Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
EMMY
At two-forty in the morning, Melody Hunter is crying on a morning show couch in Los Angeles. I know this because I'm sitting alone in the WHLR booth with my headphones pushed down around my neck, watching the clip on mute while the old hymn block plays itself out through the board.
Her face is everywhere now. Not the way it used to be.
Not golden under stage lights, not barefoot in a studio with Cade laughing six feet away, and not tilting her head in interviews while someone asked where all that fire came from.
Now it's close-ups, freeze-frames, and slow-motion edits of her smile disappearing when a host says, “A lot of people feel you helped sell a story that hurt another woman.”
The comments aren't kind. I shouldn't read them, but I read them anyway.
Turns out the wife was the muse the whole time.
Imagine trying to steal a man who built his wife an actual house.
He walked from Lonesome Strings, dropped free songs, moved to her town, saved their old bar, and Melody still thought she had a shot?
My thumb stops there. Outside the studio window, Pop sits at his desk with his reading glasses low on his nose, pretending not to keep watch. He's been doing that more lately, letting me have space from six feet away.
The clip loops again. Melody on that too-white couch, knees pressed together, hands locked in her lap. Her hair is still perfect, but the rest of her has gone dim around the edges.
The interviewer leans in. “Do you think Cade Tyler was ever in love with you?”
Melody laughs once. It isn't a pretty laugh. “No,” she says. “No. I think I wanted him to be. I think a lot of people wanted him to be. It made a better story.”
The interviewer’s face softens in the practiced way of people who smell a confession. “And now?”
Melody looks down at her hands. For the first time since I've known her name, she looks twenty-five. Not dangerous and not inevitable. Just young, tired, and finding out that wanting something loudly doesn't make it yours.
“Now I think Cade Tyler is exactly who he keeps saying he is,” she says. “A man in love with his wife.”
I set the phone facedown. The hymn ends, and dead air waits like an open mouth. My hand moves on instinct. I bring up the next track, ease the volume in, and let a steel guitar carry Harmony Ridge past midnight.
“Still with me, honey?” Pop calls through the glass.
I lift one finger without looking at him. One minute. He nods.
My palm rests low on my stomach. The slight curve is easier to find now, even under the loose black sweater June keeps calling my camouflage. The baby shifts, or I imagine it. Either way, my breath catches.
Cade is playing the Whip again tonight. He's probably packing up now.
I haven't gone. Every night, I don't go. And every night, he stays.
The back door buzzer goes off. Pop is on his feet before I can turn. “You expecting somebody?”
“No.”
The buzzer goes again, sharp and impatient. Pop walks to the side hall. I stand slowly, one hand on the console, because I've learned not to trust sudden movement. Through the narrow window in the studio door, I watch him open the back entrance. Cold night air slips in, and so does Melody Hunter.
For a second, neither one of us moves. She's smaller without the machinery around her.
No white dress, no glam team, and no microphone held like a weapon.
She wears jeans, a gray sweatshirt, and sunglasses pushed up into her hair even though it's the middle of the night.
Her mouth is bare. Her eyes are swollen.
Pop looks at me, waiting for the word.
“It’s okay,” I say, though nothing in my body agrees.
Melody steps into the hall. “I’m sorry.”
I almost laugh. Not because it's funny, but because those words have been used so much lately they've lost their meaning.
Pop stays where he is. “You want me in there, Em?”
Melody glances at him, something like embarrassment moving across her face.
“No,” I say. “But don’t go far.”
“Wasn’t planning to.”
I open the studio door, and Melody walks in like she expects the floor to reject her.
The booth is too small for both of us and everything she helped bring into my life.
My cardigan hangs over the spare chair, and a stack of listener notes sits beside the mic.
Proof that I exist outside the frame she once helped build around me.
She looks at the red ON AIR sign, then at me. “I didn't hear anything but music before I pulled up. Wasn't sure if you'd be here."
For a moment, there's only the low song coming through the monitors and the hum of the board.
“I saw your interview,” I say.
She swallows. “Which one?”
“That bad?”
A little air leaves her. “Yeah.”
I fold my arms carefully, leaving space between my wrist and my stomach. “Why are you here, Melody?”
She reaches into the front pocket of her sweatshirt and pulls out her phone. Every muscle in me goes cold.
“No,” she says quickly. “Not like that. I’m not recording you.”
“You’ll forgive me if that doesn’t soothe.”
“I know.” Her fingers curl around the case. “I have something you should hear.”
“I’ve heard enough from your phone.”
She flinches. It's quick, but I don't miss it. “Not all of it.”
I don't do anything. No nod. I just wait. Melody unlocks the phone with a shaking thumb.
“I should have sent it to you months ago. I should have posted it when everything happened. I didn’t because I was angry and humiliated and because the lie was working for me.” Her voice breaks on the last word. “And then it stopped working. And then I had to look at what was left.”
She sets the phone on the console between us. A file waits on the screen: Studio B Raw. 1:12 a.m.
She touches play. At first, there's only room noise: the muffled scrape of a chair, a cup set down too hard, someone’s tired exhale. Then Melody’s voice comes through the tiny speaker, bright and needling.
“Admit it.”
My whole body knows what's coming before my mind catches up. My hand closes around the edge of the console. Cade’s voice follows, low and worn thin.
“You want the narrative,” he says, “to be that the only reason I’m not with Melody Hunter is because I’m married. That I’d be with Melody instead of the woman I’m married to...”
The recording cuts off with a sharp little rustle. Not silence, but movement: a door opening, and Cy’s voice in the background, hard and sudden. “Cade.”
