Chapter 7
ASHER
When the new song finished playing, no one in the listening room spoke.
The last synthesizer tail faded from the overhead speakers, and the progress bar on the screen stopped at three minutes forty-two seconds.
Sabrina’s high notes were clean, and the chorus was big enough to stick by the second listen.
My guitar cut in before the bridge and pushed the final minute exactly where everyone expected it to land.
The label executive pressed the button on the desk, and the lights came back up. “Sounds like the old Asher.”
I waited for the second half of that sentence.
“But it’s missing what used to make people believe you.”
The outside songwriter sitting across from me looked down and flipped through the lyrics without pushing back.
He’d written most of the verses; I’d finished the melody, guitar, and structure; Sabrina had changed two harmony sections.
Everyone had done their part, but the formal splits were still sitting in Legal’s inbox, and no one had been in a hurry to settle them before the listening session.
“Be specific,” I said.
The audience-testing coordinator pulled the report up on the screen. “Melodic recall is very high, and the chorus scores well. The issue is emotional credibility. Core listeners kept coming back to three words: polished, familiar, distant.”
The report came in below the label’s target, but nowhere close to a failure.
Presales, the tour, and “Still Burning” were still strong, and the duet behind-the-scenes clip the team had released that day was still generating heat for the campaign.
The public believed in the pairing they saw onstage.
What they doubted was the part where the song actually started to speak.
If the next song still couldn’t hold the core audience, the stadium-tour upgrade and the old verdict about my voice being gone would both find their way back into the conference room.
“Do another version,” I said.
The executive shook his head. “The arrangement isn’t the problem.”
“Then change the lyrics.”
The outside songwriter finally looked up.
“If you want it more specific, you have to tell me what specific means. Every brief I’ve been given says loss, regret, wanting to fix things—but it can’t sound like a marriage statement, and it can’t touch any real creative dispute.
All I can write is someone losing something that could belong to anyone. ”
I looked at the lyrics on the screen. Every rhyme landed correctly. Every line was the right length for a breath. They said I was standing in an empty house, wanting someone to come back.
That house had nothing in common with the house I actually went home to.
On the real dining table, a lawyer’s notice was still pinned under a stack of papers.
Half the shelves in the study were bare.
The wedding photo Leah had turned face-down was still face-down.
I walked past it every night and never turned it back over.
None of that was something I’d told anyone. I’d never had to before. Leah would have seen it, and she would have taken the part I refused to admit and turned it into a line that sounded like I’d finally been honest.
“We can reach out to other songwriters,” my manager said.
“We’ve already cycled through four,” the executive answered.
Sabrina was sitting beside me. She tapped the lyric sheet with her fingertips. “Maybe the problem isn’t the songwriter.”
Everyone looked at her.
“Asher doesn’t believe this song,” she said. “He just wants it finished.”
Her read was accurate enough to make me uncomfortable. A few months ago, I would have liked having her understand me that clearly in front of a room full of people. Now that look still brought a moment of ease, and then it reminded me that Leah was in another city, speaking to me through lawyers.
“That’s enough for today.” I stood up. “Send me the report.”
On the way out of the listening room, my manager handed me his phone. Most of the comments still liked the production and our sound, but the top one asked:
He still sounds incredible. I just don’t know if he has anything left to say.
I handed the phone back and took the listening report home to the empty house that night. The divorce papers were still sitting next to the laptop. I pushed them a little farther away and wrote the most direct line I could think of beneath the first verse: I miss my wife.
It was true, but it didn’t sound like a lyric, and it didn’t sound like anything I would have sung before. I deleted wife and replaced it with home, then deleted the whole line. Leah would have known how to keep that true thing and still let me avoid admitting out loud what it had originally been.
I stared at the empty space. The listening report was still next to the laptop, the three words at the top: polished, familiar, distant. I kept deleting and rewriting, and what stayed on the screen was still just the next song.
At the next writing session, Sabrina asked to keep a co-writer credit on the next single.
“If you want me to keep carrying the other half of this entire campaign,” she said, “my name can’t suddenly disappear from the songwriting credits. The public will immediately start asking questions about ‘Still Burning.’”
“You didn’t write today’s song.”
“I changed the harmonies and one hook line.”
“That can be documented as an actual contribution, but it’s not an automatic co-writer credit.”
Sabrina looked at me for two seconds. “Now you care about that?”
I didn’t answer.
The streaming page for “Still Burning” still listed Asher Vale and Sabrina Knox as its songwriters.
The songwriting award was in the middle of its promotional cycle, and the documentary team had already cut the plaque moment into the trailer.
I could refuse to add a new error to the next song, but I was still profiting every day from the last one.
“Handle it according to actual contributions,” I said.
“And what about Leah?”
“That’s not your concern.”
Sabrina gave a short laugh. “It was my concern when she was writing the songs. Now that you want to move me out, suddenly it’s not my concern.”
After she left the studio, I had my lawyer resend the draft proposal.
The document was twenty-six pages, considerably thicker than the divorce notice.
It offered Leah an independent label, shared songwriting credit on all future work, a royalty split above the highest market rate, and a signing bonus large enough that any songwriter could live on it for the rest of their life.
She wouldn’t have to do press, wouldn’t have to give interviews, wouldn’t even have to stay in Los Angeles long-term.
The only thing it actually required of her was four songs in six months, at least one of which had to go to my comeback album.
I stared at that last condition and told myself it wasn’t a demand. She would get her name, her team, and control over her work. I would bring her out of the background and put her on equal footing with me. We could work together again, and working together could give us a way to talk again.
“Remove Sabrina from the next album,” I told my lawyer.
“What about her existing featured performer contract?”
“Keep what’s already been completed. Cancel future collaboration.”
My lawyer reminded me that this would trigger a breach penalty and might not help the divorce proceedings at all.
“I’m not doing this for the divorce negotiations,” I said.
I still had my lawyer write Sabrina’s removal into the proposal. In those twenty-six pages, her name disappeared from the future plans, and Leah’s four songs filled the space.
The document went out through both lawyers. For the next two days, I kept checking my email. Leah didn’t sign, and she didn’t propose changes. Her lawyer only confirmed receipt.
On the afternoon of the third day, an addendum finally arrived.
Leah Morgan agrees to one neutral twenty-minute meeting. The meeting is solely to respond to the proposal in person. Reconciliation will not be discussed. New songs will not be discussed.
I read that sentence three times. “Reconciliation will not be discussed” and “new songs will not be discussed” were both on the same line, but my eyes kept stopping on the word “agrees” the way a spotlight finds its mark.