Chapter 11
GRANT
My father used to say a man could fuck whoever he wanted as long as he remembered which woman he was coming home to.
I was sixteen the first time I heard it, standing in our library at midnight while my mother slept upstairs and my father poured bourbon over ice like we were discussing property taxes instead of the busty blonde I had seen climbing out of his truck behind the Belle Meade Country Club.
I hated him for that sentence. Hated the lazy certainty of it, the way he said coming home like a house could bleach another woman off his skin before Mom smelled her.
I called him a piece of shit. He laughed, clapped one hand against the back of my neck, and told me I’d understand when I was older.
For years, whenever anyone asked why my father and I stopped speaking before he died, I gave them some version of business disagreements because rich families prefer their dysfunction tax-deductible.
The truth was simpler. I watched my mother spend twenty-seven years pretending she didn’t know what the whole world knew, and I decided my father was weak.
Greedy. An asshole who needed proof women still wanted him because one woman loving him had stopped feeling impressive.
By the time I was twenty-one, I’d stopped pretending I could forgive him. I called him out on his shit and told him I’d rather walk away from every dollar he could give me than spend the rest of my life becoming the kind of man who thought money entitled him to betray someone who loved him.
He called me an ungrateful cunt.
I told him to go to hell.
Three days later, he cut me off from every dollar, every account, every family connection that came with his name, and left me with nothing but the choice to crawl back or walk away.
I left that house with a guitar, a duffel bag, and barely enough money to pretend I knew what I was doing.
He died years later without us speaking again.
The irony would be funny if I weren’t sitting at my kitchen island after my wife stormed out, staring at an email from Mercer Records’ audit committee on a fucking Friday morning.
Effective immediately, pending completion of the independent review, all catalogue transfers, related-party transactions, and material licensing amendments are subject to prior Audit Committee approval.
Directors with a direct or indirect interest in a proposed transaction shall recuse themselves from its review and approval.
I read the paragraph again, and the next one informs me that Magnolia Rain has been flagged for a disputed authorship claim, with digital distribution suspended until its chain of title can be verified.
Sloane’s single was supposed to hit streaming at midnight, radio has already built tomorrow morning around it, and we’ve paid for billboards in six cities, a goddamn Times Square placement, and enough influencer content to make me consider outlawing ring lights, yet Laurel has managed to stop the release without a public accusation, an Instagram statement, or a crying photograph outside a lawyer’s office.
Just one email to the audit committee, and suddenly the company carrying my last name has a governance problem I can’t bulldoze past, because the song I thought was officially mine to release is now sitting in dispute.
I call her and get voicemail, try again and get the same fucking greeting.
Grant: We need to talk about the release.
Three dots appear, disappear, reappear. Thirty seconds later, her answer comes through.
Laurel: You already released it. Onstage. In front of me. Now we can discuss whether you owned it first.
I stare at the message. Son of a bitch!
∞∞∞
The board meeting starts at eleven, and Laurel joins by video from somewhere with white walls and a window behind her.
I don’t recognize the room, and that bothers me more than the three outside attorneys seated beside the audit chair.
She’s now clad in a pale blue shirt, different from what she wore when she came home earlier this morning, her hair down, her hands out of frame.
I keep waiting for some familiar piece of our life to appear until someone asks her to confirm receipt of the preservation notice. Her left hand rises into view.
Bare.
No wedding ring!
I lose the next sentence. For a few seconds, I stop hearing the words entirely because there’s a strip of lighter skin around her fourth finger where my ring lived for eleven years, and apparently my brain is capable of ignoring allegations of financial misconduct when confronted with three millimeters of untanned flesh.
Why the fuck did she take it off?
So she can fuck Beckett without having to look at my name on her hand?
“Grant?” I drag my attention back to the voice at the head of the table. Harlan Pierce chaired this board before Mercer Records had enough employees to justify one, seventy years old and built like someone had stacked three expensive suits around a fence post. “Did you hear the question?”
I clear my throat. “Repeat it.”
The outside counsel seated to Harlan’s right glances down at his notes. “Did you authorize the payments to Price Strategic Consulting?”
Laurel looks straight at me through the screen.
“Yes.”
“What services were provided?”
“Daniel advised on artist development, management structure, and touring strategy.”
One of the attorneys turns a page. “Do you have documentation supporting those services?”
“What?”
“Reports. Recommendations. Deliverables. Correspondence. Anything showing what was actually provided in exchange for the payments.”
“It was four years ago.”
“The seventy-five-thousand-dollar payment was four years ago,” Laurel says, her voice coming through the speakers with such maddening calm that I want to put my fist through the screen. “The hundred-and-twenty-five-thousand-dollar payment was four years ago too.”
I grit my teeth. “I’m aware.”
“You didn’t seem aware hours ago.”
“Laurel.” Harlan cuts in before I can say anything else. “This is a board review, not a marital dispute.”
She gives one small nod. “Agreed.”
Of course she agrees. She’s the one who dragged our marriage into a boardroom, and somehow I’m the one sitting here looking unprofessional for objecting to it.
The attorney looks back at his notes. “Were either of Mr. Price’s engagements connected to any offer, negotiation, or proposed transaction involving Ms. Mercer’s catalogue or recording career?”
“No.”
Laurel’s expression doesn’t move. What the hell is she thinking?
“None?”
“No.”
“So you’re saying the timing of the payments and the offers was coincidental?”
“Yes.”
“Both times?”
My temper snaps. “Are you asking a question or auditioning for a fucking podcast?”
“Grant.” Harlan says my name in a dry, warning voice.
Laurel lowers her eyes for half a second, and I know that look. She’s angry.
Good. She finally knows how I feel, sitting here as people turn something personal into a fucking investigation and make it bigger than it needs to be.