Chapter 4
Angela Mackey had a whiteboard, and by the second week of October it had Jenna's life on it in four columns.
"This is the part people hate," Angela said. "I'm going to say some numbers and you're going to feel like a bad person. You're not. It's just a list."
"Go ahead."
"Land and house — his name, bought before the marriage. Barn's on the same deed. The band's an LLC and you're nowhere in it. Touring income, his." She tapped along. "Publishing sits in Redbud Songs. You're a member on paper. Two percent."
"Two."
"Two." Angela didn't soften it. "Masters on the first two records reverted five years ago into an entity you're also not in. And then there's this." She wrote PRENUP and underlined it once. "Signed a month before the wedding. Drafted when the two of you had a truck and six thousand dollars."
Jenna almost laughed. "There was nothing to protect."
"There wasn't. That's what makes it useful to him now — a court likes a clean old document. Everything you built came after it, and the paper says everything he built is his."
The room had a window with a view of a parking deck. Jenna looked at it for a second.
"So what does he do," she said.
"If he's smart? He slows it down. He offers you a number that's generous by any normal standard and insulting by yours, and he lets the calendar do the rest." Angela capped the marker.
"Look. Men like this don't fight you. They wait.
They have people who bill by the hour and you have a folding table. "
"I have money."
"You have money he gave you. That's a different thing in a room like this and you'll find out how."
Jenna sat with it.
"He won't do it," she said.
Angela looked at her over the glasses.
"They all do it," she said.
She let Jenna sit with that for a second, and then she did something Jenna had not expected, which was to put the marker down and sit on the edge of the table.
"Can I tell you the part nobody says out loud?"
"Please."
"You're going to spend the next year proving that you exist." Angela folded her arms. "Not that you were wronged — that's easy, that's a filing.
That you existed. That there was a person in that house doing work.
And the way you prove it is with documents, and you don't have any, because for twenty years the two of you were in love and nobody in love writes anything down. "
"I have the notebooks."
"You have your own handwriting, which his lawyers will call a diary." Angela shrugged. "I'm not telling you it's hopeless. I'm telling you it's slow and it's humiliating and it works about seventy percent of the time. I want you to hear that number before you decide anything."
Jenna looked at the whiteboard, at her life in four columns.
"Seventy," she said.
"Seventy. And Mrs. Bishop — " Angela stood up and got the marker again. "The other thirty percent aren't women who were wrong. They're women who got tired."
She drove to Nashville on the Thursday because it was five hours and she could not stand another day in the room.
Ames Music Group was two floors above a tire place on the wrong end of Music Row, and Grady Ames came out to the parking lot to meet her, which nobody in that town did.
He was fifty-five, no gloss on him anywhere, a man who looked like he sold farm equipment.
"Well," he said. "Twenty years."
"Five, Grady. You've only been calling five."
"Felt like twenty."
His office had one gold record on the wall and forty boxes on the floor. He moved a stack off a chair for her and sat on the edge of the desk instead of behind it.
"I'm going to talk fast because you'll leave if I don't," he said.
"I want your catalogue. I have wanted it since I heard the second record in a rental car in 2011 and figured out inside two songs that Shane Bishop didn't write it.
Not because he's dumb. Because nobody writes like that and then talks like that. "
"That's not a compliment to my husband."
"It's a hell of a compliment to you." He picked up a folder and didn't open it.
"Here's the shape. There's two deals. Number one, you sign as a writer, here, under your own name.
Advance, admin, we go get everything that's yours and we go get it hard.
That deal is real today and it doesn't care what happens in your marriage. "
"And number two."
"Number two is you make a record."
Jenna looked at him.
"You've got a voice," Grady said. "I heard it on those old demos. Everybody's heard it on those old demos. And right now there is a hole in the ground where a story used to be and the whole country's standing around it."
"You want the divorce record."
"I want a record. The divorce is why anybody buys it in the first eight weeks.
" He held up a hand before she could say it.
"I'm not going to lie to you and I'd rather you hate me honest. That deal only works if you're the woman who left.
