Chapter 10 Knox
KNOX
Quincy arrives five minutes early, which is his way of reminding us he can still outrun our excuses.
Tall, lean, white, late sixties, the last gray fringe holding on around a head that gave up on hair a long time ago.
He takes the head of the small conference table off the backstage hall and sets his phone face down.
“Keep your noses clean,” he says instead of hello. “Deliver a new album recorded in the old studio in four weeks.”
Four weeks lands like a snare hit. Salem slouches deeper. Houston nods once. I sit straighter because someone has to.
Quincy looks at each of us to see if we’re going to blink. “Yes, it’s a squeeze,” he goes on. “You work well under pressure. You always have. The chatter’s loud. This Lou Navarro’s name is in it. That’s not good for the new album.”
I shrug. “Rumors move faster than facts.”
“Facts are for press releases. Rumor sells tickets, but the novelty wears off fast.” He taps the table twice. “We’re not going to feed it trash. We’re going to deliver songs so sharp that the rumor looks like a cheap coat over a suit.”
“No pressure,” Salem mumbles.
“I’m in a do-your-job mood,” Quincy says to him. He turns to me. “How fast can you get Sagebrush blocked out?”
It’s a reasonable question for any other studio.
“This afternoon. It’s not like anyone books there anymore.
I’m surprised they can keep the lights on.
We’ll work days to avoid bleed from the night schedule at The Gold Bar.
Engineer on call. We’ll need a runner. Gear list is the usual, plus a couple of ribbon mics. Old room likes ribbons.”
“Budget says yes to anything that gets me a record in four weeks,” he says. “Within reason.” He gives Salem a look that has history in it. “Reason means receipts.”
“I keep receipts.” Salem smirks. “They make great blunts.”
Quincy ignores the commentary. “Good. Now. Lou.” He lets the name hang between us. “You three intend to treat her like a person or a headline?”
“A person,” I say.
“She’s staying with you, I understand.” Not a question. Quincy always knows what’s going on, even if we never tell him. “Fine. Keep it boring in public. I’ll get her a stylist, so she’s more suitable for your image.”
“She’s not a prop,” Houston says slowly.
“She’s got a brain? That’s good to hear. She’ll appreciate my work.” Quincy turns his notebook, uncaps a thin pen, and draws a rectangle. “Album. We need a visual story that doesn’t look like you’re apologizing for stealing your brother’s girlfriend.” He looks up at me. “Ideas?”
“I want her to lead the visuals.” I clear my throat. “Art director for the album and tour branding.”
Quincy’s eyebrows move a millimeter. “Your new girlfriend’s the art director. That’s bold.”
“She’s a designer. Good. Fast. She sees clean. And she’s not my girlfriend.” I keep going before Salem can poke. “She’s from here. She’s already sketching. We can pay market and put a firewall in place so it’s not a handout. I want her in the room when we decide covers, posters, the lot.”
Quincy considers the pen like it’s a vote. “Deliverables?”
“Album cover system with variants. Two single covers. Tour key art. Venue packages—marquee, screens, posters, laminates. Merch routed through the same grid. A simple microsite to house the era. She’ll set a type system that won’t age like milk.”
Houston nods. “She already has a Sagebrush silhouette that reads from ten feet.”
“Show me when it’s done.” Quincy points the pen at me. “Money?”
“Fair rate with a kill fee and usage spelled out.”
He stands. “Noses clean. Record done. Visuals that don’t apologize. Keep Troy out of the goddamned studio. That boy’s a menace.” He gives us the long-suffering look that only a man who has dragged bands across decades can carry. “I’m too old for a bender detour.”
“We’ll keep him out.”
“Good. I’ll be in my bunker turning down clever ideas from clever people who have never made anything in their lives.” He starts for the door, pauses, and looks back at me. “Knox.”
“Yeah.”
“Leadership is a lonely trick. Don’t let it make you stupid with that girl.”
“I’ll try not to.” No promises.
“Try harder.” He leaves us to the quiet that comes after a marching order.
“We’ve done worse,” Houston says when Salem mutters something about four weeks.
“We’ve done dumber,” I say. “Don’t make me list them.”
I snap a photo of the whiteboard, block a calendar on my phone, and text the engineer we trust. Then I email Quincy the gear addendum and a budget skeleton for visuals. When I hit send, I loop Lou in.
