Chapter 33 #3
His lawyers insist substantial portions can be traced to premarital assets and separate royalty income. Evelyn says tracing is exactly why forensic accountants exist, then sends me a bill capable of causing its own cardiac event.
The lender on Grant’s term facility creates the more immediate headache.
With the preservation order still in place, several disputed assets no longer count toward his collateral requirement.
He covers part of the shortfall with publishing income nobody is contesting, but the rest leaves him with a shrinking list of ugly options: ask the court for permission, sell something at a loss, find more clean collateral, or convince the lender to restructure a loan it has no incentive to make friendlier.
His promoter helps by making everything worse.
Grant still sells tickets, so the tour survives. His guarantee doesn’t. They cut it again after the sponsor cancellations and demand larger reserves against the fall dates.
I’m almost relieved.
Not for him.
For the realism.
His fans do not evaporate because he cheated on his wife.
Half of country music would be performing for empty folding chairs if adultery automatically killed ticket sales.
People still stream him. They still buy tickets.
They still defend him online with the kind of conviction usually reserved for constitutional rights and SEC football.
Women call me ungrateful. Men insist marriages are private matters in the comments under pictures of my ass.
Some people decide Sloane seduced Grant, as if a thirty-eight-year-old man with lawyers, employees and a functioning driver’s license lost all agency the second a pretty woman entered the room.
Others blame Beckett, since a woman leaving her husband remains so conceptually difficult that another man must’ve operated the machinery.
Grant still has money. He’s got the house, publishing income, tour revenue and forty-eight and a half percent of Mercer Records.
His fall is expensive, not magical.
The difference is leverage.
Every dollar he moves now comes with three people asking where it came from and who else has a claim to it.
Business decisions require approvals he spent years treating like decorative suggestions.
Money tied to his shares, catalogue or tour gets caught in a structure he built on the assumption that no one would ever force him to explain how any of it worked.
Evelyn puts it less poetically. “The goal isn’t to make him poor because he cheated on you. Courts do not issue poverty as a marital remedy. The goal is to make sure you don’t end up subsidizing the consequences of decisions he makes after the marriage breaks down.”
I nod.
The distinction matters.
Grant may eventually make himself poor. I’m not asking a judge to do it for me.
His mistress, meanwhile, does something stupider.
The protective order tells her not to contact me, come near my home, workplace or medical appointments, and for several days she obeys with the enthusiasm of a woman whose attorney has finally learned to scream louder than she does.
A gossip account posts photographs of me leaving Jenna’s clinic. Nothing invasive, just Nora and me in sunglasses crossing the parking lot, but the caption claims anonymous sources say I’m preparing “a surprise return to music.”
Less than an hour later, Sloane uploads a video about “artists who disappear until scandal makes them marketable again.”
She never says my name, but honestly, she doesn’t need to.
Her attorney must recognize the problem. The video disappears minutes later, which would be useful if the internet didn’t have the survival instincts of a cockroach and several people hadn’t already screen-recorded it.
Evelyn calls it potentially relevant, not a clean violation. Taking a public shot at me isn’t the same as contacting me, and the order doesn’t prohibit her from being an asshole on the internet.
“So we do nothing?”
“We preserve it.”
I sigh. “I’m starting to hate that verb.”
“Evidence rarely provides the theatrical satisfaction clients expect.”
“Terrible system.”
Mercer’s interim committee has the more immediate problem. Sloane remains under contract despite losing her distributor, fighting her former management company in arbitration and watching two commercial partners walk.
Elena sends the board a proposed resolution: freeze new discretionary spending on Sloane’s project, preserve the masters and accounting, hand existing contractual obligations to an outside administrator and start negotiating an orderly release if getting her out costs less than spending the next several years paying lawyers to hate each other.
Reasonable, and expensive for Sloane in ways she can’t turn into a crying video.
She may eventually leave Mercer without owning any of the masters financed under her existing deal, and whatever legitimate recoupable costs remain do not disappear because Grant once made promises he had no business making.
I vote yes, since I simply refuse to use company money to rebuild it for her. There’s a difference—a deeply satisfying one.