing her Dogwood Diner sweatshirt, her dark hair twisted up with a pencil, and the expression she gets when somebody is about to learn something the hard way.
“Coffee,” she decides. “You don’t have to want it. You do have to hold it.”
“I’m not helpless.”
“No,” she says. “You’re concussed by your own life. Different thing.”
She brings me a mug anyway and sets it in my hands, then tucks the blanket higher around my shoulders. She doesn’t say Cade’s name. That’s the first kindness of the day. The second is that she doesn’t ask me what happened.
June already knows enough. She saw the award show. She saw the clip. She saw the internet turn my face into public property. By the time Daddy’s old truck rattled into her driveway at dawn, she had the back door unlocked, the porch light on, and the guest room made.
I didn’t make it to the guest room. I made it to the couch, sat down with my duffel at my feet and the blue folder clutched to my chest, and said, “I left him.”
June only nodded once. Then she took the folder from my arms, put it on her kitchen table like it was evidence in a trial, and said, “Okay. Shoes off. Water first. Breakdown after.”
My sister runs a diner that stays open all night. She's used to dealing with problems surgically, whether they're drunks coming in for coffee or old men who pinch waitresses' behinds.
She sits on the edge of the coffee table and looks at me over the rim of her own mug. “I have to go in for lunch rush.”
I open my mouth, but she stops me before I can speak.
“I also know you’re about to tell me you’re fine here, and then I’m going to find you eight hours from now fused to this couch with cable news talking about your marriage in the background.”
I glance toward the black screen. June lifts her eyebrows.
“I don’t want to go outside,” I admit.
Something in her face softens, but not into pity. June has never offered pity like it was a gift. “Good thing you don't have to."
“It’s everywhere.”
"Yeah. It is."
“They’re calling me the missing wife.”
Her jaw tightens.
I look down at the coffee gone cold between my hands. “Like I wandered away from somebody’s yard.”
June sets her mug down hard enough for the spoon to rattle. “You are not missing. You are sitting on my couch in Harmony Ridge, Tennessee, wearing one of my sweatshirts and looking like hell. As far as second locations go, it's a good one.”
A laugh scratches out of me. It sounds unused.
The laugh dies, but something warm and painful remains behind it. She stands and reaches for my hand. “Wallow for a day or two. Then come to the diner.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“June.”
“You can sit in the office. You can chop pie boxes. You can stare at the wall and terrify my prep cook. I don’t care. But it would be better than hiding in my house while the whole country talks about you like you’re not a person.”
“I don’t want people looking at me.”
“They’re going to look,” she says. “Then they’re going to remember you’re Emmy Sutton and feel ashamed of themselves.”
I stare at her. She squeezes my hand. “Let them do the work.”
The gas station sits at the corner of Route 8 and Dogwood, exactly where it's always been.
The prices are higher, there's a new ice machine I don't remember, and the pumps have a TV that show cute pets and clips from late-night television.
June pumps the gas while I run in for aspirin.
The headache that rode shotgun with me from Nashville has since matured into a tenant.
After the first couple of days of wallowing, I managed to avoid looking at my life imploding online and on television. That all comes to a screeching halt as I stand paying for my aspirin.
Because there I am on the magazine rack beside chewing gum and sunflower seeds. It's not a flattering picture. They never are when they're selling this brand of drama. It's a still from the CMAS, my smile almost brittle under the arena lights.
COUNTRY KING it hasn’t.
June repainted the walls a clean pale green, the old vinyl stools are new, and there’s a chalkboard menu in her handwriting with a framed dollar bill above the register from the first day she owned the place.
But the bones know me: the pass-through window, the swinging door, the corner booth where I used to do homework, and the scuffed tile near the server station where Daddy slipped once carrying a tray of biscuits and swore in front of the pastor’s wife.
June runs the diner the way she runs everything: fast, blunt, and with more heart than she wants credit for.
She calls customers by name. She knows who takes decaf and who is lying to their cardiologist. She tells someone to stop blocking the register, tells someone else their mama called and they better call back, and at one point threatens to throw a biscuit at a man named Keith for asking too many questions.
