Chapter 8 Not Long Ago
Not Long Ago
“Why didn’t you tell me you were in a documentary, Aunt Jace?” Livvy asked, clearly miffed.
“Because I wasn’t,” Jace said as she turned down the volume on her cell phone to quiet her niece and closed her office door.
She’d been coming into the Function Fest workspace in Ferndale every day to rally her staff’s morale post–Adoption Academy.
Their remaining clients still depended on them to provide the services they’d paid for, and their pipeline of potential new clients needed to be cultivated to make up the revenue they’d lost. But mostly, she wanted her team to have faith that their business could recover.
“We all have to stay focused,” she’d told them.
“It only takes one call to turn things around. Then we’ll be back in the black and ready to do even more. ”
Given her speechifying, Jace figured it would be bad form if they overheard the boss rehashing her past glory with Livvy—or finding out that she was producing a fundraising concert that wasn’t going to make the company one thin dime.
“Well, I just saw footage of you and Paloma all over this film called Cut to the Chorus that came out ten years ago about the indie music of Detroit in the 1990s,” Livvy said.
“Pretty much any musician who ever grabbed a slice at the Garden Bowl is in it. And a good chunk of it was about Paloma Doralle. You sure you don’t know about it? ”
Jace’s blood ran cold. “Oh. That documentary.”
“So you do know about this,” Livvy said, still sounding annoyed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Jace hesitated. “I knew it was in the works, but the director never interviewed me or asked me for any input. I’ve never seen it.
” She didn’t say that Sabine had gotten her tickets to the premiere, but the thought of being in a packed house of her former colleagues watching the best years of her life pass her by again had kept her home. “Did you watch it?”
“Yes, and I think you should, too. There are clips from performances at the Artemis that we might want to have looping on screens before the show starts, for one thing.”
“That makes sense,” Jace said, her pulse readjusting. “I’ll put you in touch with Rennie. They’ll be handling the social media and could use that material for promotion for groups that’ll be playing the concert.”
“Rennie is a media company?”
“No, Rennie works for Sabine. They/them pronouns.”
“Copy that.” Livvy took a small pause. “Aunt Jace, um—well, I hate to tell you this, but you’re going to need to hear what some of these musicians said about you before you approach them to be in the benefit.”
Her pulse bumped upward again. “Meaning?”
“They didn’t all appreciate how you managed Paloma’s career.”
“What did they say?”
“That you may have driven her out of the business.” Livvy tsked into the phone. “Shit, I have to get this other call. I’ll send you a link so you can watch it, then we can talk.”
Jace’s heart migrated to her throat. “Wait—are you still planning to come out here Memorial Day weekend? Maybe we can watch it together.”
“Sounds good; gotta go. Love you.”
“Love—” The call dropped before Jace could finish.
She sat for a couple of moments, parsing what the interviewees could have possibly said about her.
She knew all too well that their mutual friends had taken sides after their breakup.
She’d gotten Sabine, Mo, and Louis in the divorce, so to speak.
Others in their circle had kept their distance, probably hoping to stay in the good graces of a famous person who might help their own careers one day.
But what Livvy intimated sounded way worse.
Fellow artists, people who Jace had assumed respected her as a businesswoman and a friend, had gone on camera to say the opposite.
Why would they do that? Jace wondered. Paloma had left her, after all. She was the one who couldn’t believe in herself without Jace’s help. She was the one who never told Jace what was wrong, leaving Jace to try to do whatever she could to keep them both afloat. Jace wasn’t the bad guy.
Was she?