Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
EMMY
The first person to tell me Cade Tyler has moved to Harmony Ridge is Mrs. Jameson at the pharmacy, which feels unfair.
There are certain sentences a woman shouldn't have to receive while holding saltines and a box of ginger tea while secretly pretending to be anything other than pregnant. Cade is in town is one of them.
Mrs. Jameson rings up my purchase with the slow attention of a woman who has never once let a receipt leave her hand without also releasing a piece of news. "Well," she says, sliding the tea into a paper bag, "I guess you heard."
My hand stills on my wallet. "Heard what?"
Her eyes flick up. Too eager. "Cade Tyler rented the Hanley cabin off Mill Creek Road."
For one second, the pharmacy lights go sharp around the edges. I put my card into the machine the wrong way.
Mrs. Jameson politely looks at the register instead of my face. "No press, from what I hear. No big cars. Mr. Hanley said he came with a duffel and a guitar."
A duffel and a guitar. That's worse than a tour bus. Worse than a billboard. Worse than a banner dragged across the sky behind a plane with some expensive apology printed large enough for God and local traffic to judge.
A duffel and a guitar isn't Cade's playbook. Cade's playbook is light, sound, and a stage big enough to hold an entire lifetime of mistakes. Cade knows how to stand beneath a spotlight while everyone and their mother looks on. But a cabin? Quiet? Ordinary?
I sign the little screen with a finger that doesn't feel attached to the rest of me.
Mrs. Jameson pushes the bag across the counter. "You all right, honey?"
There it is again. Honey. The word people use when they already know the answer.
"I'm fine," I say. And because I've apparently learned nothing from the last year of my life, I make sure my voice sounds exactly fine.
"He rented a cabin," June says, like the words taste bad.
We're in the back office of the Dogwood Diner, where the walls are thin, the filing cabinet sticks, and June keeps a jar of emergency peppermints in the bottom drawer.
I sit in her desk chair with my knees pressed together and one hand wrapped around my paper cup of ginger tea.
The nausea has been worse in the mornings this week.
Also at night. Also whenever someone fries onions.
Also whenever I remember my husband exists. So, constantly.
"I heard," I say.
June paces three steps, turns, and paces three steps back. "Mr. Hanley rented to him. Mr. Hanley. A man I've personally served breakfast to for fifteen years."
"You can't punish him with food."
"I can, actually. That's between me and the Lord."
I press the cup to my lips and don't drink. The smell helps, but the taste doesn't.
June stops pacing. "Has he called?"
"No."
"Texted?"
"Blocked, remember?"
"Shown up?"
"No."
Her face shifts, and I hate that I know what it means. It means she's trying very hard not to be impressed.
"Don't," I say.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're thinking loudly."
"I'm thinking a man with access to private jets and national television chose to sit by himself in a two-room cabin."
My stomach twists. "That means nothing."
"Okay."
"I mean it."
"I said okay."
"You said it like a liar."
June leans against the desk and folds her arms. "What do you want me to say, Emmy?"
I look down at the tea. My thumbnail worries at the rolled rim of the cup until the cardboard softens. "I want you to say he's being manipulative."
"Is he?"
"I don't know." The honesty slips out before I can stop it.
June's face gentles, and I hate that worse. A man who rented a cabin instead of buying the hill under it is harder to hate. A man who doesn't call is harder to accuse of forcing the door. A man who moves into the edge of your town and stays there, gives your anger too much room to wander.
It doesn't change what he did. It doesn't change the arena, or Melody's little digs about being a home wrecker, or my face blown up on a screen while strangers decided how humiliated I was allowed to look. It doesn't change a sentence I heard in his voice.
The only reason I'm not with Melody is because I'm married.
My hand goes to my stomach before I can stop it.
June notices. "You still okay?" she asks softly.
I nod, because the alternative is opening my mouth and saying the thing that lives in my head all the time now. He's here, and I'm pregnant, and I want my husband so badly I feel ashamed of myself.
Instead, I stand. "I have a show to prep."
