Chapter 7
GRANT
I’m sitting across from my mother at Kayne Prime, staring at my phone as Laurel ignores my ninth call.
Nine fucking times.
At some point, this stops being ignoring and becomes a statement, and I’ve no idea what the hell she thinks she’s saying.
I’m not panicking. Not a bit. I refuse to give my own nervous system the satisfaction.
Mom watches me place my phone facedown beside my plate, irritation pinching her features. “I’ve spent years boasting to your wife about how you’re never late for anything, and you keep finding new ways to make a liar out of me. Where is she?”
“Home.”
“Why?”
“Headache.” The lie leaves my mouth so smoothly, it might as well be the truth.
Mom takes a sip of wine and studies the empty chair next to me, where the restaurant has placed a folded napkin and a small arrangement of garden roses Laurel always complains are wasted because no one is allowed to take them home.
Warren, my mother’s second husband, is talking to an older man he knows at the next table and misses the exchange.
Good.
Warren has the emotional instincts of a golden retriever and would ask whether Laurel needs soup.
“She knew this dinner was for your anniversary.”
Something about that gets under my skin. “I’m aware what day it is.”
“Are you?” She lifts one eyebrow. At sixty-two, Celia Hargrove is all silver-blonde bob, cream silk, and diamonds my father bought her before he died, stones she still wears even while married to another man.
I wouldn’t blame her. The son of a cunt didn’t leave either of us a dime when death finally got around to him.
“You remembered when someone reminded you, didn’t you? ”
“I didn’t forget.”
My calendar marked the dinner, but how the fuck was I supposed to remember any of this shit when the showcase—and Sloane’s wet pussy wrapped around my cock—was all I could think about?
The image of her naked body flashes through my mind again, and I shift in my seat, trying to adjust myself without making it obvious.
Christ! I’m getting a fucking hard-on sitting across from my mother.
“Laurel texted me a few days back for the recipe for that coconut cake I used to make when you were a boy. She wanted to have one made for you.”
My stomach free-falls. “What does cake have to do with anything?”
“Nothing. But that is generally how anniversaries work.” She unfolds her napkin. “Small things people remember because the person matters.”
I lean back. “You’ve spent years criticizing my wife, and now you’re chairing the Laurel Mercer fan club?”
“I criticize everybody. It is one of the few democratic things about me.”
Warren glances over with a beatific smile that grates on my nerves. I rub a hand down my mouth to hide my scowl.
“We had a disagreement.”
“Clearly.”
“Drop it, Mom.”
Her eyes move over my face. My mother has spent thirty-eight years learning exactly what I look like when I’m lying, which makes lying to her more effort than I enjoy spending.
“What did you do?”
“Why does everyone assume it was me?”
“Because Laurel once apologized to a waiter after he spilled soup on her, and I birthed you.”
I almost smile at that. The soup. If she weren’t being such a pain in the ass right now, I probably would.
Five minutes before an interview, a waiter spilled tomato bisque down the front of Laurel’s white dress.
She didn’t give a shit about the dress. She was more concerned with the look on the kid’s face, like he was already expecting to be fired, and spent the next few minutes reassuring him while she stood there covered in soup.
That’s Laurel. It always has been.
She can make generosity feel like the most obvious thing in the world, so effortless you forget it costs her anything at all. I’ve known that about her for fourteen years. I’ve loved it about her for almost as long.
So where is that generosity now, when I need it most?
“She’ll cool off,” I say.
Mom puts down her wine. “That’s what men say right before they discover their wives don’t.
” My eyes snap to hers. For one tense second, I wonder if she knows something, but she reaches for the bread, tearing off a piece like she hasn’t just put a match to my nerves.
“Whatever you did, fix it before Sunday. I’m not having you two show up to the Hargrove dinner looking like you’ve spent the week trying to kill each other. Warren has the governor coming.”
Relief punches out of me, my cheeks puffing with the exhale. “Glad we found an emergency to end the dispute.”
My phone vibrates.
Thinking it’s Laurel, finally coming to her senses, every muscle in my back releases before I even look at the screen.
I pick it up, only to find a message from the one person I really shouldn’t be hearing from right now.
Sloane: Are we done? I miss having you inside me
I swipe the notification away without answering.