I find her at the suite table with a sketchpad and her laptop, hair up, locket catching light, eyes on a vector she’s pushing into a shape I don’t recognize. She looks up when I sit, cautious for one second, then ready.
“Manager meeting went as expected. Four weeks. Album at Sagebrush. Keep our noses clean.”
She huffs. “Define clean.”
“Not giving strangers free content,” I explain. “No public fights. No headline photos. Deliver music so good the rumor mill gets bored.”
“Ambitious. Doable. Didn’t you guys write Black Whiskey in three weeks?”
I laugh clean and sharp. “Yeah. How’d you know that? No one ever brings up that album.”
There’s color in her cheeks when she answers. “It’s my favorite. Since I was a kid.”
Fuck me. I was in my thirties when we wrote that album.
“Well, you’re the only one who liked it.” I pause. “I pitched you as art director.”
She goes still. “You did what?”
“Album visuals. Tour branding. Pay at market. Firewall between business and whatever this is.” I slide the laptop around to show her a list. “Deliverables, budget ranges, timeline.”
She reads like she’s looking for a trap and not finding one. “You want me to lead.”
“Yes.”
“Not as a favor.”
“As a hire. You’ll set the grid. Approve vendor proofs. Tell us no when we try to make the cover look like a remorseful diary entry apologizing to Troy.”
Her mouth curves, then settles. “I like work that doesn’t apologize.”
“Me too.” I point at her sketch. “The Sagebrush mark works.”
“I’m still refining,” she says, but she looks lit from the inside now. “What’s the timeline really?”
“Four weeks in total. Visuals lock by week three, so the printers can breathe. First single cover inside ten days. Tour key art inside two weeks. Microsite by week four. The budget is healthy if we don’t get wasteful.”
She nods. “I can do that.”
“We’ll pull a crew, let you run that end of things.”
She looks at me like I’ve given her oxygen. “Thank you.”
“You’re not a charity case,” I say before she has to tell me again. “This will be a lot of work.”
“I know. It just feels good to hear deliverables come out of your mouth instead of pet names.”
“We don’t have time for pet names. We have a calendar.” I hesitate. “But we might make time for pet names. If you’re up for that.”
She smiles with her teeth for the first time today.
It makes me stupid for a second. I cover by opening a shared doc and adding dates.
She leans in, shoulder to shoulder with me, and our heads brush as we argue about whether the second Tuesday is too tight for the single.
The work slides into talk like it always does when people trust each other.
She asks about our mother, and I tell her more than I usually tell anyone.
How we learned to sleep on floors and count load-out in reverse.
How she taught us to keep cash in two places.
How the first time we played the room upstairs from Sagebrush, the owner tried to pay us in drink tickets, and she made him walk to the ATM.
Lou laughs, not at us, but with us. “And Troy? I know that has you knotted up.”
It’s time I talk to someone about this. Probably. Since it happened last year, I feel different. Like I’m shirking my responsibility. It doesn’t sit right with me.
“Kicking him out broke me a little,” I admit with a hiss at myself. “Not because I doubted it was right. I know it was. If for no other reason than he has to learn his actions have consequences. He won’t grow up until he internalizes that.”
“So, you kicked him out for his own good?”
I wince. “No. That’s just a side benefit of what happened.
If I hadn’t kicked him out, we would have fallen apart.
We were infighting. Houston was in total denial about Troy stealing from us, so he was defending him from Salem, who wanted to strangle Troy after he learned about him stealing from us.
” I let out a breath to clear my head. “I was stuck between total denial and life-altering violence with the two of them. Neither was a real option. I chose the one that made the most sense, and they complied.”
“Yeah. But that’s logistics.” Her hand rests on my forearm. “How did you feel about it?”
“Like shit” blurts out of me. My shoulders sag. “Because leadership is bleeding in private and smiling in public. I did both. I still am.”
She watches my hands as I talk, like she’s reading the places the words don’t go. She sees me in a weird way for someone I just met. But there’s a part of her that gets it. I can tell when our eyes meet.
Her voice is quiet. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not asking for sorry. I’m telling you the cost. He tried to rip off the family. That’s the line for me. There has to be a line. Everything after that is noise.”