June doesn't argue. She just steps closer and tucks the sleeve of my cardigan back onto my shoulder, a small, mothering motion that nearly undoes me. "Eat something first," she says.
"I had crackers."
"You had one cracker and a sniff of some tea."
"That's a balanced meal in my current season."
Her mouth twitches, but her eyes stay worried. I take two more crackers because loving June means occasionally letting her win.
At 11:58, Pop Dobbs taps the studio glass with one knuckle and mouths, You good?
I lift my thumb. This is one place where my body still knows what to do. Headphones. Mic. The red light above the door. The old chair that squeaks if I shift too far left. The tiny scratch in the console near the fader, the same one that was there when I was twenty-two.
The theme fades under my fingers. I lean toward the microphone.
"Good evening, Harmony Ridge. This is Emmy Sutton on WHLR Backroad Country, and tonight we're talking about the difference between being missed and being chosen."
Pop's head turns behind the glass. I keep my eyes on the board.
"A person can miss you because your absence is inconvenient," I say. "Because the house is too quiet. Because the coffee doesn't make itself right. Because nobody remembers which shirt has to be washed cold. Missing is human. Sometimes it's even honest."
The phone lines begin blinking. My pulse answers each little light.
"But being chosen is different. Chosen learns the part of you it stopped seeing. Chosen doesn't ask for applause because it finally remembered you were a person."
My throat tightens, so I reach for the next song and let the steel guitar fill the space I can't. Not Cade. Not Melody.
While the song plays, I stare through the glass at the dark shape of Pop moving around the booth. Beyond him, beyond the station, beyond Main Street and the sleeping diner and the pharmacy where Mrs. Jameson is probably telling her husband everything, there's a cabin on Mill Creek Road.
I close my eyes. No. This show isn't for him. It was mine before him, and it's mine after him. I didn't crawl back into my own voice so I could aim it at the man who forgot to hear me when I was standing in the same room.
By Wednesday, everyone knows Cade buys his own groceries.
He bought groceries at Rayburn's.
He held the door for Mrs. Tandy at the gas station.
He asked Mr. Hanley where to get a decent radio antenna.
And now, I look around the diner when I step in, half expecting to see him sitting in there, waiting on me.
I sit down in the nearest booth because the room tilts, just a little. June is beside me instantly.
"Food?" she asks.
"Air first."
She slides into the seat across from me, blocking me from the rest of the diner. She looks around. "Doctor appointment next week?"
I nod.
"You want me to come?"
Another thing I imagined Cade doing: sitting beside me in a waiting room, knee bouncing, filling out forms too aggressively, asking questions from whatever book he panic-read at three in the morning, his big hand covering mine when the nurse called my name.
The ache is so sudden I have to look away. "I want him to know," I whisper.
June goes still.
I press my fist to the center of my chest. "I don't want to tell him. Not yet. I know why I can't. I know it. But I want him to know. I keep thinking about what he'd say."
June's eyes shine, but she lets me keep talking.
"He'd cry," I say, and my laugh breaks in the middle. "He'd try not to, because he'd want to be steady for me, but he'd cry anyway. Then he'd say something ridiculous about names. He always liked Laurel for a girl because of the mountain laurel by the Whip."
"And for a boy?"
"Cash," I say, and roll my eyes before the tenderness can kill me. "Obviously."
June smiles through her worry. "Naturally."
"He'd put his hand on my stomach." I press my palm low, where there's still nothing much to feel. "And he'd talk to the baby like it could hear him already."
My throat closes. For a moment, the diner falls away.
I'm in a kitchen that doesn't exist, in a life that didn't fracture, with Cade kneeling in front of me and laughing against my stomach while I run my fingers through his hair.
I can feel the warmth of him as clearly as if wanting could open a door.
Then a chair scrapes near the counter, and the day comes back. I remove my hand.
"It doesn't change anything," I say. "It doesn't change those words, those god awful words."
Because as soon as I start to imagine all the things he would say to me, all the sweet nothings that might come out of his mouth, I hear those words…
And wonder if he'd rather say the sweet nothings to Melody instead of me.