My mother watches me. “Laurel?”
“Work.”
Another lie. They’re breeding now.
The call from Erin comes before the entrées arrive.
I step outside to take it because Laurel still hasn’t answered me, Sloane has sent three more messages with pictures I’ve been trying like hell not to disappear into the bathroom and fuck my fist over, and the restaurant suddenly feels six inches wide.
Heat rolls off Division Street despite the sun going down, the pavement radiating the last of the day back into the air. I loosen my collar and press the phone to my ear, grateful for the excuse to get out of there.
“Speak.”
Erin inhales. “Laurel asked for access to the corporate archive.”
My grip tightens around the phone. “Which part?”
“All of it.”
“I need you to be very specific and define all.”
“Original incorporation documents, shareholder agreements, capitalization tables, director resolutions, catalogue and publishing records, writer agreements, master-ownership records, licensing agreements, insurance files, and the company’s financial records, including loan documents—”
“Why the fuck did you give her access to loan records?”
Silence stretches between us.
“Mr. Mercer, she’s a director. She’s entitled to those records.”
I stare across the road at a group of women in white boots climbing out of a party bus, all of them screaming because one dropped her phone. “What else did she take?”
Keys tap in the background as Erin pulls up Laurel’s activity log. Thirty-seven files when she started. Fifty-three now, and the number keeps climbing because Laurel is still opening documents while I sit in a steakhouse lying to my mother that my wife has a headache.
“The original corporate documents,” Erin says.
“The construction loan. Two insurance settlements. The publishing records for your second album. Her pre-marriage catalogue. Mercer Records’ tax returns from the first four years.
The shareholder agreement. A handful of older catalogue and payment records. ”
My stomach tightens.
Every fucking piece of paper that can tell her exactly what she gave us, what it became, and what we did with it.
Red has washed across my vision by the time she finishes. “Anything else?”
Erin hesitates. “She requested the archived emails, too.”
The back of my neck goes cold. What the fuck is she doing all of this for? “Which emails?”
“Anything containing her name from 2018 through 2020.”
My mouth dries. “Why?”
“I didn’t ask, but she searched one name.”
Traffic moves past me in a sheet of headlights.
“Whose?”
“Beckett Vale.”
For three full seconds I hear nothing except a motorcycle tearing through the intersection. “Repeat that.”
“Beckett Vale from Vale House Entertainment. She opened two archived threads before I called you.”
I close my eyes. Son of a bitch! “Lock the archive.”
“I can’t.”
My eyes open. “Why the fuck not?”
“Because you don’t have the authority to lock a director out of corporate records.”
“I own the damn company.”
“You own forty-two percent of it.” Her voice drops, careful now.
“Laurel owns twenty-one. The employee trust holds twelve, and the remaining shares are spread among the original investors.” I grip the phone harder.
“The governance agreement gives directors access to the records they need to perform their duties, including the company's formation, financing, and catalogue ownership. I can restrict access to specific privileged material if there’s a legitimate basis for doing so, but I can’t simply shut her out because you told me to. ”
I know that. Of course I fucking know that. I signed the agreement. Laurel sat beside me in the lawyer’s office with a yellow highlighter, correcting two clauses our attorney had missed. Back then, I thought it was sexy when she understood my contracts better than I did.
Tonight, it feels like discovering the gun in your safe has always known the combination.
“Do not lock her out,” I say. “And don’t tell her I’m aware.”
Erin goes quiet. “Okay.”
“Every file she opens, every email she searches, every request she sends—you tell me.”
“Understood.”
My ears are ringing by the time I hang up, Beckett Vale’s name still lodged in my skull.
He offered Laurel a record deal seven years ago, although the version she knows stops well short of the truth.
She knows he came backstage after one of our shows in Austin, told her she had the strongest pen in Nashville, and asked for a meeting.
Two weeks later, we sat across from him at lunch in Los Angeles as he spoke almost exclusively to her, acknowledging me when courtesy required it and not much beyond that.
Beckett was thirty-two, already running the label his father had left him, with half the industry waiting for him to bury it.
Instead, he cut the dead weight, bought two struggling publishing houses cheap, signed artists the majors had passed over, and spent the next four years turning Vale House into the largest independent music company in the South. I hated him within minutes.