Chapter 15
Chapter Fifteen
CADE
By the time the third song comes, my fingers are bleeding again. Not badly, just a thin red line where the pick has worried the same raw place all night, but it spots the edge of the lyric sheet and pulls me out of the take.
Cy looks up from the folding chair by the window. “You planning to leave any hand attached for the house tomorrow?”
I set the guitar flat across my knees. “Probably enough.”
“That’s reassuring.”
The cabin is quiet except for the rain ticking against the tin awning and the low hum of the small recording rig I shipped in and set up myself.
No engineer. No producer. No assistant bringing coffee I didn’t ask for.
Just a battered microphone, a laptop, two guitars, and every ugly truth I spent years dressing up until it sounded like something people could applaud.
The lyric sheet in front of me reads:
She was radio light in a nowhere room.
I scratch out light. Too pretty. Emmy would hate it.
I write:
She was nineteen and asking better questions than men twice her age.
Cy leans forward. “That one.”
I don't answer because my throat is too tight.
I remember her that night at WHLR, sitting across from me with headphones too big for her head and one finger pressed to the board while she asked me about a song nobody else had cared enough to finish listening to.
I'd been broke, sweating through my shirt, and trying to act like confidence could cover hunger.
Emmy looked at me like I was already worth hearing.
I sing the line once, rough and quiet. The room changes. Not in the dramatic way people like to talk about in interviews. No lightning or divine visitation, just the plain shift of a lie leaving the room.
Cy’s gaze drops to his boots. “Hell.”
The first song was about the interview. The second was about the drawer.
Not her body, not her smile, and not the things a man reaches for when he wants the world to know he desired his wife.
I write about the sketches instead. The porch she drew with careful pencil lines.
The reading nook labeled not storage. The dogwood she wanted if she could find one.
I write about keeping those pages in a drawer through four mansions and never once building the home she asked for before the world knew my name.
There is no chorus big enough to hide that.
The third song is about that stupid night. Not the one where she heard the wrong thing. The one where I let her suffer in plain sight.
I don't want to write it. I try three times to make it about the award show, about cameras, and about the way a room can turn a woman into a symbol while she’s still sitting there breathing. Every version lets me stand too far away from it.
So I write:
I watched them turn their lights on you
and still I didn’t move.
The pen stops in my hand.
I see Emmy on that jumbotron, her face calm enough to pass for grace if you didn't know her.
I knew her. I knew the stillness around her eyes and the way she held pain like a glass too full to lift.
And I still stood at that microphone with Melody tucked against my side and thanked my wife like she was part of the crew.
My stomach turns. I pick up the guitar again.
Duke calls while the rain is still coming down. I let it ring through once, then twice. On the third time, Cy says, “He’ll just keep going until one of us dies.”
I answer and put him on speaker.
“Tell me you have not done what I think you’ve done,” Duke says. His voice fills the cabin, polished and furious. He sounds like Nashville. He sounds like a conference table and a contract slid across glass.
“Depends what you think.”
“I think you uploaded three unreleased songs to a free website under your own name with no Silver Creek clearance, no publishing conversation, no rollout, no preorder, no video, and no way for me to stop the hemorrhage.”
“Then I did what you think.”
A pause. Not silence, as I can hear him breathing through his nose. Cy closes his eyes.
“Cade,” Duke says, too carefully, “you are giving away hits.”
“No.”
“You are. I’ve heard the first two, and so has half of my office because apparently the entire internet found them in twenty minutes. These are hits.”
“They’re letters.”
“They're assets.”
My hand closes around the phone while the bandage pulls at my palm. “That right there is why you didn’t get to hear them first.”
“Do you understand the story you’re sitting on? The wife. The muse. The truth behind ‘Wildfire.’ Jesus Christ, this could sell a stadium.”
The old reflex twitches in me. Numbers. Heat. The clean little thrill of knowing a room wants what I have. Then I look at the lyric sheet on the table: Drawer Sketch, Backroad Girl, The Man I Became.
“No,” I say.
“No?”
“The second there’s a transaction attached, it becomes a performance. I’m done performing loving her.”
Duke laughs once, sharp and disbelieving. “You think this isn’t a performance? You dropped love songs onto the internet for the woman currently refusing to speak to you.”
“I’m not asking her for anything.”
Duke’s voice lowers. “Silver Creek is going to lose its mind.”
“They can get in line.”
“You’re still under contract.”
“For commercial releases.”
“You think legal won’t argue?”
“They can argue with free.”
“You’re burning bridges.”
“I’ve gotten good at watching things burn.”
Another silence. When Duke speaks again, some of the anger has drained out, leaving the part of him that has known me too long. “Cade. Is she worth all this?”