She nods. “Absolutely there does. Maybe I’m wired different or whatever, but family or not, you don’t let that shit slide. You can’t. Money isn’t just money—it’s survival. He stole resources. Fuck that guy.”
“You don’t have to shit on him to make me feel better.”
She cocks a thin brow. “Is it working?”
I laugh, which surprises me. “Maybe a little.”
“Good.” She ties her hair back. “If you want to stop thinking about him, we can get back to work.”
“That’ll work.”
She looks back at the screen. “Discretion in public,” she says, like she’s writing a rule. “Honesty in private.”
“Exactly.”
“We don’t pretend,” she says. “We don’t perform for strangers. But we also don’t lie to each other.”
“It doesn’t have to be a problem.”
“It won’t be if we don’t let it. I’m not interested in burning my work down for a man again. Or in this case, men. And I’m not interested in hiding either.”
“Good. Neither are we.”
“But for now, I’d like some discretion. Until the heat dies around that picture of Salem.”
“Agreed.”
She sits back, thinking. “You and your brothers have done this before? Sharing someone, I mean.”
“Shared nights. Never more than one or two. It was simple. This is not that.”
“Because?”
“Because I click with you,” I say, and don’t try to soften it. “So does Houston. So does Salem.”
She breathes out like that lands somewhere she keeps locked. “Okay.”
“We don’t have to name it today. We’re just figuring things out, you especially. We just have to not lie about it.”
“Deal.” She glances at the clock. “You have to get back downstairs.”
“Soon,” I say, but I don’t stand yet. The quiet between us feels workable, not fragile. I close the laptop. “Quincy thinks this record lives or dies on how we carry ourselves and how fast we cut.”
“He’s not wrong.”
“He’s also not the one in the room when the take falls apart. That’s us.”
“You thrive under pressure,” she says, throwing his words back at me with a small smile.
“We endure under pressure. Thriving is the press release’s wording.”
She laughs. “Fair.”
I gather the papers. “You’ll get a contract. Sign it. Send me the W-9. I’ll have accounting pull your vendor profile. We’ll set deposits so you’re not floating us.”
“Look at you taking care of me without making it weird,” she says, half teasing, half not.
“It’s logistics. It’s what I live for.”
We stand at the same time. She tucks her pencil behind her ear. The gesture is small and does something big inside my rib cage. I ignore it like a professional.
At the door, she stops me with a hand on my forearm. “Thank you for telling me about Troy. How you feel.”
“If you’re going to sit in our rooms, you get the mess. No point pretending we’re tidy.”
“I don’t need tidy.” She squeezes once and lets go. “I need real.”
“Same here.”
I head back down the service hall toward the venue, passing the framed photos of acts that came through before us. Some smiled too hard. Some looked tired. The ones I respect look like they’re on their way to work.
Onstage, backline is set, cables taped, mics ready. Houston tunes without looking at the tuner. Salem argues with a monitor like it’s a person who owes him money. I step into the center, and the room settles the way rooms do when someone who pays attention walks in.
I count us in for a warm-up take. We play the bones of a song that isn’t a song yet and find a pocket that could be something if we keep our heads. It’s there. Not magic. Work. We push it twice more and then cut before we ruin what we found.
On the break, I check my phone. The headline is still there, still loud, still wrong. I put the phone face down. I don’t need it to tell me what the day is.
There’s a part of me that still tries to make excuses for the kid I carried through backstage halls when he fell asleep. I think about the man who looked at family accounts and decided short-term shine mattered more than loyalty.
Will he recover from the Lou situation? From getting kicked out of his family’s band? Maybe. Maybe not.
I’ve spent years wrapping worry around him like bubble wrap. He kept pulling it off. He liked the attention of the wound more than healing it. He proved it when he reached into the drawer we don’t touch and came up smiling.
I’m the one who’s supposed to keep track of what matters. The band. The work. The crew. The rooms we leave better than we found them. The people who trust us. Lou too, if she lets me put her on that list.
I don’t have to keep Troy’s feelings on the pile if he won’t add ours to his. That’s not cruelty. That’s life.
I used to think worrying about Troy was part of loving him.
I used to think love meant carrying what someone drops and never asking them to pick it up.
He taught me different when he chose himself over all of us.
He made his choice look easy. He chose himself over his family.
Maybe that’s the part that hurts the worst.