Chapter 5
LAUREL
There’s something perverse about being held by the man who has just robbed you, like getting tucked into bed after the burglar finishes loading your television into his truck.
Grant’s thumb moves once over my knuckles.
An old habit. He does it when he thinks I’m anxious, the same small stroke he gave me under restaurant tables before meetings, beneath hospital blankets before surgery, backstage the night I tried to perform for the first time after the damage and made it halfway through the second song before my voice gave out.
“Laurel.” I pull my hand from his, ignoring the disapproving grunt he makes. “We need to talk.”
“That may be the first intelligent thing you’ve said today.”
Sloane takes her bow beneath the lights as photographers crowd the foot of the stage, and I watch her smile with my lyrics still warm in her mouth.
People are crying. One woman near the front has her hand over her heart. A radio executive I’ve known for ten years turns toward Grant and says, “That chorus is fucking lethal,” and my husband thanks him.
He thanks him.
Not a smidgen of hesitation in his bones; just that insidious Grant Mercer smile that has sold out arenas, bourbon endorsements, and the national fantasy that the man beside me came out of his mother’s womb knowing how to write a bridge. An ember of anger glows to life in my chest.
“Your office,” I say.
Grant reaches for my elbow, but I step away before his fingers can close around me, and his face hardens at the rejection. “Don’t make a scene.”
For one second I think I misheard him. Then I laugh, one short sound I don’t recognize as mine. “You put another woman onstage singing a song you stole from me, and you’re worried I might embarrass you?”
His eyes cut toward the people around us. Of course they do. Grant has spent years learning where every camera is before he scratches his nose. “Keep your voice down.”
“I spent four years keeping my voice down.” I look toward the stage, where Sloane is receiving a standing ovation for the song that lived untouched on my hard drive because I couldn’t bear to hear the girl I used to be sing it. “Look how well that worked out for me.”
∞∞∞
Grant shuts the office door behind us and turns the lock, and I remember helping him choose this room.
That almost makes me laugh. Five years ago, the building was still studs, concrete, and contractor dust, and Grant walked me through it wearing the Titans hat I’d bought him, the one he’d insisted was too precious to wear until I threatened to throw it away.
He wanted the corner office facing downtown.
I told him the western windows would roast him alive every afternoon.
He told me he liked the skyline. I told him rich men would tolerate heatstroke if someone promised them floor-to-ceiling glass.
He kissed me senseless against the unfinished wall and chose the office anyway.
Now the wall is walnut, his Grammys sit in a lit cabinet, and the desk between us costs more than our first three cars put together.
My money paid the deposit on this building.
The publishing checks from songs I had written before anybody knew his name, the inheritance Daddy left me that Grant swore we’d put back the minute the label turned a profit.
We replaced some of it. I stopped asking about the rest because husbands and wives build things together, and keeping score seemed ugly when I still believed we were on the same team.
“Tell me how my song ended up on Sloane Avery’s album.”
Grant exhales through his nose and tosses his jacket over the back of his chair before lowering himself into it. “I found the demo in the archive.”
“I know where you found it. I asked what gave you the right to use it.”
“It was sitting there, Laurel.”
“So is your mother’s china. Should I sell that too?”
His mouth flattens. “Don’t do this.”
“Do what? Understand my husband is a thief?”
His eyes narrow. “Make it something it isn’t.”
“You registered yourself as the writer.” A silence so loud you can hear a cricket settle over the room. “Didn’t you?”
“The publishing paperwork needed to move.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“Jesus Christ.” He drags a hand over his face. “You haven’t touched that song in eight years.”
I stare at him. “And?”
“And you weren’t going to record it.”
“And?”
“Sloane needed a lead single. I knew the song would work for her.”
“And?”
His temper flashes. There he is. The Grant the public never gets because that Grant would lose sponsorships.
“What the fuck do you want me to say?”
“Try the truth. It’ll be a fun change of pace.”
He plants both hands on the desk. “Fine. The truth? You stopped recording. You stopped writing for release. You have hundreds of songs sitting in boxes and on drives collecting dust while I’m running a company with more than sixty-three employees.
Sixty-three people who depend on those paychecks.