I stare at the little red recording light, steady in the dark. “No,” I say.
Cy’s head turns.
“She's worth more than anything I could possibly offer."
Duke exhales. “You're impossible right now.”
“I was impossible before. This is me trying to be honest.”
“Honesty with no strategy is just bleeding in public.”
I look at my hand. “Maybe.”
“Call me before you post anything else.”
“I won’t.”
“Cade.”
I hang up before he can turn my wife into a campaign calendar.
By sunset, the songs are everywhere.
I don't touch my own phone because I can't. The screen keeps lighting up against the table anyway: texts, calls, alerts, names I haven’t seen since award season, and names I hope never to see again.
Silver Creek. Duke. Reporters. Artists who already want to do covers.
People who smell blood and call it interest.
Cy reads softly. “They’re saying ‘Wildfire’ wasn’t about Melody.”
My hands go still on the guitar strings.
“People are pulling old interviews,” he says. “That WHLR clip from when Emmy interviewed you. Someone found it.”
I close my eyes. Her voice comes back to me from thirteen years ago, warm through cheap station headphones: Cade Tyler is here with us tonight, and he’s got a song that sounds like it’s already been waiting on you awhile.
I'd fallen a little in love with her before the first commercial break.
Cy scrolls. “They’re comparing lyrics.”
I huff out a breath that almost hurts. “People need hobbies.”
“They’ve got one. It’s you.” He pauses. “And her.”
That makes me look up. He turns the phone so I can see without taking it. A post sits on the screen, already shared too many times to count: We owe Emmy Sutton Tyler an apology. The muse was the wife. The whole time.
Below it are stills: Emmy at nineteen in the WHLR booth, Emmy at the awards in that champagne dress, Melody under the stage lights, and me looking like a man who mistook applause for proof.
I push the phone gently away. I don't want strangers defending Emmy because they discovered a better story.
I don't want another crowd gathering around her pain, even if this time they're ready to make the light shining on her a little softer.
But I also know what I did. I let the world misread my life because the misreading was profitable.
Now I give them the truth with no price tag and no doorway back to me.
Cy sits across from me. “She won’t play them.”
Every night, I hear her. Her voice comes from the little radio on my kitchen counter, steady as a hand on a fevered forehead.
She takes calls from women who are trying not to go back, men trying to learn how to apologize, lonely truckers, tired nurses, and old widowers who call just to hear someone say their name.
And sometimes, between songs, she says things that sound like instructions: Sorry is easy. Changed is the only currency that spends.
I've started measuring my days by that sentence.
“She doesn’t have to play them,” I say.
Cy studies me. “Then why put them out?”
“Because for two years, every song I wrote let people make her smaller.” My voice comes rougher than I expect. “I can’t walk into her station. I can’t call. I can’t stand outside the diner holding a speaker over my head like an idiot and call that respect.”
Cy’s mouth twitches. “Please don’t.”
“So I make songs that don’t need her permission to exist and don’t require her labor to carry them.”
“That’s a thin line.”
“I know.”
“You sure you’re on the right side of it?”
No. That's the answer I don't say. There are mornings I don't know whether anything I do is repair or just another way of wanting. Wanting can dress itself up. Wanting can learn all the right words and still reach.
I pick at the edge of the bandage on my palm.
“She can hate them,” I say. “She can never listen. She can turn off every radio in town if she needs to. But I helped make a world where everybody thought another woman brought me back to life.” I swallow.
“The time to correct that assumption is long past.”
Cy nods once, slow.
The cabin settles around us as rainwater drips from the eaves. Somewhere beyond the trees, Harmony Ridge moves toward midnight, toward her voice.
I turn back to the microphone. The last song waits on the screen. It's the simplest one, which makes it worse. No bridge designed to kill a stadium, no clever turn, and no place for my voice to climb until people mistake volume for feeling. Just the exact inventory of what I did.
I sing about missed dinners, backstage doors, and her sitting out front while I stood behind curtains. I sing about telling her she imagined pain because admitting it would have cost me comfort. I sing about a sentence she heard wrong and a marriage she read right.
I don't sing her name. Not out loud.
I upload it before I can back out. No cover art. No announcement. No caption except two words: For her.
At midnight, I turn on WHLR. The cabin is dark except for the radio dial and the laptop screen, where the numbers keep climbing in a way Duke would call historic if he could stop swearing long enough.
Emmy’s voice slips into the room. “Good evening, Harmony Ridge,” she says, warm, careful, and close enough to hurt. “You’re listening to Backroad Country.”
I sit on the floor with my back against the bed, guitar beside me, phone facedown, hands aching.
She doesn't say my name.
She doesn't play my song.
Of course she doesn’t.
I close my eyes and listen anyway.