Chapter 41
GRANT
The lake house sells on a Wednesday, and nobody congratulates me.
Charles sends the closing statement to me in the back of a black SUV outside Bridgestone Arena, security still clearing the loading dock, and for several seconds I stare at the number wired into my account as if seven figures can look insulting depending on where they came from.
It’s more money than I once believed I’d earn in a lifetime. It knocks most of the bridge collateral deficiency off the board, covers my piece of Mercer’s rights offering and should be the kind of number that lets a sane man sleep at night.
All I can see is the screened porch.
Thomas Bellamy on the dock in an old Savannah Bananas cap, telling me I hold a fishing rod like a man trying to negotiate with it.
Laurel asleep on the sofa with a notebook open across her stomach and mosquito bites stippling one ankle because she refuses bug spray on the grounds that it smells “like chemical warfare.” My first platinum record propped against the pantry wall because we drove straight there after the label dinner and neither of us owned a proper display case yet.
The house goes to a surgeon from Knoxville and his wife. Cash buyers. No financing contingency. Forty thousand below asking, and I take it because my lender’s cure period doesn’t give a shit about sentiment.
“The wire clears tomorrow,” Charles says through the line. He has stopped pretending any of this is emotionally neutral. “Once the bridge lender receives the required paydown, the maintenance default goes away. Your rate remains higher under the amended terms, but they waive acceleration.”
I look through the tinted glass at crew members unloading road cases beneath a tour banner that used to carry Redwood’s logo. “And Mercer?”
“The rights offering closes as projected.”
Thirty-nine point eight percent.
I already know the fucking number. I’ve refreshed the cap table often enough to qualify as self-harm.
“The rights offering closes as projected.”
I dropped almost twelve million buying Russell Vance’s six and a half percent because forty-eight and a half looked so much like control I could practically taste it.
Then Mercer turned around and issued new equity to patch a financing mess I helped create, and I came out the other side owning less of the company than I did before Russell ever sold.
There are financial advisers who could explain the whole clusterfuck with charts. I prefer the simpler version.
I lit money on fire because I couldn’t tolerate Laurel having a vote I couldn’t override.
“You need to stop thinking of the Russell shares as a loss you can win back,” Charles says.
“They’re not gone. I own nearly forty percent of a profitable company.”
“Yes.”
“A company I built.”
“Yes.”
“So stop talking like I’m bankrupt.”
“You’re not bankrupt, Grant. You’re leveraged to hell, sitting on less cash than you had two months ago, staring down serious legal exposure and still spending like the old balance sheet is waiting for you to come back. Those are different problems.”
My hand tightens around the phone. “The tour starts in five weeks.”
“Which is exactly why we need to deal with the promoter escrow.”
“Later.”
“No. They want another two million parked against cancellation, reputational fallout and sponsor shortfall. They’re rewriting your personal guarantee as we speak. Either you fund it or we start cutting into the routing.”
“The fucking shows are selling.”
“Some of them. Three secondary markets softened after the second sponsor pulled out.”
“They’re still selling.”
“Grant.”
“I said later.”
I hang up before Charles can remind me that hanging up doesn’t dissolve obligations, a lesson everyone around me seems determined to teach until either I learn it or they die of natural causes.
Rehearsal is shit. Music used to be where I went when everything else got too fucking loud; now half the songs sound like witnesses.
I put After the Fire back into the set because Tessa is right and yanking Laurel’s biggest contribution from a tour already bleeding sponsor confidence would be the financial equivalent of shooting myself to improve my limp.
No piano intro this time. Acoustic guitar first, everybody else coming in late on the chorus—the arrangement Laurel originally demoed before a producer decided radio needed something bigger.
The first verse rolls across an empty Bridgestone, my voice spilling into thousands of vacant seats, and for one humiliating second I’m twenty-nine again in a studio with busted air-conditioning, Laurel beside me recording the harmony with her hair piled up and held there by a pencil.
Halfway into the second line, my mouth gives up.
I know the lyric. That’s the fucking problem.
The band makes it another bar before I throw up a hand, and not one person asks what happened.
At this point, the people on my payroll deserve hazard pay for how good they’ve gotten at pretending not to notice when I short-circuit.
We start again. I finish it.
Tessa sits ten rows back with her laptop open, watching me like a vet assessing an animal with a recent bite history. “Better.”