People with families. Mortgages. Lives. And you expect me to keep funding an artist who refuses to be one because you’re sentimental about a demo from 2018.
” The words hit, but his next ones draw blood. “You’re not an artist anymore, Laurel.”
Blood drains from my face. Grant sees it.
I know he does because he raises one hand toward me and stops.
Too late. Four years of swallowing grief, four years of smiling when strangers asked if I missed singing, four years of telling myself that marriage wasn’t a competition and his success did not make my loss larger—and this motherfucker has been standing beside the grave with a shovel in his hand.
“Interesting.” My voice barely rises above the hum of the vent. “When you needed my song, you knew I was an artist. You knew exactly what you were taking. Now that you have it, suddenly I’m not one anymore.”
A knock sounds at the door, and Grant immediately grunts, “No.”
I glance over my shoulder at him, confused by the sharpness in his voice, but another knock comes before I can ask who he’s expecting. I walk to the door and pull it open, and my breath stutters.
Sloane stands on the other side.
For a moment, I simply stare at her, taking in the jeans and black tank top she’s changed into after the performance, the stage makeup still framing her green eyes, her hair falling loose around her shoulders.
She looks nothing like the woman who stood beneath the lights twenty minutes ago, singing my song to a room full of people while my husband watched from the wings.
Grant’s chair scrapes against the floor behind me. His head snaps up, and the second his eyes land on Sloane, something in his face changes.
“Get out.”
Sloane’s eyes flick toward him, then back to me.
I don’t know why I step aside. Maybe because I need to hear whatever she came here to say. Maybe because some part of me already knows there is no version of this conversation that gets easier by keeping it in the hallway.
“Come in.”
She hesitates, then walks past me. I shut the door.
“We need to talk.”
“No, you need to leave.”
“Grant—”
“Sloane.” A strange note slips into the way he says her name.
I’ve heard my husband say that woman’s name a hundred times—over dinners, in meetings, during interviews, on phone calls—but I have never heard that version. Familiar. Irritated. Intimate enough to have history in it.
I begin connecting the dots. My mind goes to the office soap he said he used, the scent clinging to his throat, his damp hair, the four unanswered calls.
I turn toward Sloane. “What hotel was he at when I was calling him?”
It’s an assumption. I wonder why I chose the word hotel, because I have no idea where Grant was when I was calling him.
But I need to see what she does with the question.
If she answers too quickly, hesitates, looks at Grant, gives me some lame attempt at a lie. Anything that tells me I guessed right.
Grant goes rigid. Sloane’s eyes move to him.
Oh.
“Laurel.”
“I didn’t ask you.” The words leave my mouth with such calm that Grant shuts his. “What hotel?”
She swallows. “The Conrad.”
There are moments that announce themselves when your life changes.
A car screaming around a corner. A phone call in the middle of the night.
A doctor walking into a room with pity already etched across his face.
Moments that make it clear, before anyone says a word, that the life you walked into is not the one you will walk out of.
Then there are moments like this one, when the air stalls and somewhere outside, a copier spits out paper while fourteen years of your life rearrange themselves around a name.
Conrad.
“How did you know I called him?” I ask.
Grant comes around the desk. “Laurel, enough.”
My eyes stay on hers. “I asked what hotel he was at when I called, and you knew exactly which hotel I meant. So how did you know?”
Sloane’s lips part. To anyone else, it might look like she wants to take back a mistake she just blurted out. But I am not some witless little wife she can feed a story to and expect to swallow whole.
She knows her game.
So do I.
“I saw his phone.”
“Where?”
“Laurel.” Grant snags my arm.
I look down at his hand, my teeth clenched. How many times has he touched her with those hands? The thought turns my stomach.
I wait until he removes it.
My hands are shaking. My skin feels wrong, prickling all over, suddenly too tight and unfamiliar, like I’ve been shoved out of my own body and left standing beside it.
I look at Grant and remember him over me this morning, remember how happy I was that we finally felt connected after months of missing each other in the same house.
His mouth at my shoulder, his wedding ring cold against my hip, the quiet I love you he murmured into my hair afterward when I accused him of trying to make me late for my appointment.
I laughed, kissed his chest, and told him fourteen years had done nothing for his self-control.
He kissed me again and said thousands more probably wouldn’t either.