Chapter Seven - A Wife with a Price
CHAPTER SEVEN
A Wife with a Price
By noon, I had acquired a motive.
Money. It appeared first in a headline I did not click.
SOURCES: ELI MERCER’S WIFE DEMANDS MILLIONS IN SONG DISPUTE.
The next version was worse because it sounded more respectable.
INSIDERS SAY PRIVATE MARITAL FEUD IS NOW A PUBLISHING BATTLE.
By one fifteen, a television producer had emailed the address on an old charity website asking whether I would appear remotely to “share my side.”
By one twenty, another asked if I wanted to respond to “claims that the dispute began after Mr. Mercer’s collaboration with Sadie Rowe.”
Claims. The word could make anything sound as though somebody had already proved it. I took my laptop to the kitchen table and did the thing Priya had told me not to do. I read just enough.
An unnamed person “close to the situation” said I had never objected to the song’s credits before Eli became involved with a younger singer.
Another source described the money being discussed as “life-changing.”
Someone who had apparently spent years near our marriage told a reporter that I had always been “comfortable with the arrangement” until the award show.
That one stopped me. Because it was true in the way a bruise could be described as a change in skin color. I had been comfortable.
Sometimes. I had also been tired, grateful, afraid of destabilizing the life the song had bought us, and very good at converting my own unease into a problem for later.
The article did not need those details. It needed a wife with a price.
The number in the headline bothered me for another reason. I had never demanded it.
Northline had put that figure on the table. Their offer had become my greed before I had even accepted that money should be part of the conversation. The direction of the transaction had been reversed in a single sentence: they offered, I became the woman demanding.
That was how a useful story worked. It did not need to invent every fact. It only needed to arrange the true ones until the person reading them reached the wrong conclusion without being told to. My phone rang.
Priya. I closed the laptop before answering.
“Tell me you didn’t read the stories.”
“I didn’t read the stories.”
“June.”
“I read three.”
“Then tell me you stopped.”
“I stopped.”
“Good.”
“Who talked?”
“We do not know yet.”
“Nolan.”
“Do not convert probability into evidence.”
I pressed the heel of my hand against my forehead.
“He used ‘private marital misunderstanding’ yesterday. Today an anonymous source calls it a private marital feud.”
“I noticed.”
“And the number?”
“The proposal amount is known to Northline’s counsel, Nolan’s management office, us, and possibly whoever had access to the internal negotiation summary.”
I stared at the dark laptop screen and my own faint reflection in it.
“All right.”
“Thank you.”
“I hate when you reward me for behaving.”
“Then stop making it noteworthy.”
Despite myself, I smiled. It disappeared when she continued.
“They are trying to provoke you into saying more than we want said.”
“Why?”
“Because an emotional wife is easier to negotiate with in public than a rights claimant with documents.”
I looked toward the plastic bin, mostly empty now.
“What are they saying about Sadie?”
“That depends which site you mean.”
“That is not an answer.”
“Some are implying the obvious triangle.”
My stomach turned.
“Has she said anything?”
“Not publicly.”
“Do we know whether she approved the sample, the bridge, or the dedication?”
“None of the three.”
“Then nobody gets to call her his mistress because I’m angry.”
“Agreed.” I stood and walked to the sink.
Outside, low clouds had settled around the ridge. The porch railing was wet, though I had not noticed rain begin.
“What can I say?”
Priya was quiet long enough that I knew the question mattered.
“What do you want to say?”
That Eli had not cheated. That I still loved him. That love was not the point. That I had written the song. That the first demo carried my voice because it had once carried my whole life. That the number in the leaked offer had not been my demand.
That a settlement large enough to impress strangers could still be cheap if what it purchased was another sixteen years of silence.
I wanted to say Nolan Briggs had been teaching the world to look through me since before my wedding.
I wanted to say my husband had let him. I wanted to say I had let him too.
The truth was too large for a statement.
“I don’t know.”
“Then say nothing today.”
The relief was immediate. So immediate it embarrassed me.
“Okay.”
“Silence is allowed.” Relief moved through me too quickly. Permission to do what I had always done best.
“June?”
“I’m here.”
“I mean it. You do not owe the public a performance because they have become curious.”
“I know.” We disconnected. For almost an hour, I felt better. I made soup from a can. I found a screwdriver that actually fit the loose handle on the bathroom cabinet. I stripped the bed and put the sheets into the washer. Ordinary work had edges. A task could be finished. The internet could not.
At two forty, someone knocked. My whole body tightened before common sense caught up. Eli would not knock again. Not after yesterday. I looked through the front window. Ada stood on the porch holding a paper grocery bag. I opened the door.
“I didn’t order anything.”
“Good afternoon to you too.”
She lifted the bag.
“You bought coffee and eggs this morning and then drove up a mountain to a house that’s been empty a year. I guessed your pantry had not healed itself in your absence.”
