Chapter Six - The Song Goes Dark
CHAPTER SIX
The Song Goes Dark
The first sign that Priya’s notices had landed was a gray box where the play button had been.
I was standing at the kitchen counter with a screwdriver between my teeth, trying to replace the battery in a smoke detector that had begun chirping every forty-three seconds.
My phone rested beside a mug of coffee. The music app was still open from the night before.
The duet artwork remained. Eli in black.
Sadie in white. My title underneath them.
But the track would not play.
UNAVAILABLE.
I took the screwdriver from my mouth. The smoke detector chirped.
“Of course you have something to say.”
I climbed down from the chair and refreshed the screen.
Unavailable. A second service showed the song in my listening history but returned an error when I touched it. On a third, the duet had disappeared from Eli’s release page entirely. My pulse did not leap. There was no rush of triumph.
I felt the same way I had when the power went out during a storm and every appliance in the house stopped at once: aware of the sudden quiet, and of everything waiting behind it. Priya called before I could call her.
“Don’t celebrate.”
“I wasn’t.”
“Good. Two services disabled access after receiving notices. Northline’s distributor has temporarily pulled the release from the others while counsel reviews the claims.”
“So it’s down.”
“For now.” I leaned against the counter.
“For now sounds expensive.”
“It can be. It can also change. A takedown is not a judge deciding you own everything. Northline can dispute the notices, send counter-material, negotiate, or decide to keep the track offline while they sort this out.”
“I understand.”
“Do you?”
“You keep asking me that.”
“Because you keep living in situations where people confuse movement with victory.”
The smoke detector chirped again, demanding attention from the ceiling.
“Can I throw something at the ceiling?”
“Not if it belongs to your aunt’s estate.”
“It belongs to me.”
“Then legally, I have no opinion.”
That got a laugh out of me. Priya let it pass without commenting.
“Northline’s lawyer wants a call at noon. They sent a proposal first.”
“Already?”
“They moved fast because early settlement language can lock the frame before we answer it.”
“What do they want?”
“A confidential resolution of the new-release dispute. The duet stays down for seventy-two hours while they replace the sampled material and revert the bridge. They pay you a negotiated fee for the demo use and additional consideration for the lyrical changes.”
I waited. There was more. Priya never changed her cadence before delivering good news.
“And?”
“The existing authorship metadata on the original song remains untouched pending a separate review.”
The catch was exactly where I expected it. I perched against the kitchen table.
“They want to buy the new problem and keep the old lie.”
“That is one interpretation.”
“It is the accurate one.”
“They would disagree with your adjective.”
“I don’t care.”
“I figured.” The cabin had warmed enough that the old pine walls were giving off a dry resin smell. Outside, wind moved through the branches with a sound too low to be called rustling. I could see the plastic evidence bin near the opposite end of the table.
The sunflower notebook was no longer inside it. Priya’s office had the original now, sealed and documented. I had a scan on my laptop. Twenty-four-year-old me had written the first line of The Light That Waited beneath a grocery list.
Milk. Bread. Cold medicine. Leave the porch light on. One ordinary life stacked on top of another.
“How much money?” I asked.
Priya named a figure. I sat with the number.
It was more than my mother had earned in several years of work.
Less than Eli’s last tour grossed in a night.
Enough to make refusal feel theatrical if you only saw the number and not what it purchased.
The number had a history attached to it whether Northline knew that or not.
When the first royalty checks came in, Eli and I had paid off the credit card we used for my mother’s prescriptions.
We bought a refrigerator that did not need a chair wedged under the handle to stay closed.
Later came the house, the retirement accounts, the cars that started every morning.
Each improvement had made the old bargain easier to defend.
I had not been dragged into invisibility. That would have been a simpler story.
I had participated in it every time security arrived and I told myself the missing credit was merely a technicality.
Every time Eli asked if I was sure and I said yes because there was finally money in the bank.
Every time I treated future correction as safer than present disruption. That did not make the song less mine.
It did mean I knew exactly how powerful a comfortable compromise could be. The figure Priya had just named could buy years of independence if I needed them. A different house. Studio time. Legal fees. Space to become June Bennett again without checking a joint account before every decision.
All I had to do was accept language that turned the reason for the payment into fog. I understood the temptation. That was why I did not trust myself to call it generosity.
“And confidentiality means what?”
“They want mutual non-disparagement, no public discussion of the dispute terms, and language stating the parties resolved a misunderstanding concerning legacy creative materials.”
“Misunderstanding.”
“That’s their word.”
“Whose misunderstanding?”
“The draft is strategically vague.”
I stood and carried my coffee to the sink although the mug was still half full.
“They used my recording.”
“They did.”
