Chapter Three - No More Invisible Work
CHAPTER THREE
No More Invisible Work
Priya’s office was on the twelfth floor of a building that looked expensive enough to discourage emergencies.
At four forty-seven in the morning, the lobby was empty except for a security guard reading something on his phone and a cleaning cart parked beside the elevators.
I carried the plastic storage bin against my ribs with both arms. The old laptop sat on top of it in a canvas tote. My suitcase remained locked in the car.
Priya was waiting when the elevator opened.
She had changed since I had last seen her in person, which was to say her hair was shorter and there were silver threads at her temples now.
Everything else was exactly as I remembered: navy trousers, white shirt, no jewelry except a watch, and the expression of a woman who had already removed panic from the list of useful options.
“You brought the materials.”
“Most of them.”
“Good.” No hug. I loved her for that. She led me into a conference room and shut the door. A legal pad, two yellow pencils, and an unopened bottle of water waited at my place. Across from me, Priya set down a mug large enough to qualify as structural support.
“Before we start,” she said, “are you safe?”
“I am.”
“Does Eli know where you are?”
“He doesn’t.”
“Do you want him to?”
“Not tonight.”
“Fine. Then that is not a problem we solve this morning.”
I sat. Priya did not ask whether my marriage was over.
That was the second thing I loved her for.
She opened the storage bin. The top notebook was the sunflower one.
For a moment, seeing it under fluorescent conference-room light felt more intimate than taking off my wedding ring. Priya looked at me.
“May I?”
“Go ahead.” She put on thin nitrile gloves from a box in a credenza.
I blinked. “You keep gloves in your conference room?”
“I keep clients.” That almost got a laugh out of me.
Almost. She opened the notebook carefully and began turning pages.
Dates. Crossed-out lines. Chord notes. Shopping lists in the margins.
My mother’s medication schedule. One entire verse written around a grease stain because the page had been on the kitchen counter while Eli made grilled cheese.
Evidence did not look the way I had imagined evidence looking.
It looked like life before anybody knew it would need to prove itself.
Priya reached the pages from 2008 and stopped.
“Walk me through this. Slowly.”
I did. I told her about the apartment. The radiator. The porch light. The cheap recorder. The bathroom tile. The first demo. She did not interrupt until I finished.
“Who wrote the lyrics?”
“I did.”
“The melody?”
“I did.”
“Did Eli contribute to either?”
“Not to either.”
“Arrangement?”
“Later. In the studio. He changed the key, and the producer changed the instrumentation.”
“But the words and melody as a composition?”
“Mine.”
“Any signed transfer?”
“None.”
“Publishing agreement?”
“Not from me.”
“Split sheet?”
“Draft only. Never signed.”
“Work-for-hire agreement?”
“Never.” She nodded once.
“Now the recording. The home demo.”
“I sang it.”
“Who recorded it?”
“I did.”
“On your recorder?”
“Mine.”
“Anybody else performing?”
“No one.”
“Who had copies?”
“Eli, Nolan, and the producer. I emailed it to them in 2009 so the studio could hear the phrasing before Eli cut the commercial track.”
“What did the email say about rights?”
“Nothing. It was the reference track, with notes about tempo.”
“And the released 2009 master?”
“Eli performed it. Northline paid for the session.”
“Good. Keep those separate in your head.”
She pulled the legal pad closer and drew three boxes. In the first she wrote COMPOSITION. In the second, HOME DEMO. In the third, RELEASED MASTER.
“The composition is the song itself—your words and melody. The home demo is a particular recording of you performing that song. The commercial master is another recording. Different assets. Different ownership questions. Different leverage.”
I stared at the boxes. For sixteen years, all of it had been one thing in my mind.
Our song. Priya tapped the first box.
“What you created is not suddenly yours because we file paperwork today. Registration matters. Timing matters. Remedies can depend on timing. But authorship does not begin because a form gets submitted at five in the morning.”
I looked down at the legal pad. She noticed and kept going.
“This is not the part where I tell you we win everything by breakfast.”
“Thank you.”
“You may thank me less in ten minutes.”
“I doubt it.”
“Let’s test that.” She moved to the second box.
“The new duet uses part of the home demo?”
“It does.”
“You are certain it is the same recording?”
“I can hear the button click.”
“We’ll preserve the track and have someone compare the audio properly. Your ear matters. Documentation matters more.”
“Fine.”
“And the altered bridge?”
“Words I didn’t write. Meaning I didn’t approve.”
“Was there written permission for a new lyrical version?”
“Not from me.”
“Did you approve a sample?”
“Never.”
“Did you approve Sadie recording the duet?”
“I didn’t.”
“Did you approve the dedication?”
“I didn’t.” She wrote each answer down. There was something obscene about how easy the questions were.
No. No. No. I had spent years making my consent complicated so nobody else had to feel uncomfortable. Priya made it a column. She turned the old laptop toward herself but did not open it.
“Password?” I gave it to her.
“Don’t boot it yet,” she said. “We’ll make forensic copies first.”
That phrase made me look at her.
“This is a song, Priya. Not a murder.”
“People destroy useful evidence every day by trying to prove they have useful evidence.”
I sat back.
