Chapter 18
ASHER
In month nine, the final divorce decree took effect on the same day the stadium tour was officially canceled. The two emails arrived six minutes apart.
The first listed the rescheduled shows: venues with forty thousand to sixty thousand seats were canceled, and the eleven remaining cities were moved to theaters seating two thousand to four thousand.
Ticketholders could request refunds or exchange for the new dates.
The ticketing team told me most of the theaters would still sell out, and the new venues still required a full band, lighting, and rehearsals.
The second email had the court-issued decree attached. The first page gave the termination date of our nine-year marriage, with no sentence afterward judging which of us deserved forgiveness. My lawyer asked whether I needed to request a review.
“No.”
The lawyer marked the confirmation field. After the call ended, only the decree, already in effect, remained on the screen.
The desk calendar still had that day marked for the first rehearsal of the original stadium tour.
My assistant deleted six days of stage construction and replaced them with two theater rehearsals and a standard soundcheck.
Right beside those calendar entries, the decree confirmation field marked the end of our marriage.
I signed the confirmation field, filed the document in my private records, and left my phone face-down on the edge of the desk.
Sabrina released her own statement that week.
She acknowledged that she had known Leah was the author of “Still Burning” and had nonetheless requested and accepted a co-writing credit that was not hers.
She also stated that the final release paperwork, the plaque, and the overall publicity campaign had been approved by me.
The statement did not cast her as a victim or reduce my responsibility.
She lost the songwriting credit and the creative soulmate narrative but kept her history as a performer.
Two months later, her first solo single came out, and reviews still recognized her voice and stage presence.
The first time she appeared on television alone, the host asked about “Still Burning,” and she only repeated the facts from her statement, then sang as steadily as she always had.
I did not share the broadcast. Preserving her real work did not mean we needed to maintain private contact. We had no further contact.
During the same period, Micah, two other songwriters, and I finished a five-song EP.
At the start of every writing session, the split sheet went on the table, and at the end everyone confirmed their contributions on the spot.
The main melody on the third song came from Micah, the lyrics were written by another songwriter, and my contributions were guitar, structure, and revisions to two lines of the chorus, so I asked the producer to move my name from the customary first position to third.
When my name moved down the list, I stared at it for two seconds before clicking confirm.
I still sang that song. I had written another track on the EP entirely on my own.
It took six weeks, and I went through nine drafts. The early lyrics still sounded like I was imitating the way Leah would understand me, and by the third version I had even used an image she returned to often. I tore that page out and started over from the parts I could explain clearly on my own.
The night the chorus stalled on its final line, I saw Leah’s name in my contacts, and I put the phone back on the desk. The next day I asked Micah to listen to the silence.
“Do you want it to sound smarter, or more like you?” he asked.
I deleted three lines and kept the last one: I left the unfinished parts for someone else.
Micah asked me to sing it again. The line wasn’t elegant, and the high note gave me nowhere to hide. When the second take ended, no one in the control room spoke immediately.
“That’s it,” I said.
The finished song didn’t have the edge of Leah’s work or a single line a critic could call a perfect confession. It was simply, unmistakably mine.
When the EP came out, one review said Asher Vale remained an outstanding performer, but the new songs felt smaller, clumsier, and more honest. Another said I had lost the remarkable lyrical depth I once had.
The first show on the theater tour took place in an old theater with two thousand four hundred seats.
There was no documentary crew backstage and no sponsor walls on either side of the stage.
The audience still called my name when the lights went down, and someone in the front row held up an old record they had kept for years.
I introduced every song with its updated songwriting credit.
Before I sang the old hit, I said, “Lyrics and core melody by Leah Morgan. Guitar, arrangement, and vocals by me.”
Her name traveled through the whole theater from the speakers. The audience applauded, and I waited for the applause to end before I played the first chord. I did not turn that moment into a story about asking her to come back.
On past tours, a documentary clip of me writing alone in a motel room would have played before that song.
Now the screen showed only the corrected songwriting credit against a black background.
There were no photos of Leah and no unauthorized recordings of her.
The audience received the facts, not her private life.
In the second half of the show, I sang the song I had written entirely myself. No large screens, no flame effects. When the first verse ended, the audience was quieter than they had been for the old songs, and it wasn’t until the second chorus that anyone sang along.
It was not the most popular piece of the night. I sang it through to the end anyway.
Over the two months that followed, most of life happened in places without applause.
I revised lyrics that weren’t good enough in the recording studio and signed split sheets with collaborators based on our actual contributions.
The team processed monthly royalty settlements and platform syncs for the old catalog, and anything requiring Leah’s confirmation was relayed entirely through lawyers.
In the eleventh month, the last overseas platform completed the sync for all twelve works.
In the twelfth month, the recalculated back royalties were transferred into the account Leah had designated.
Her lawyer replied only to confirm receipt, and my team marked the item complete.
Each time, I had a plausible reason to write to her directly. I did not use any of them.
The hardest part turned out not to be signing. It was seeing her name in the recipient field, instinctively moving the cursor toward it, then pulling my hand back. There was no audience, and no light came on for that.
The house was still very quiet. The divorce documents that had been on the dining table were put away.
I packed the face-down wedding photo into a private box instead of sending it to Leah or throwing it away.
The half-empty bookshelf was never refilled.
I put only my own handwritten lyrics on the bottom shelf.
One afternoon in the thirteenth month, while I was revising the set list for the next theater show, a new email appeared in my personal inbox.
The sender was Leah Morgan. I stared at that name and did not open it immediately. We had been divorced for four months, and every necessary matter since then had been handled by lawyers. She did not owe me a personal email.
The message contained only a time and a place:
Next Wednesday, two o’clock. The coffee shop on Harbor Street. If you’d like, we could have coffee.
No catalog, no songs, no forgiveness, and no promise about the marriage.
I put my hand on the keyboard, deleted the first thing I had typed—“why”—and then deleted “what should I bring?”
In the end I replied with only:
I’ll be there.