“They changed my lyrics.”
“According to the evidence we have, yes.”
“They sold the duet under credits that still don’t name me.”
“Correct.”
“And the solution is to call it a misunderstanding, pay me, make a new version, and leave the song that built his career exactly as it is.”
“That is the offer.”
“No.” Priya did not answer.
“No,” I repeated.
“I heard you.”
“I want the original credits addressed.”
“Then we reject or counter.”
“Reject.”
“June, a counter does not mean acceptance. It can define the structure you actually want.”
I turned toward the window. A squirrel ran along the porch railing and stopped to inspect an acorn lodged between two boards. The world had an infuriating amount of room for things that did not care about me.
“What would the counter say?”
“That you are willing to discuss the new master only as part of a broader correction process: authorship metadata, accounting, past publishing income, future use, and the public record.”
“That’s the structure.”
“That will make this slower.”
“Let it.”
“It may make them more aggressive.”
“Also good.”
“No. Not also good. Predictable is not the same as good.”
I rubbed my thumb over the edge of the counter.
“Then predictable.”
“Better.” Her voice shifted slightly.
“There’s another attachment.” I waited.
“Nolan drafted a public statement.”
My stomach tightened.
“Read it.”
“I can summarize.”
“I want the words.”
Priya was quiet for a second, then read:
“Eli and June Mercer are navigating a private marital misunderstanding arising from the creative evolution of a beloved song. Eli remains devoted to his wife, and both parties ask fans to respect their privacy while the label addresses routine rights questions surrounding the new recording.”
The cabin seemed to shrink. Private marital misunderstanding.
Creative evolution. Routine rights questions. Every sharp edge sanded until nobody could tell who had bled.
“Both parties?” I said.
“You did not approve it.”
“Then he cannot say both parties.”
“That is my position.”
“Routine?”
“I objected to that too.”
“And ‘marital.’ The rights issue isn’t a marital issue.”
“Correct.”
“If we were divorced this morning, my demo would still be my demo.”
“Exactly.”
“If I had never married Eli, the authorship question would still exist.”
“Exactly.”
“Then why does every sentence turn me back into his wife?”
Priya did not answer immediately.
“Because ‘wife upset with famous husband’ is a story the public already knows how to consume.”
I sat again.
“And ‘uncredited writer asserts rights’ is not.”
“It is less convenient.”
I thought of the television graphic.
WHO IS MRS. MERCER?
They had found a way to make my disappearance about my relationship to him before anyone had bothered to ask what I had made.
“No statement,” I said.
“None from us?”
“Not yet.”
“And Nolan’s?”
“He does not use my name in that language.”
“I’ll send that instruction.”
“He’ll say silence is making it worse.”
“He already has.”
“What did you say?”
“That you retained counsel for the rights matter and all proposed references to you require approval.”
I smiled despite myself.
“That must have delighted him.”
“I bill by the hour. His delight is not a metric.”
The line went quiet for a moment.
Then Priya said, “June, I need one more decision.”
“Go.”
“Northline wants confirmation that you are not trying to interfere with the original 2009 master while we negotiate.”
I pictured Eli’s first commercial recording. His younger voice. The guitar introduction we had argued about for two days. The photograph from the album booklet where my name appeared only in the thank-you section, between Nolan and a vocal coach.
“Are they entitled to that confirmation?”
“They are entitled to ask. We decide what we can truthfully say.”
I thought about the difference Priya had drawn on the legal pad. Composition. Home demo. Released master.
“I’m not trying to make the old recording disappear.”
“That helps.”
“I’m trying to make the record tell the truth about who wrote it.”
“I can work with that.”
“And I don’t want fans losing something they bought fifteen years ago just because the label is afraid of me.”
“I can work with that too.”
“Put it in writing.”
“I will.” We ended the call. The silence afterward lasted less than a minute.
Then my phone began vibrating across the table with alerts rather than calls. A trade publication had posted a breaking item.
MERCER-ROWE DUET PULLED AMID RIGHTS DISPUTE.
Another followed.
NORTHLINE PAUSES RADIO PROMOTION OF AWARD-SHOW RELEASE.
Then the entertainment sites found those headlines and removed the boring nouns.
MARRIAGE CRISIS HITS ELI MERCER’S MUSIC.
JUNE MERCER PULLS HUSBAND’S NEW DUET.
WIFE WAGES WAR OVER LOVE SONG.
I turned the screen facedown. The song had been unavailable for perhaps forty minutes. The smoke detector chirped above me.
I dragged the chair back under it, replaced the battery, and snapped the cover shut. The detector stayed quiet.
On the table, my phone lit with another headline. I left it there and tightened the battery cover one final turn.