“Fair.” She took out her phone and called someone named Mateo, apologized for the hour without sounding apologetic, and arranged for the drives, recorder, and laptop to be imaged that morning.
Then she began photographing notebook covers and page sequences without separating anything from its original order.
I watched her work. For years, Eli’s career had trained me to solve problems before they reached him.
A hotel had lost a reservation? I fixed it.
A journalist had an old date wrong? I sent the correction.
A set list had two songs in the wrong emotional order? I quietly mentioned it at dinner so Eli could discover the answer himself before rehearsal. Invisible work was still work. The difference was that nobody invoiced for mine. Priya sat again.
“Now we talk about what you want.”
“I want the duet down.”
“That is one thing.”
“I want my name on my song.”
“That is another.”
“I want the old royalties corrected.”
“Possibly another.”
“I want them to stop telling people I approved any of this.”
“Another.”
“I want—” My voice stopped. Priya waited. I looked at the three boxes on the pad.
“I want him to know what he did.”
Her expression softened by perhaps half a degree.
“That one is not a legal remedy.”
“I understand.”
“Good.” She rotated the pad so the list faced me.
“I can help with the things that are documents, rights, accounting, communications. I cannot make Eli understand you. And I cannot use a copyright dispute to punish him for being a bad husband.”
“I don’t want punishment.”
“I hear that from clients before the numbers and options are on paper. Ask me again after you know what your leverage actually is.”
I met her eyes.
“Then ask me again when I have it.”
A small pause.
“Better answer.” Priya made another list beneath the boxes.
“Legal name as author. Date you finished the work. Whether and when it was published. What exactly you claim in the composition, and what exactly you claim in the demo. We separate facts we know from facts we still need to verify.”
“I thought filing was the easy part.”
“Forms are easy when nobody cares. The moment money and history are attached, precision becomes expensive.”
She asked me for the address of the old apartment, the approximate month of the demo, the date Eli first recorded the commercial version, and every name I remembered from the original session.
When I did not know an answer, she wrote UNKNOWN instead of letting me guess.
That, more than anything, made me trust her.
Nobody was asking me to make the story cleaner. She opened a blank folder.
“Here is what I recommend this morning. We preserve everything. We prepare the appropriate registration materials based on what we can substantiate. We send notices narrowly focused on the new duet—the sample from your home demo and the altered material you did not authorize. We demand that Northline preserve its session files, approvals, internal communications, metadata, and accounting. We do not pretend a platform takedown is a court judgment. We do not claim you can erase every existing recording Eli ever made. We do not make threats we cannot support.”
“What happens to the original recording?”
“Not the fight for today.”
I nodded. The distinction steadied me. Part of me had wanted the whole world to go dark around the song simply because I had gone dark inside it. But the 2009 recording was not the duet. It was also not only mine. Priya continued.
“If platforms remove the new track temporarily, Northline can contest it. They can negotiate. They can litigate. They can also decide the new release is not worth the problem.”
“And Nolan?”
“If Nolan calls you, do not discuss substance.”
“He will call.”
“He will sound reasonable.”
“He always does.”
“He may tell you this can be fixed privately.”
I looked toward the windows. Nashville was beginning to pale at the edges. Buildings appeared one by one as the dark thinned around them.
“That’s what they always say when the public version works for them.”
Priya studied me for a moment.
“You have been paying attention.”
“I was there.”
“Yes,” she said. “That is not always the same thing.”
My phone was still switched off. I imagined Eli somewhere across town, awake now, perhaps furious with Nolan, perhaps furious with himself, perhaps telling everyone that if he could only speak to me for five minutes he could make me understand what he had meant.
The old June would have answered. Weakness had never been the problem; efficiency had.
She knew his voice when it cracked. Knew how long to let him pace. Knew which question would turn anger into shame and shame into something manageable. She could take an emotional emergency built by six people and return it to Eli in a shape he could carry.
Then she would call that love. Priya slid a representation agreement toward me.
“I need authority to communicate on the rights matter if you want me between you and them.”
I read the first page. Then the second. I asked three questions. Priya answered all three without irritation.
At the signature line, my hand stopped. I trusted Priya; the act itself simply felt larger than paper. For years, when something important happened, I had turned toward Eli first.
Good news. Bad news. Contracts I did not understand.
Decisions I did understand but did not want to make alone.
Even my own work had traveled through him.
I wrote. He sang. I remembered. He was quoted.
I noticed. He decided. The arrangement had become so ordinary I had mistaken delegation for marriage.
“June?” I picked up the pen.
“If they want to talk about the song,” I said, “they talk to you.”
“Exactly.”
“If they want access to the demo?”
“Through me.”
“Settlement offers?”
“Through me.”
“Credit changes?”
“Through me.”
“And if Eli asks?”
Priya did not answer quickly.
“That depends. Do you mean your husband, or do you mean the performer whose team is using your work?”
The question landed cleanly.
“For now,” I said, “the performer.”
“Then through me.” I signed. Priya took the agreement, added her signature, and closed the folder. Nothing dramatic happened. No room shifted. No marriage ended.
Outside, morning simply continued arriving over Nashville. But when Priya reached for the first notice, she did not ask Eli what I wanted. She asked me.
I answered.