Melody stops the file.
For a moment, the booth has no air in it. I stare at the phone. The words are the same, exactly the same, and not the same at all.
My memory plays the old clip over it, the one that gutted me in my kitchen.
The only reason I’m not with Melody is because I’m married.
If I wasn’t married, I’d be with Melody.
Clean. Damning. Cropped down until it fit perfectly in the hand. But this file has the beginning. This file has his disgust in it, his exhaustion, the sound of a man naming a lie someone else wanted him to wear.
My throat works, but nothing comes out. Melody’s fingers hover over the phone.
“The version that went online was cut from that. I didn’t post it.”
I look up at her, and she flinches.
“I didn’t,” she says again, softer. “But I knew. I knew what it made people think. I knew what it made you think.”
My hand is still gripping the console. If I let go, I might find out I'm shaking. “You let it stand.”
“Yes.” The word is small and bare. She looks down at the phone, and a tear drops onto the black screen before she wipes it away with the heel of her hand.
No camera. No soft lighting. No pretty angle.
“It sold records,” she says. “It made me look like the woman he couldn’t have.
The temptation. The spark. It made the song bigger.
It made me bigger.” She swallows hard. “And I told myself if he hated it enough, he’d fix it.
Publicly. He’d say my name and choose me or he’d say yours and end it. Either way, I thought I’d matter.”
I feel sick, not just because of her, but because a part of me is still in that kitchen, phone in hand, hearing his voice and feeling something in me shut a door. I built months on that sound. I built a wall with it. I hid behind it. And it was real. And it was not.
Melody wipes beneath her other eye. “There’s more.”
“I don’t know if I can.”
“I know.” She nods too fast. “I know. But this is the part I came for.” She swipes to another file. This one has no neat title, just a date and a string of numbers.
“Different night?” I ask.
“Earlier,” she says. “When we were still working on the bridge.” She presses play.
A guitar comes through first, quiet and unfinished. Cade picking out a line, stopping, trying it again. I know that sound. I know the little pause when he finds something he likes but doesn't trust it yet.
Then Melody’s voice, closer to the phone. “You keep pulling back on the chorus.”
Cade gives a tired laugh. “Because it’s not a chorus yet.”
“It is. You just won’t say what it’s about.”
The guitar stops. I hold myself very still.
Cade says, “It’s about Emmy.”
The room inside me goes quiet. On the recording, Melody says nothing. Cade plays two soft notes. “It was always about Emmy.”
“That line?” Melody asks, and I can hear her trying to keep it light. “Tell me you felt it before I burn alone?”
“First night at WHLR,” Cade says. “She asked me what I wanted people to hear when they heard me. I gave some stupid answer about grit and truth because I was twenty-five and trying to sound like a man with a biography.” His voice shifts, softer, nearer.
“She didn’t laugh at me. She just leaned toward the mic and said, ‘That’s the answer you give people when you want to sound artistic and important.
Try again.’ Too damn young to be that damned wise and I was mesmerized. "
My hand flies to my mouth as I remember it. The rain. The cheap headphones. His boots dripping on Pop’s old carpet. The way he looked at me like I'd caught him with his guard down and he was deciding whether to resent me for it.
On the tape, Cade breathes out. “I went back to the motel and wrote until daylight,” he says. “Not a good song. Too many words. Bad second verse. But every song after that had her in it somewhere.”
Melody’s voice is quieter now. “Even Wildfire?”
“Especially Wildfire.”
The guitar resumes, the beginning of the chorus, rough and low.
Melody stops the recording. I don't move.
The song on the WHLR board fades into its last steel notes. Through the glass, Pop watches me with one hand braced on his desk, his face drawn and careful. My eyes burn so hard the room blurs.
For months, I've been trying to make my heart understand that love songs can lie, that pretty words can be arranged around an empty center, that a man can sound wrecked and still not be safe.
But this isn't a song. This is Cade in a room where he doesn't know I'll ever hear him.
Cade tired and unguarded. Cade saying my name before there was anything to gain by it.
I press my palm low over my stomach. Melody sees the movement, her gaze dropping just for a second before her face changes.
“Oh,” she whispers.
I step back from the console. “Don’t.”
“I won’t.” She lifts both hands, the phone still caught in one of them. “I won’t say anything.”
The baby sits between us now, impossible to hide from a woman trained to notice every weakness in a room. Melody’s mouth trembles. “Does he know?”
The question hits harder than it should.
I look at the phone. At the proof she carried around while my life cracked open.
At the girl in front of me who wanted to be chosen so badly she helped make another woman’s pain profitable.
At myself, standing in the booth I fought my way back to, one hand over Cade Tyler’s child.
“No,” I say.
Melody closes her eyes. “I really am sorry,” she says.
This time, I believe she is. It doesn't fix anything. It doesn't hand me back the nights I spent listening for his truck. It doesn't erase the arena, the camera, the champagne dress, the pity dressed up as concern. It doesn't make her innocent. But it puts one true thing on the table.
I pick up my phone. My thumb hovers over Cade’s name, still blocked, still buried where I left it the morning I drove home. Then I unblock him.
Outside, the WHLR sign buzzes against the dark. Somewhere across town, the Whippoorwill is probably closing down, Cade loading his guitar into his truck with sore hands and no idea the last locked door has just opened.
Melody looks at my stomach again, then back at my face. “Does he know?” she asks once more, barely above a whisper.
My hand tightens around the phone. “No,” I say. “But he’s about to.”