Page 55 of A Song for Another Woman

CADE

The paper is soft at the folds from thirteen years of being opened and closed by a man who never deserved to touch it.

I sit at the kitchen table in the cabin with Emmy's sketch spread flat beneath both hands. The radio is off for once. Dawn presses pale against the window over the sink. The refrigerator hums behind me, steady and cheap. Outside, the mountain is still dark enough that the trees look like one solid thing.

Her pencil lines are faded in places. Not gone, just worn.

A porch wraps around three sides of the house. She labeled it in her neat nineteen-year-old handwriting:

wide enough for two rocking chairs, so someday I can sit there with the man of my dreams.

I shut my eyes. God, I can hear her saying it.

She'd drawn the kitchen bigger than the bedroom. A pantry with double doors. Windows over the sink. A little room tucked above the kitchen with a note beside it:

reading nook, not storage.

At the far edge of the page, she'd sketched a tree. Not carefully like the house, just a trunk, a cloud of blooms, and a line beneath it:

Old dogwood if I can find one.

When she gave me these sketches, we were eating grilled cheese in a rental with a ceiling stain shaped like Florida. I had seventy-three dollars in my checking account and a truck that only started if I tapped the dash twice and called it sweetheart. Emmy slid the paper across the card table between us like she was embarrassed to want anything that much.

"Someday," I told her, because I was twenty-six, broke, and stupid with love. "I'm gonna build you exactly this."

She laughed then, soft and a little shy. "You better not make it fancy."

"Exact," I said, pressing my palm over the drawing like a vow. "Every line."

I kept the paper. That is the part that damns me.

I kept it through the first record deal, the first tour bus, and the first house with gates. I kept it when decorators walked me through marble samples, lighting plans, and rooms staged so no one could tell actual people lived there. I kept it while Emmy stood in those rooms with her arms folded, trying to find a place to curl up.

I bought mansions. I never built her home.

My phone lights up beside my coffee. Duke again. I turn it facedown without reading the message.

Then I pick up the sketch, slide it carefully into the old folder, and drive into Harmony Ridge before the town is fully awake.

The land sits off a narrow county road where the blacktop thins and the fences start leaning. It isn't much to look at yet: two acres, a rise gentle enough for a house, woods thick along the back, and a pasture on one side gone gold with winter. The realtor keeps calling it "private," like privacy is a feature you can buy by the acre. I barely hear him.

Because there, on the south edge of the clearing, is the dogwood.

It's old, wider than my arms could reach. It's bare now except for the hard little buds waiting out the cold, but I know what it'll look like in bloom. Emmy told me once that dogwoods look like they remember being hurt and decided to flower anyway. Back then, I kissed her shoulder and told her she should write songs.

She said, "Maybe I just like saying things to you."

I have to turn away from the tree. The realtor mistakes it for doubt. "There's another parcel closer to town if you're wanting something more visible."

"No," I say.

He blinks. "No?"

"This one."

"It's not the flashiest."

"I don't care about flashy."