Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
EMMY
The fourth caller asks for Cade before I even get her name. Pop looks at me through the studio glass with both eyebrows up, one hand hovering over the switchboard like he can personally hold back the county if he leans hard enough.
I press my thumb against the edge of my notepad. “You’re on WHLR with Emmy Sutton. What’s keeping you up tonight?”
A woman clears her throat. “Well, honey, I was hoping maybe you’d play that new Cade Tyler song.”
There it is. Again. Behind the glass, Pop closes his eyes.
I keep my voice even. “We’ve got plenty of good music for you tonight, Miss...?”
“Loretta,” she says, softer now. “It’s just, that one about the radio girl. I thought you might want to hear it too.”
My chest tightens. The red ON AIR light glows above the door, small and merciless. “I appreciate you calling, Loretta.” My hand goes still on the board. “But I’m going to say this once because I trust y’all to hear me. I don’t spin Cade Tyler records on this show.”
A thin silence opens.
“They’re not records, exactly,” Loretta says.
My mouth almost breaks. Almost. “No,” I say. “I guess they aren’t.” No label. No rollout. No glossy cover. No money changing hands. No video of Cade looking wounded in flattering light. Just songs dropped into the world like open palms.
“That boundary still holds,” I say, and my voice stays steady until the last word, where it catches just enough that I know half the county hears it. “This room is mine. This show is mine. I decide what comes through these speakers.”
Pop’s face changes with pride and worry both at once. Loretta is quiet for a moment before saying, “Yes, ma’am.”
I let out a careful breath. “But if you need a song about somebody trying, I’ve got one for you.” I cue up an old Tammy Wynette track. When the music fills the booth, I take off my headphones and set them down carefully.
My hands are shaking.
Pop cracks the door. “You all right?”
“I’m fine.”
“That word’s gotten mighty thin around you lately.”
“I said what I meant.”
“I know you did.” He nods toward the board. “Sounded good doing it.”
I look down at the playlist so he won’t see my eyes. “That’s the job.”
“No, sugar,” he says quietly. “That’s you.”
I don’t answer. The song ends, and I put my headphones back on before kindness can get under my skin.
At 3:08 in the morning, I sit on the edge of June’s guest bed with one earbud in and my phone glowing in my lap. I lasted nine hours after the first request. That’s not nothing, but it's also not enough.
The house is quiet except for June’s old pipes knocking when the heat kicks on.
My cardigan is buttoned wrong, one button slipped into the wrong hole, and my hair smells like diner grease because I stopped by after the show and let June feed me toast at midnight like I’m a stray with a driver’s license.
The song waits on my screen. No cover art. No clever title treatment. Just Cade’s name and two words: For her.
I hate those two words.
I touch play. His guitar comes in first, old Martin tone, rough at the edges and not studio-perfect. I hear the scrape of his fingers on the strings and a breath before the first line. Then his voice comes in, low and raw enough that my body knows it before my mind can defend itself.
He sings about a girl in a radio booth who asked him better questions than men twice her age.
My hand flies to my mouth. No one knew that.
Not the way he sings it. Not the cheap headphones, the midnight coffee, or the way I’d warned him not to talk while I faded out a caller.
That memory belonged to us. I thought maybe I'd carried it alone all these years, tucked under everything that came after.
The second verse is worse. The sketches. The drawer. The house he never built.
I close my eyes, but that only brings his voice closer.
He doesn’t make himself noble in the song, nor does he make me soft and forgiving.
He sings about being handed a dream and storing it with receipts, about building rooms big enough to impress strangers while his wife had nowhere to curl up and feel known.
My breath comes apart. By the last verse, he is singing about the night at the awards. Not Melody. Not the duet. Me.
I watched them turn their lights on you
and still I didn’t move.
The phone blurs in my hand. There is no audience in this recording.
That’s the terrible part. No clapping to hide inside, no Duke, no Silver Creek, and no camera finding his best angle.
He sounds tired, ashamed, and plain. He sounds like a man telling the truth to a dark room because the truth finally got too heavy to hold.
I pull the earbud out before the song ends. The room keeps ringing anyway.
I sit there with my palm pressed low on my stomach, over the secret that has started rounding me out no matter how many sweaters I wear.
In the bedside drawer, beneath June’s spare charger and a stack of paperbacks, the sonogram picture waits inside an envelope.
Black and white. Grainy. Impossible. Mine.
