Chapter 9
LAUREL
No one tells you how practical heartbreak becomes once lawyers and blood tests get involved.
One minute, you’re sitting in a hospital exam room listening to a nurse tell you your rapid HIV test is negative; the next, you’re barefoot in a sun-hazed hotel suite, eating cold French fries over a stack of corporate documents as a woman named Evelyn Shaw asks about a prenup.
Evelyn’s expression doesn’t shift an inch, a level of composure that makes me want to choke on the remnants of my own joke. Beckett warned me she was thorough, discreet, and utterly immune to charm, but I’m beginning to suspect he undersold the last part.
She has the sort of voice that sounds expensive even through a speakerphone—crisp, dry, and utterly uninterested in giving me the emotional experience daytime television promised divorce lawyers provide.
“Any postnuptial agreement?”
“No.” I wince at how inadequate my answer must sound to her. “There was something when Mercer Records took its first outside investment. Grant said the bank needed spouses to sign because we were using marital assets as collateral.”
“Show it to me.”
I find the PDF among the files I took from the company—there’s something deeply fucked about admitting that—and forward it to her. Evelyn reads for long enough that I finish my fries and start hating myself for caring whether she thinks I’m competent.
“This is a spousal consent,” she says. “Grant needed your signature because the company was using assets tied to the marriage as part of the financing. You were consenting to the loan and agreeing to certain restrictions on the company’s shares.
That’s all this document does. It doesn’t change who owns what between you and your husband, and it doesn’t give him any ownership of your separate catalogue. ”
Air comes back into my lungs, and I realize I’d been holding it. “So he can’t take my songs.”
“Not based on this document. We need to figure out what you assigned, licensed, had administered, or co-owned over the years. You told me you wrote for Grant’s albums?”
“A lot.”
“Under written agreements?”
“Sometimes.”
Evelyn pauses in a way that tells me exactly how stupid that answer was. “We’re going to need to trace the paperwork for each one.”
I close my eyes. “Perfect.”
“Laurel, listen to me. No emptying accounts, no destroying anything, and no announcing a divorce yet. Don’t threaten him with what you’ve found.
Preserve the records. Get independent accounting.
Make copies of every agreement involving your work, your money, and your equity.
Then we sort out your rights, his rights, and anything that may have been moved around hoping you’d never bother asking. ”
My eyes open. “Moved around?”
“I’m a lawyer. I’m paid to be suspicious.”
I burst out laughing, the first real laugh to come out of me since Sloane opened her mouth in Grant’s office, and it hurts so much I have to press a hand over my stomach. It isn’t even that funny.
Evelyn waits it out, one eyebrow slightly raised, giving me the dignity of laughing without turning it into a moment. She doesn’t tell me to breathe or drink some water or remember my worth.
Thank God.
“There’s something else,” I start after regaining my breath. “My former manager turned down an offer on my behalf that I never even saw.”
“Name?”
“Daniel Price.”
I open the Mercer Records general ledger because Grant’s assistant gave me access years ago, never imagining I’d actually learn how to use it, let alone search Daniel Price.
His name brings up a handful of entries.
The first is a travel reimbursement. The second is an invoice.
The third makes my hand stop on the trackpad.
Price Strategic Consulting — Artist Development Advisory — $125,000.
The payment is dated nineteen days after Vale House was told I had rejected the publishing-imprint offer four years ago.
I glare at the line until the number starts looking like someone else’s problem.
“Evelyn.”
“What is it?”
“How much money turns a coincidence into bullshit?”
“Usually less than whatever you just found.”
A tense silence fills the room as I tell her everything I just found.
“Screenshot it. Download the invoice and the approval trail.”
My fingers move down the screen. Grant’s authorization sits at the bottom. One digital signature. One hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars to the man who was supposed to represent me, nineteen days after he closed a door I never knew existed.
I used to think betrayal would feel like one knife driven straight into the heart. Turns out, some men prefer cutlery sets.