Chapter 4 #2
She had braced all week for the version where she was a woman taking half of something she had nothing to do with. That version was still out there, in the comments, where it lived.
Above it, in the actual pieces, something else had happened.
A critic at a place that mattered went back through six records with the corrected credits in hand and wrote two thousand words about what he had missed.
Somebody found a live clip from 2009 where a much younger Shane, drunk and happy at a festival, says this one's my wife's and then plays it.
Somebody else pulled the phrasing on three songs and laid them next to "Hold Still" and drew a conclusion out loud.
And under all of it, in every single piece, was a sentence about Shane Bishop that used the word remarkable.
Remarkable act of restitution. Remarkably, he simply signed it over. It is remarkable that a man in his position—
Jenna read four of them at the folding table with her coat on and understood that a thing was being decided about her life by people who had never been in her kitchen.
Nobody had asked her. Not one of them had called. The story had a hero in it and the hero had a publicist, or had until last week, and even without one the machine had found the shape it liked.
She thought: he did the right thing and it has cost me the last private thing I owned.
Then she made herself sit with the other half, because being accurate was the only thing she had that was entirely hers, and the other half was this: it was true.
He had signed it over. Whatever it bought him, it was still the truth about who wrote those songs, in public, forever, and no amount of her being angry about the packaging made it less true.
Both of those things were facts at the same time, and she was going to have to live in the room with both of them.
Grady called at nine, from a parking lot somewhere, and he was blunt about it because he was always blunt about it.
"I'll say the ugly thing," he said. "That filing cost me. Yesterday you were a woman with a claim. Today you're a woman with an asset, and the asset's tangled up with a man everybody's about to start liking again. My second deal got harder this afternoon and I'd be lying if I said I was glad."
"You're telling me to be careful."
"I'm telling you that I want something and so does he, and mine's on paper." He blew out a breath. "Be careful, Jenna."
She drove up the mountain on Sunday at first light, because there was a thing in the barn that belonged to her.
She had thought about it every day for three weeks. The third reel box from the left, with a folded piece of glossy paper in it, sitting on a shelf in a building she no longer went to.
She timed it for six in the morning because he had never in his life been up at six unless a plane made him.
The gate was open. The gravel was the same. The redbuds had dropped and the whole hill had gone brown and open the way it does in the middle of October, and she could see the house from further down the drive than she could in summer.
There was one light on up there, in the kitchen.
She sat in the truck for a minute with the engine off and looked at it.
Then she went into the barn, which was unlocked, because it had never once been locked.
It was cold. The board was off. It smelled the way it always smelled, which nearly took her legs out from under her — dust and old tape and the ghost of the woodstove — and she stood inside the door until it passed.
The reel box was where she left it. She got the printout out and put it in her jacket and put the box back, square with the others, out of twenty years of habit.
Then she saw the piano.
The lid was up. There was a page on the music desk and about nine more on the floor around the bench, and a pencil, and a coffee cup that had been there long enough to have a ring in the bottom of it.
She did not go over and read them. She wanted to. She stood there and wanted to for what felt like a long time, and then she turned around and went out and shut the door.
She was almost at the truck when the kitchen light went off up at the house.
He was awake. He had been awake, at six in the morning, and he had seen her truck come up the drive, and he had turned the light off so that she would not know he was standing there.
Jenna drove down the mountain with both hands on the wheel and her jaw set and something enormous and unwelcome sitting in her chest.
He hadn't come down.
That was all. He had watched her come and he had watched her go and he had not come down the hill, and no man she had ever known would have done that, least of all him.
She drove back to Charlotte on Monday to sign the first round of papers, because that was the appointment, and because you keep the appointment.
It was cold for October. She had been to Biltmore Avenue the week before and there was a second printout in the glovebox now, and something on it had a heartbeat, and she had sat in the parking lot afterward for twenty minutes with the engine off.
Ten weeks.
Angela's conference room had a long table and a view of the parking deck. The papers were in a stack with little colored tabs down the side, dozens of them, each one saying sign here in a friendly font.
She uncapped the pen.
She thought about a filing on a Thursday with no photographer. She thought about the credits on these records were wrong, they are correct now, which was, she realized, sitting there, the only sentence he had ever said about her work in public that was not about how lucky he was.
She thought: he still hasn't apologized. He still doesn't know what he did. He gave away sixty million dollars and he still thinks the crime was paperwork.
And under that, in a smaller and much worse voice: then why did he do it.
Angela came in with coffee and stopped in the doorway.
Jenna was sitting with the pen in her hand, over the first tab, and had been for a long time.
"Take your time," Angela said.
"I drove here to do this."
"I know."
Jenna put the pen down on the table, very carefully, as though it might go off.
"I can't," she said.