If you go back up that mountain in February it's worth about a third and I won't be able to get it funded. "
"So you need me to stay gone."
"I need you to be who you are today," Grady said. "But yeah. That's the same sentence, mostly."
She had come five hours with her whole life in a milk crate and this was, so far, the only person who had told her the truth about what he wanted.
"What's it worth?" she said. "The catalogue. If somebody bought it clean."
Grady scratched the back of his neck.
"Sixty," he said. "Somebody'd pay you sixty tomorrow.
And if we go get the credits properly it's more, but the credits are a war, Jenna.
That's the ugly part. You're going to spend three years in depositions arguing that you wrote your own songs, and his lawyers will make it sound like a woman who typed some things up and got ideas about it, and you'll sit there and hear it. "
"I know what it'll sound like."
"You don't," Grady said. "But you will."
His phone went off on the desk. He glanced at it, and then he stopped talking, which she would remember, because Grady Ames did not stop talking.
He picked up the laptop and turned it around to face her.
It was a trade filing, and then it was four trade sites, and then it was everywhere.
Corrected credits, all six albums, filed that morning. Every song. Words and music by Jenna Bishop. Publishing splits restated back to the first record. A transfer of writer's share, executed, not proposed, dated the ninth of October.
There was a statement. It was two sentences long, and it did not have Hal Fitch's fingerprints on it anywhere, because it had no warmth in it at all.
The credits on these records were wrong. They are correct now.
That was it. No apology, no request, no mention of a marriage, no mention of a single, no photograph.
Jenna read it three times.
"Jesus Christ," Grady said quietly. "Do you know what he just did?"
"He fixed the credit."
"He didn't fix the credit. Fixing the credit is a press release.
" Grady put the laptop down. "He signed over twenty years of writer's share.
That's every dollar those songs have made since you were eighteen and every dollar they will ever make.
There's a number on this and the number's enormous and he did it in a filing, on a Thursday, without a photographer. "
"That doesn't sound like him."
"It doesn't sound like anybody." Grady sat down properly, in a chair, for the first time. "I've been doing this thirty years. Nobody does that. They fight, they settle, they take a picture with you on the courthouse steps. Nobody just hands it over."
Her phone was on the desk. She looked at it.
He had not texted her.
That was the part that got under the ribs.
He had done it at nine that morning and it was two in the afternoon and there was nothing on her phone, no did you see, no I told you I'd fix it, no does this help.
In twenty years the man had never once done a thing without telling her about it within the hour.
"He didn't call me," she said.
"No," Grady said. "He didn't."
Angela Mackey called at four while Jenna was on I-40 with the mountains coming up in the windshield.
"I need you to understand that I've never seen this," Angela said.
"Is it a trick?"
"That's what I've spent five hours trying to find and I can't find it.
He instructed his people to stop contesting.
All of it. In writing. My phone calls are being returned in nine minutes by people who bill nine hundred dollars an hour.
" A pause. "Jenna, he had the prenup. He had the clean old document.
He had a fifteen-year war he could have made you fight and a very good chance of winning it.
He put the guns down and then he gave you the field. "
"So what do I do?"
"Legally? Nothing. You're protected past anything I could have gotten you."
"That's not what I asked."
There was a long quiet on the line, and when Angela spoke again she sounded less like a lawyer.
"I told you a generous thing was coming and not to decide anything on the day it lands," she said. "This is that day. Don't decide anything."
Jill called at six and had already made up her mind.
"It's a strategy," she said. "It's the best one I've ever seen and I want you to hear me say that.
He gave up money. He has an enormous amount of money and he gave up the kind he doesn't miss, and in exchange he gets to be the man who did it, forever, in every article about you for the rest of your life. "
"That's cynical, even for you."
"It's Thursday and there are already three pieces up calling him remarkable." A rustle of paper. "Jenna. Ask yourself one question. Did he say sorry?"
Jenna drove for a mile.
"No," she said.
"There you go."
But that was the thing. He hadn't. There was no apology anywhere in it, no ask, no door left open, no now can we talk. If it was a play, it was a play with the payoff cut out.
By Saturday she had become a story, and it was not the story she expected.