Chapter 17 Lou
LOU
I stop pretending the internet can be managed with silence alone. It won’t. I can feel the story grinning at me through every open app. If it’s going to happen with or without me, I would rather aim it.
I pitch the guys at the table. “We turn the mess into a behind-the-scenes. Songwriting at Sagebrush. Arranging. Mic choices. The ugly parts that make a song work. We show craft, not gossip.”
Houston looks up from his notebook. “Milk the process for content.”
“Yes. Quick cuts for socials, longer cuts for the site. Captions that discuss tempo and structure, rather than who held whose hand. No couch confessions. No drama. We put the studio on camera and keep faces secondary.”
Salem grins. “I can behave if the comments are off.”
“Comments will be off,” I say. “We post, we walk away. Quincy routes the press to himself.”
Knox nods. “Schedule?”
“Sagebrush mornings already exist. We shoot fifteen minutes at the start, fifteen at the end. One phone, airplane mode, horizontal. A single ambient mic for B-roll. No one stops to perform. I’ll edit on the hotel Wi-Fi in the afternoon.
We publish every other day, not daily. Keep them wanting more, keep them hoping to catch some drama.
That’ll get clicks and views faster than anything else ever could.
They want drama, and we’ll give them a show, but it’ll be about the album instead of each other because that’s the real story here. ”
Houston taps the table in even time. “Title?”
“I was thinking of Back to the Drawing Board for the series. Each clip will be named for the task. ‘Ribbon Check.’ ‘Ghost Note.’ ‘Bridge Surgery.’ Everything in the same visual grid. Same type. No thumbnails with faces all the way up in the frame. Keep it about the work.”
Knox folds his arms. “Safety?”
“The police know I got threats when I dated Troy. If this grows, it will happen again. We film our work and gear, not routes or door numbers. We blur anything that tells strangers where we sleep. We keep locations obvious only when we’re already public.”
Salem shoots me a look. “What if I want to tell everyone to go to hell and call it a day?”
“You can, later. Let me try something boring first.”
He leans back, half-amused. “Spoilsport.”
I draft the statement before I lose my nerve.
I explain that we met because of work, that I’ve relaunched my studio, and that I’m helming the Turner visuals for this album.
I specify that I won’t discuss our private life, that the art will speak for itself, and that we won’t engage with harassment.
I end with a resources line pointing to crisis hotlines, reporting links, and block-and-mute guides for the major platforms. I add contact info for booking and a media email that forwards to Quincy, not me. He’s the manager—let him manage.
I read it out loud. “Thoughts?”
They nod along, more or less. Knox suggests, “Can you add a line about how there was no overlap between us and Troy?”
I shake my head. “It would read like we meant the opposite of that, for one. Two, no one would believe it. Three, it doesn’t matter to the public. A lot of people would say that going from one brother to three is wrong, no matter how much time there was between them.”
“Fair points. Just wish we could set the record straight.”
“Same. But here we are.”
I design the slides for the series. Sagebrush silhouette in the corner.
A chalk line that runs through the cut like the pencil marks on the old doorframe.
The family, craft, and second chances motif guides everything.
I make a pocket brand sheet for Quincy with style rules and a list of banned words: scandal, triangle, home-wrecker.
I build a folder tree and drop the templates in.
We take the plan to our meeting with Quincy.
He meets us in a small office in the hotel reserved for their residency performers.
He looks tired and sharp. Tall, lean to the point of thin, and older.
I checked his bio before the meeting, and he’s two years younger than Talia.
But meeting him in person, he could be twenty years older than her by the looks of him.
I walk him through the idea, and to my surprise, he’s open to things.
“Behind-the-scenes only,” I say. “No talking heads. No confessions. It will be about the work, not the drama.”
He looks at the guys. “You will not perform for her camera.”
“We won’t,” Knox says.
“We don’t have the energy,” Houston adds.
“I already perform for every other camera.” Salem folds his arms over his chest, making both bulge. “This one gets the grown-up version of me.”
Quincy nods. “Do it. Send me the statement before it goes up. I’ll sync legal so the hotel doesn’t pucker.”
“Done,” I say.
We shift to the album title conversation because I want to fold it into the same frame.
“I have a title I like. Back to the Drawing Board. It’s the title of the docu-series, and I think it’s appropriate to what’s happening with everything else.
This album is about second chances and starting over. Feels right.”
Salem grins. “Mean.”
Houston tests it with a melody under his breath, as if titles need a pitch. “It sings.”
Knox nods once. “It fits the shape of things.”
Quincy watches their faces first, then mine. “You can sell that to the hotel and not end up with a note that says Make It Sexier?”
Knox shakes his head. “This album isn’t about sexy. And the hotel only wants to debut a single here—they don’t get a say in what we do.”
Quincy’s lined face smooths a little. “You might have a talent for this, Lou.”
“Thank you.” I hold for the other shoe to fall.
It doesn’t. The guys shake hands with Quincy, who seems slightly put off when I shake his hand on the way out. But he gives me a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes, and we part ways.
I get it—I’m a new addition to this situation. Per Knox, Quincy has been managing them for fifteen years, so throwing me into the mix is odd for him. And he’s an old white guy. They’re not known for adjusting well to change.
“He’ll come around,” Houston assures me in the elevator.
It makes me smile. “You saw that too?”