I'm sitting at a corner booth, filling up sugar shakers when the door swings open, and Pop Dobbs walks in.
My pulse gives one hard kick.
Earl “Pop” Dobbs owned WHLR when I was nineteen and thought a radio booth at midnight was the center of the universe. He let me sit in during weather reports, taught me how to breathe through dead air, and once told me I had the kind of voice people trusted before they knew why.
I haven’t seen him in years.
Pop looks around, zeroes in on me, and heads over. He takes off his hat and motions toward the opposite booth seat, and I give him a nod, trying not to smile too big.
“I heard you were back in town," he says as he slides into the booth.
“Can't keep nothing from this town," I say. "If you’re here to see if I'm alive, I am.”
“Debatable.” He says it gently. “But that ain’t why I came.”
Pop turns his hat in his hands. “WHLR’s in trouble.”
I frown.
“Real trouble,” he says. “Ads are down. Tower needs work. I got syndication eating up half the day and dead air eating up the rest. Backroad Country’s barely breathing.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I am too.” He looks at me for a long moment.
My chest tightens. I know where this is going before he says it, and my body starts backing away even though I stay in the chair. “Pop.”
“I need a voice between 8 and midnight.”
“No.”
“I haven’t asked yet.”
“You were about to.”
“I was.” His eyes crinkle, but they’re sad too. “And I’m asking anyway. Come back behind the mic, Emmy. Not forever if you don’t want. A week. A night. Hell, come yell at me through the glass and make me feel young.”
The room goes too quiet.
Radio. The word alone opens something I’ve kept boarded up for years.
A little booth washed in blue light. Headphones warm over my ears.
My hand on the fader. The clock ticking toward midnight.
A road crew calling from three counties over.
A woman in a kitchen whispering that she couldn’t sleep and didn’t want to wake the kids.
Then Cade, proud at first. Then Cade getting bigger. Then interviews, industry rules, conflict-of-interest talk, and Duke’s careful explanation that it just looked cleaner if Emmy stepped back. Just for now. Just while Cade’s career found its footing.
His footing became a mountain. Mine disappeared.
“I can’t,” I say.
Pop nods like he expected it. “Because of him?”
I shake my head, but the lie has no strength. “Because I don’t know if I remember how.”
Pop’s face softens. “That’s not something you forget.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do,” he says. “Best voice I ever had.”
My laugh is brittle. “Pop.”
“I’m old, not sentimental. No conflict now. No manager telling anybody what’s clean. No label caring whether your voice touches his records. Just you and a microphone, if you want it.”
If I want it.
Wanting feels dangerous. Wanting is how you hand someone a map to hurt you. I wanted a house with a porch and a nook over the kitchen. I wanted a husband who came home. I wanted to be seen without having to stand in a spotlight beside another woman.
“I can’t say yes,” I whisper.
Pop nods once. No pressure. No disappointment dressed up as patience. “Then don’t.”
I look up.
“Just don’t say no to yourself because somebody else taught you to.” He puts his hat back on. “I’ll be at the station. Door still sticks. Coffee still awful.”
Then he leaves.
That night, I lie on June’s couch on the same blue-flowered pillow. Pipes knock. A car passes by, revving the engine. Somewhere down the street, a dog barks twice.
My phone is still face down. My ring's still on. Nothing's fixed.
But my mind won’t go quiet. It starts shaping the day without permission, the way it used to at midnight when the county went dark and lonely people reached for the radio.
Well, friends, if you ever wondered whether you can hit rock bottom in borrowed sweatpants, I’m here to tell you the answer is yes. Good news is, the coffee’s decent and nobody lets you skip lunch.
I almost smile. Then I go still, because I hear the pause after it. The place where I’d let the line breathe. The soft turn toward the next song. The way I’d lower my voice, not for drama, but because people leaned in when you trusted them with quiet.
My marriage may be broken. My name may be on every rack between here and Nashville. I may not know what comes next or who I am when no one is calling me Cade Tyler’s wife. But there is a voice inside me, worn down and waiting.
And for the first time since I drove away from Nashville, I understand something cleanly. They didn’t kill it.