“I can pay you.”
“That sentence seems to follow you around.”
She handed me the bag. Bread. Apples. Butter. Coffee. A carton of eggs. Soup that had not come from a can.
“I’ll bring the money tomorrow.”
“Fine.” Ada glanced past me but did not step inside. The restraint registered.
“Water behaving?”
“Yes.”
“Back step?”
“Still trying to kill me.”
“I’ll give Cal a call.”
“I can find someone.”
“I know. Cal lives four minutes away and owes me for pie.”
That appeared to settle the economics.
Then her gaze moved to my face.
“I saw your picture.”
My grip tightened on the bag.
“Where?”
“Customer showed me something on her phone after you left.”
Of course. The mountain had delayed recognition, not abolished the internet. Ada leaned one shoulder against the porch post.
“She wanted to know if I knew you.”
“What was your answer?”
“That you had eggs.”
I stared at her.
“That’s all?”
“You didn’t tell me the rest.”
Something low in my chest loosened.
“I appreciate that.”
“Don’t. It’s basic manners.”
She started down the steps, then turned.
“For what it’s worth, people around here will get curious. Curious can be harmless without being private.”
“I understand.”
“If you want nobody to know your business, don’t mistake a small town for a monastery.”
“I won’t.”
“Good.” She left. I carried the groceries inside and put them away one item at a time. People would get curious. The public was curious already. For years, my solution to other people’s curiosity had been to make myself smaller than the question.
No comment. Eli handles the music. I’m just happy to support him. The credit never mattered to me. Those sentences had not been forced out of me. That was what made them difficult to forgive. I opened my laptop again. Another headline led the search results.
BITTER WIFE OR SECRET SONGWRITER? INSIDE THE MERCER MARRIAGE WAR.
Bitter wife. Secret songwriter. As if there were no version of me that could exist between insult and novelty.
I clicked despite myself. Halfway down the page was a photograph from eight years earlier.
Eli at an album-release party, Nolan beside him, me slightly behind them holding Eli’s coat because there had been nowhere to put it.
The caption identified me as “Mercer’s longtime wife, June.”
Longtime wife—never writer, never Bennett, never the woman whose notebook held the reason any of them had been photographed there. My first impulse was to close the screen. My second was older. Let it pass.
Headlines moved quickly. People lost interest. Publicists fed them something new. I could stay quiet, settle the rights dispute privately, disappear into Larkspur until the appetite moved elsewhere. Silence had protected me before.
Then I looked more carefully at the photograph. I remembered that night. A reporter had asked Eli who wrote the bridge on the new single. He had turned toward me because I had rewritten it in a hotel bathroom two weeks earlier. Nolan had answered before he could.
“Eli writes from instinct.”
Everybody laughed. Including me. I had made it easy, not from foolishness but because each individual moment had seemed too small to become a life. I picked up my phone.
Priya answered with, “What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“That is rarely how your calls begin now.”
“I want to make a statement.”
“About?”
“Only what we can prove.”
Her voice sharpened into work.
“Go on.”
“The ownership is disputed.”
“Correct.”
“I have counsel.”
“Also correct.”
“We are addressing it through the proper process.”
“That is safe enough, though bland.”
“I want one more thing.”
“What?”
“No allegation of infidelity.”
Priya paused.
“You want that affirmative?”
“I do.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m not going to let the internet punish Sadie for a story I’m not telling.”
“And Eli?” I looked at the rain stippling the window.
“And Eli.”
“Does saying that compromise how you understand the betrayal?”
“No.”
“Say why.”
“Because he did not have to sleep with another woman to erase me.”
Silence.
Then Priya said, “Good. That distinction matters.”
“I don’t want a paragraph about our marriage.”
“I wouldn’t recommend one.”
“No ‘we ask for privacy.’ No ‘difficult time.’ No ‘we love each other.’”
“Agreed.”
“No number. No response to the leaked offer.”
“Agreed.”
“And don’t call me Mrs. Mercer.”
Another brief pause.
“How do you want the attribution?”
I knew the answer before she finished asking.
“June Bennett Mercer.”
“All right.” She drafted while we were on the phone. The final statement was four sentences.
No adjectives. No accusation. No performance of devastation. Priya read it back. I changed one word.
Then I approved it. Ten minutes later, her office sent it to the reporters who had contacted us and posted the same text through a new professional account created under my full name. The statement did not tell anyone who to hate. It did not rescue my marriage. It did not explain the song.
It said the authorship and rights associated with the disputed works were being formally addressed through counsel. It said I would not comment on private negotiations. It said I had made no allegation of infidelity by Eli Mercer or Sadie Rowe.
My phone began vibrating again. On the new account, JUNE BENNETT MERCER sat above the four sentences. I turned the screen facedown and let it keep vibrating.