The doctor a town over had smiled when she handed it to me, and for one second I nearly looked over my shoulder for Cade.
He should've been there asking too many questions.
He should've cried and pretended he wasn’t.
He should've walked out holding that picture like the whole world had narrowed to something smaller than his palm.
Instead, I tucked it into my purse, drove home alone, and bought saltines at the gas station.
I know I have to tell him. Not tonight, and not because of a song. But someday soon, because Harmony Ridge is small, my body is changing, and secrets don’t stay polite forever.
I put the phone face down and lie back without turning off the lamp. His voice keeps finding me in the silence.
The diner is loud enough at lunch to make the windows sweat. June moves behind the counter with a coffeepot in one hand. “You need to sit down.”
“I'm standing perfectly.”
“You are standing like a woman trying to convince gravity she’s management.”
“I had toast.”
“When?”
I think about that. “Recently.”
June’s face goes flat.
“I’m fine,” I say, reaching for a tray stacked with plates.
The room tilts. Not dramatically at first, just a small slide like the floor changed its mind. I grab the edge of the counter while the plates rattle. Heat rushes up my neck, then drains so fast my hands go cold.
June is beside me before I can say her name. “Emmy.”
“I’m okay.”
“You are not.”
Mabel Tandy stops mid-story at booth three, Mr. Rayburn looks up from his meatloaf, and the whole diner seems to inhale at once.
June’s arm comes around my waist, firm and fast. “Low blood sugar,” she announces to the room, bright as a church bulletin. “She thinks coffee is a food group. Everybody go back to pretending you weren’t staring.” A few people laugh because June Sutton could redirect a tornado with tone alone.
She hustles me into the back office and shuts the door with her hip. The second we’re alone, her face loses the performance. “Sit.”
I sit. She kneels in front of me, one hand already on my wrist. “Dizzy?”
“A little.”
“Nauseous?”
“Always.”
“Any pain?”
“No.”
“Bleeding?”
“No.” My voice shakes on it.
June hears. Of course she hears. She squeezes my wrist once, then stands and grabs crackers from the emergency drawer. “You scared the hell out of me,” she says.
“I scared me too.”
Her mouth trembles, but she sets the crackers in my hand like she’s mad at them. “Eat.”
I eat because my sister’s fear deserves obedience.
Outside the office, the diner noise resumes, though not fully. Voices dip and rise in careful little waves. People are talking. Not cruelly, probably, which is almost worse. Concern is gossip in a clean dress around here.
June looks toward the door. “Mabel saw.”
“Mabel sees dust settle.”
“And Rayburn. And Cal Jenkins.”
I close my eyes.
“All it takes is one person saying you looked peaked,” June says softly.
“Then somebody else remembers you’ve been buying ginger tea.
Then somebody mentions they haven't seen you wearing anything other than a loose sweater or sweatshirt. Somewhere between the hardware store and the pharmacy, Cade hears it from a man buying picture hangers.”
The cracker turns dry in my mouth. I picture Cade standing in Rayburn Hardware, receipt in hand, while some well-meaning person drops our baby into his life between weather talk and lumber prices. My hand settles over my stomach before I can stop it.
June sees that too.
“I know,” I whisper.
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Because this is getting close, Em.”
“I said I know.”
Her shoulders soften, but her voice doesn’t. “He should hear it from you.”
“I can’t.”
“You can.”
“No.” I look up at her, and the word comes out quiet but solid. “Not yet.”
June sits on the edge of the desk, tired now. “Because of the songs?”
Because of the songs. Because of the house. Because he is doing everything I said mattered, and somehow that makes it harder to breathe.
“He can write a true song,” I say. “That doesn’t mean he can live one.”
June’s eyes close for half a second.
“A man that gifted can believe his own apology while he’s singing it,” I say.
“He can mean every word in the moment. He can bleed all over a guitar and call it honesty, and maybe it is. But what happens when the next wildfire comes? When the next room makes him feel young and necessary? When I’m tired and ordinary and there’s a crying baby and no one is clapping? ”
June doesn’t answer.
“I need to know he’s real,” I say, my voice breaking. “Before I hand him the one thing that would make him stay whether he really wants to or not.”
Her face crumples just a little.
“I’m not punishing him,” I whisper.
June looks at the closed door, then back at me. “At some point, Emmy,” she says, “protecting yourself and punishing yourself start to look exactly the same.”