I drop the microphone onto the stand. “Didn’t ask.”
She gets up and follows me into the tunnel. “You’re welcome.”
The press team wants copy on the rights offering.
Five people have apparently spent a stupid amount of billable time figuring out how to say I got my ass diluted without making it sound like I personally drove Mercer into a ditch.
The statement is all fresh capital, stronger governance, continued operations—the usual corporate bullshit you shovel over a mess when telling investors the truth might send them running.
My own team lands on enthusiastically participated. Fucking hilarious. I sold property, coughed up cash and helped mop up a financial disaster with my fingerprints all over it. Enthusiasm had very little to do with the experience.
“Lose enthusiastically,” I instruct Tessa. “And keep Laurel out of the FAQ.”
She keeps typing. “There isn’t a Laurel question.”
“There will be. Bellamy House. Her comeback. Whether I support it.”
That gets her hands off the keyboard. “Do you?”
Fuck me. Say no and I sound like the same controlling prick everyone already thinks I am. Say yes and I have to publicly applaud Laurel building a career that no longer has a damn thing to do with me.
“It’s none of my business.”
Tessa looks over the top of her laptop. “That may be the first emotionally stable sentence you’ve produced since February.”
“Don’t fucking frame it.”
“I was thinking needlepoint.”
Sloane’s retraction hits that afternoon and six months of sex, lies, recordings, lawyers and career arson get boiled down to a few dead-eyed lines on my phone.
According to the statement, the documentation doesn’t support her claim that Laurel knew about or approved Magnolia Rain, and she regrets any contrary impression.
Regrets any contrary impression. I fucked this woman for six months and now she sounds like a pharmaceutical recall.
Mercer announces her exit separately. No album.
No tour. No glossy little paragraph about growth, gratitude or whatever bullshit PR teams use when everyone knows somebody got shoved out the door.
The protective-order mess gets cleaned up into supervision, compliance terms and a very expensive lesson in what happens if she tries it again.
Nashville handles the rest the way it always does: no grand blacklist, no public execution. Producers suddenly get booked. A festival develops amnesia. Her agent bails. Calls start dying in voicemail. Clean, polite, vicious.
For half a second I want to call her and ask if any of it was worth it. The hotels. The deleted messages. All that sneaking around for a crater this fucking big.
Then the question turns around and looks at me.
∞∞∞
Mom shows up at rehearsal the next day unannounced, since Celia has always treated appointments like a cute little rule for other families.
She waits until the dressing room clears, drops a printout of the lake-house listing on the table and says, “You sold it.”
I shrug. “Needed liquidity.”
“I know why.”
Her finger drags over the porch in the photo. “Harold hated this place. Too small, wrong lake, no neighbors worth bragging about. He never understood why you kept it once the money got stupid.”
“Laurel liked it.”
Mom glances up. “So did you.”
She dips into her bag and pulls out a brass key wrapped in tissue, the blue plastic tag faded almost white.
My stomach drops before I get a proper look at it. The lake-house spare. Laurel gave it to her years ago with instructions that if we ever managed to die at the same time, Mom’s first job was rescuing the wine. The memory nearly gets a laugh out of me.
“Why do you still have that?”
Mom drops it into my palm. “I don’t. Laurel asked me to throw it away.”
My fingers close around the key. “When?”
“Last week.” Of fucking course. The teeth bite into my skin, and Mom, apparently deciding I haven’t been kicked around quite enough today, adds, “She sounded good.”
My head comes up. “You spoke to her?”
“Yes.”
Jealousy comes crawling up my throat on all fours. Mom clocks it immediately and wags a finger at me.
I hate that every person in my life can read Beckett Vale on me now. “Did she sing?”
“No. She talked.” Mother’s expression softens. “Her voice sounds fuller.”
I wait for the rest like an asshole volunteering for execution.
“She sounded happy.”
The one goddamn update I can’t turn into numbers, legal exposure or a problem for Charles to fix.
“With him?”
“For fuck’s sake, Grant.”
“It’s a question.”
“No, it’s you finding a way to make her recovery about Beckett Vale.
” She gets to her feet, already pissed enough that the chair legs scrape hard across the floor.
“I am tired. Caroline is tired. Tessa looks ten years older. Your lawyer probably keeps antacids in his fucking briefcase. We are all sick of trying to explain that Laurel has a life happening outside your line of sight.”