Salem huffs a laugh. “Quincy has the biggest stick up his ass I have ever seen.” His face falls. “Particularly when it comes to women.”
“How so?”
Knox sighs. “He’s always had a thing about Yoko Ono and the whole Beatles situation. He has a lot of opinions about groupies and women because he knows women are the easiest way to fuck up a band.”
My brow falls. “That’s not women’s fault—”
“I don’t mean it that way.” The elevator opens, and we hold the conversation until we reach the suite. Once inside, Knox continues, “Musicians have women throwing themselves at them for their whole careers, and men are…”
“Weak,” Salem fills in.
“Easily distracted,” Knox corrects. “All it takes is one easily distracted guy to derail the career of a whole band. Quincy knows it, so do we. So, a woman who dated one brother, then the other three—whatever you want to call our situation, I mean—then comes into the meeting with opinions and great ideas of her own…that’s bound to make him extremely nervous about you. ”
I sigh at that, but I get it. Still. “Yoko didn’t break up The Beatles. They were cracked before she came along.”
Houston smiles and kisses my forehead. “No one is saying you’re a Yoko. And you’re right—history did her dirty.”
“Not history. People.”
He nods. “Damn straight.”
“Well, I have a lot of work to grind out. So, I’m heading to my room for a while, and then I’ll bring out the camera for some B-roll.” Note to self—give Quincy a wide berth. I don’t want to cause any more drama than I already do.
The work is calming, but a nagging voice in the back of my head wonders if Quincy will ever like me.
The day moves better once the decision is in the world. They cut a verse. We label files. The sky turns. I shoot the ending slice for the next clip—just a hand coiling a cable, Salem’s forearm in frame, ink and tendon, no rings, no clues for the gossip mills to chew on. I cut that too.
When I finally check the statement, the numbers are stupid high, but the replies I can see are mostly normal. Designers. Musicians. Fans are dropping their own boundaries in the comments. They want more of this—more behind-the-scenes without the drama.
“Keep up the good work!” Several people posted this message.
It’s odd. Since I ended up with these three, variations of that keep showing up. From Talia, about my skill. From Houston, about my ear. From Knox about structure. Salem and my normality, whatever he means by that.
I don’t hear a song in my head when I wake up.
I don’t have scales in my skin. I don’t think of myself as musical.
I think about grids and the way letters sit next to each other.
But the studio has taught me to hear count and feel weight.
I can name when a bar is wrong without knowing how to fix it. Maybe that’s a skill?
I write a second short post. Behind the scenes will be about songs and rooms. I won’t be engaging with gossip or harassment. If you’re here for craft, welcome. No exclamation points. No hashtags. I schedule it for the morning so I don’t have to watch it land in real time.
At night, I sit with the guys on the floor and we mark a chorus line again.
I don’t sing; I count. I catch a mis-stress before anyone wastes ten minutes trying to convince the words to bend to a breath they don’t want.
Houston nods like a coach. Salem says, “Nice catch.” Knox puts a dot on the page next to the fix.
It feels like the version of school I would have liked.
The next day, Quincy sends a short email. Hotel likes the title. Proceed. He adds nothing else.
I take it as a win, go back to the deck, and add a slide for the album spine so the title reads correctly in both directions. I set up the merch mock-ups and shove them to the end so no one can talk me into ordering cheap blanks just because a vendor calls back fast.
In the gaps, I keep editing clips. It is weirdly soothing to put the day into a rectangle and let it go. Our views vacillate up and down, so I try to ignore them. I focus on making the next tile match and ignore the haters.
It’s not that the threats stop. They don’t. It’s that I don’t feel like a target in a carnival anymore. When it came to Troy, I felt like I was dangling in the wind—an easy target for anyone, because I wasn’t tethered to something stable. Now, I am. The difference is slight and enormous.
I still check exits. I still sleep light.
But I also draw in the morning and set type at night and feel the old desire to make something worth keeping come back into my fingers.
I know I’m safe. Between hotel security and the guys, no one is going to hurt me here.
But paranoia always dies a slow death, and growing up in foster homes made me paranoid long before meeting Troy Turner.
The odd part sticks with me. People keep telling me I have a talent. For patterns. For catching when a line is wrong. For picking titles that hit. Something about being with them has put me at the right distance to the music. Not inside it, not outside it. Useful.
I don’t know how long this lasts. I don’t know if any of us will be the same in a month. I do know I am less alone at the table than I was when I started trying to be a girlfriend and forgot to be an artist.
I write the words Back to the Drawing Board on a Post-it and stick it to my laptop. I leave it crooked on purpose. It is a title, yes, but it’s also an instruction. I’m moving on. I’m doing the work. I like them, and I like who I am when I work next to them.
If this all falls apart once the new album hits, that’s okay. This has been an education, and a great rebranding for me. If we go our separate ways, so be it. I’m good on my own.
But just thinking that gapes a pit in my chest. I’d be lying to myself if I said I wouldn’t miss them.
Of course I would. I twiddle my pencil and stare out the window over the Strip.
Soon, bright lights will mute the stars above.
Bachelorette parties will wobble into the streets, already drunk on yard-long margaritas.
Street hawkers will harass tourists. It’s chaos out there.
In here, I have the illusion of safety. It can’t be real with them, can it?
My head says no. My heart says yes.
I have no idea who is right. All I can count on is the work ahead.