Chapter 8
LEAH
The name on the poster was printed in twelve-point type.
It hung on the bulletin board downstairs at the arts center, wedged between a children’s choir enrollment notice and an ad for a used guitar. The black toner was uneven, and a staple had pressed a diagonal crease into the lower right corner.
Tess Rowan — Salt Through the Window
Song by Tess Rowan the lighting came from four old spotlights fixed to a crossbar, and a sticker from last winter’s fundraiser was still stuck to the side of the mixing board.
There would be no livestream, no professional photographer.
The audience would be students, neighborhood residents, and a few people passing through town for the weekend.
That morning, an entertainment journalist had emailed my lawyer saying she was willing to cover my first public creative work since the separation “in Leah’s own voice.
” She had already drafted a headline: Rockstar’s Forgotten Wife Writes Her Revenge.
She wanted to bring a camera crew to the show and was willing to promise she wouldn’t press me on the divorce.
I had my lawyer send back a refusal. “Salt Through the Window” was not a revenge song.
It was about sea wind, an old room, and how a person relearns to open a window after leaving.
Tess had written the original melody and imagery; I had helped her put into the lyrics what she actually wanted to keep.
The song didn’t need Asher’s name to explain it, and it shouldn’t borrow his scandal to find an audience.
During the afternoon rehearsal, Tess came in wrong at the bridge twice in a row.
“I get nervous just knowing you’re sitting out there,” she said.
“Then don’t look at me.”
“That’s hard. The second you frown, I feel like the whole section needs to be rewritten.”
“Nothing gets rewritten today.” I turned her lyric sheet back to the first page. “You already know what this song is saying. Sing it to the window, not to me.”
She made it through cleanly on the third try.
When the show started, I took a seat in the last row against the wall.
The first two songs were by students—one performer forgot a chord change, and another’s microphone cut out without warning.
The audience waited patiently and applauded anyway once the problems were sorted.
No one here stood to lose a stadium tour over a single mistake, and no one needed a romantic rumor to make a song feel important.
When Tess’s turn came, she announced her name and the title first.
“This song was written by me and Leah Morgan,” she said. “She’s in the back, but she didn’t want to come up.”
A few people in the front rows turned around. I didn’t hide—I just raised a hand to signal her to keep going.
When the first verse reached the window that kept blowing open in the wind, the room went quiet. Before the bridge, Tess glanced at me, then let her eyes settle on the old window at the side of the stage.
No manager came rushing in, no video went suddenly viral, no industry executive offered a contract on the spot.
Forty-seven people sat in the sixty-chair hall, and they were quiet for one second before they started to applaud.
An older woman in the front row raised a hand and wiped at the corner of her eye.
That was enough.
After the show, the woman who had wiped her eyes walked up to Tess and asked whether the song was available to buy online. Tess said there was no official recording yet; the woman looked a little disappointed, then pointed at the poster and asked, “Which one is Leah?”
Tess gestured toward the back. The woman came over to me. She didn’t say she recognized me as anyone’s wife—she only brought up the line in the bridge about salt settling on the windowsill.
“Did you write that line?” she asked.
“We wrote it together.”
“It’s beautiful.” She took my hand for a moment. “After my husband left, I went half a year without opening the bedroom window. When I heard that line just now, I thought maybe I could try tonight when I get home.”
She said that, put on her coat, and left. No request for a photo, no questions about Asher.
After the show, I helped stack the chairs. Tess took the poster down from the bulletin board and handed it to me; the edges had already started to curl.
“Keep it,” she said. “Your first poster.”
“It’s not the first.”
“First one with your name on it correctly.”
I took it.
Asher’s contract was still on the dining table back at the apartment.
The courier box was thick—inside, along with twenty-six pages of terms, was a handsomely bound presentation booklet.
The cover was printed with the name of the independent label I might own; the interior pages mocked up an office, a team, and the visual identity of future albums.
I set the ordinary poster down beside the contract and began reading page by page.
The signing bonus was enough to buy the building I lived in.
The royalty split was higher than any songwriter agreement I had ever seen.
I would hold a formal title, could decline interviews, and could sign other artists independently.
The first thirteen pages itemized, one by one, everything I had never publicly held in my own name.
On page fourteen, the conditions tightened.
Four songs in six months, with one to be offered first to Asher’s comeback album; all project timelines scheduled around his recording and touring cycle; key singles requiring me to be in Los Angeles for the recording; if I refused to deliver, the operating funds for the independent label could be suspended.
It gave me my name, and still dictated where my voice had to appear first.
The final appendix stated that Sabrina would withdraw from the next album and all future joint promotions. That page had clearly been designed to read as the most significant concession.
I looked at her name being written out of the future plans and felt no sense of victory. The appendix removed her; page fourteen still handed my time to Asher’s album and touring schedule. Placed side by side, the position had changed. The person assigning positions had not.
My phone lit up—my lawyer confirmed the meeting time for the following afternoon. The location was a neutral studio Evan had helped arrange. We would arrive separately; there would be no press and no private dinner.
I could have had my lawyer send the contract back. But if I only sent a refusal, Asher’s team would adjust the numbers, shorten the delivery window, and send another version. He would keep believing the problem could be solved for the right price.
On the last page, I wrote: Unsigned.
Before I left the next morning, I put the contract, the preliminary catalog list, and the show poster together in a document folder. The poster didn’t need to come with me, but I wanted to remember, before I saw Asher, why those forty-seven people had applauded the night before.
The neutral studio was on the north side of town, a twenty-minute drive from Evan’s archive studio. I arrived on time; the front desk brought me to a small conference room with no recording equipment.
Asher was already there.
After five weeks apart, he was a little thinner.
The sleeves of his black shirt were rolled to his elbows, and the same version of the contract I had received lay on the table in front of him.
When he stood, I saw the familiar relief in his eyes—as though my willingness to walk through the door already proved there was still a way back for us.
I didn’t respond to that. I set the document folder on the table. On the far side of the room, a display screen was mounted on the wall, paused on the title slide of a presentation: Leah Morgan — Creative Partnership & Future Catalog.
Below it, laid out in order, were a touring plan, a royalty split proposal, and a three-year collaboration timeline. For the twenty minutes I’d given him to hear my refusal, Asher had prepared a complete framework for how to keep using me.