Chapter 30
Gravity Has Taken Better Men Than Me
RIFF
I find Harmony standing in the middle of the bar’s lounge area, holding two drinks and staring at nothing. I go up behind her and put my hands on her hips and whisper into her hair.
“You’ve been gone forever, babe. And I’m so … thirsty.”
She doesn’t respond to my sultry tone. In fact, she doesn’t respond in general. She just stands there like she’s numb from top to bottom. I turn her around to look at me and her face is pale, tears welled up in her dark eyes.
“Harmony?” I cup her cheek. “What’s wrong?”
She sits on the end of the hotel-room bed while I crouch in front of her holding both her hands.
“They know about us,” she says shakily, her red-rimmed eyes shining and ready to spill over.
“Know what about us? Who?”
“FM Sound. They know about the stunt. They must have bribed someone, or found a willing mole, at Glambam. Dana Hatton, one of their executives … she came to me at the bar. I didn’t remember her, but she’s been with FM Sound since before I left.
She has copies of contracts, texts, emails, annotated social media reports …
all with details that prove our whole relationship is staged. ”
“Was staged,” I correct her.
“It doesn’t matter. No one will believe us if they see those documents.”
I have to consider for a moment what this actually means.
I hadn’t thought about the potential consequences if the truth ever came out.
Fans are always speculating, sure, but that’s part of the game—what’s real and what’s not—and like Harmony’s manager said, people will believe what they want to believe.
That’s kept us pretty safe, so accusations of fraud didn’t cause me much concern.
But hard evidence of an effort to fool the public, especially with lofty sales goals attached, might actually turn fans against us.
Not in the “love to hate ‘em” sort of way where they’d say we’re a little trashy but still support us.
More in the way that they’d bully us off the internet demanding their money back …
because we tricked them out of hard-earned cash by lying to their faces.
I can see the headlines now:
Harmony Sonora and Riff Hurley con fans out of millions in joint effort to double projected record sales
Music industry romance sham exposed, public outraged
Hurley and Sonora canceled after failed dating publicity stunt
My pulse hums with a panicked energy.
I don’t understand, though. What does it matter to FM Sound what Harmony and I do? Her success would be their success. Of course they can’t take more than the single slice they already own—her early albums—but it’s not like they’d get a bigger slice by crushing her fanbase.
Unless there’s something else they want.
“What are they trying to get out of you?” I try to keep my voice from a raging volume. “This is a huge threat, and I’m not seeing where their payoff would be.”
Wringing her fingers, she explains in greater detail her history with her former label—their refusal to even sell the masters in the beginning, the strategies she used to lessen their profits from her work, the way they punished her for that.
And then she tells me their latest move: “Dana said they’ll ruin me if I don’t get Glambam to back off the purchase. ”
There it is.
Naturally I ask all the logical questions.
Why even make the masters available for sale if they don’t want to sell them—or at least raise the price?
And if they don’t want to look like the greedy assholes they are, why not just anonymously leak the documents and let Harmony fall, tanking her sales to ensure that Glambam won’t follow through on the purchase anyway?
Why go to Harmony first and give her any semblance of a choice in the matter?
Don’t get me wrong; I’m glad there’s a chance to stop the leak. But it doesn’t make sense.
“They want good artists to sign with them, which means FM Sound can’t afford to be openly hostile to me about my masters anymore,” she confirms. “That’s why they’re demanding that I make it look like I’m choosing to walk away from the sale.
It protects their public image. As far as an anonymous leak, they acknowledge that hurting me hurts them too—although if I don’t cooperate, they’re willing to take a hit if fans boycott my first two albums along with my new music, because owning my legacy work gives them a ton of clout either way.
Still, it’s better for all parties involved if I do cooperate, and thus they approached me with the ‘opportunity.’”
I stand and pace the length of the bed a few times, tugging at my hair.
What the fuck is wrong with these people?
“We can’t let FM Sound get away with this,” I finally say.
“What do you mean? Of course we can.” Harmony half-chokes on a sob. “We have to. There’s no alternative.”
“We can tell Charles. Glambam has legal power.”
“I don’t know who we can even trust at Glambam, who might be reporting to FM Sound from within our walls.
Dana said if she gets word that I’m talking to lawyers, she’ll leak the documents for that too.
Or if I try to sabotage the value of my masters—even if I just record a ‘Harmony’s Version’ of any of my songs.
She’s got a sniper rifle pointed at my forehead, Griffin. ”
“So, what, we just … do what she says?”
“Not ‘we,’” Harmony says. “‘I.’ I’m the one who signed with FM Sound after Lucky Stars. It’s my masters they’re fighting to keep. I’m the one their Head of Catalog approached. This is my problem.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what? Take responsibility for—”
“Try to deal with this on your own. You’re not the one who suggested the dating stunt.
It’s Glambam’s fault that we have anything to hide.
We agreed to do it, yes, under pressure, but it’s not all on us and definitely not on you alone.
I don’t care if you’re the one FM Sound came to.
You and I were a team even before we liked each other, so we’re going to deal with this together. ”
“I don’t see how that’s possible.”
“If you don’t think Glambam has any sway here, and a legal team is too risky—”
“There’s no proof anyway,” she interjects.
“—then there’s only one thing left to do.”
“What?”
“Tell the truth,” I say. “We’ll do a press statement and tell everyone it started as a promotional strategy—not a ‘stunt,’ because word choice is crucial here.”
I may not have been a reporter of serious news, but I learned well enough how a carefully worded phrase could change audience perception of information.
“Griffin …”
“We’ll apologize for misleading people—not for ‘lying,’ since we never said we were dating, everyone assumed—and let them know that we’re together now because we did develop real feelings for each other during our collaboration.
Some people will be mad, but a confession promotes trust, even in the wake of deceit.
Not to mention it renders FM Sound’s ammo pretty much useless; they can’t shock anyone with a big revelation, because we’ll have already revealed everything. Our fans will forgive us.”
“And if they don’t?” Harmony asks. “Or if Dana leaks the texts and the emails after we confess, adding the full negative context to our version of the story? That’ll make us look even worse.
It’ll seem like we only confessed because we were about to get caught—and that we lied again to make ourselves look like we have more integrity than we really do.
No matter what, it’s going to kill my career, and yours, and no one will want to sign with Glambam.
If Glambam takes a hit, they’ll have to lay people off.
I can’t live with myself if I let you and the label go down with me over a bunch of stupid songs I wrote a long time ago. ”
“They’re not stupid. And I don’t care about my career; I care about you—and the fact that FM Sound is exploiting you. This is a ‘negotiating with terrorists’ situation.”
“Sometimes the terrorists win,” she says softly, more to herself than to me.
“We have to keep fighting,” I argue.
Now she lets the tears spill over, scrunching up her face. I sit beside her and put my arms around her.
“I’m …” she starts. “I’m … so … tired … of fighting.”
Swiping her tears off her cheeks with my thumbs, I say, “I know. I know you are. But if we don’t get ahead of this now, FM Sound is going to lord this over you forever, any time you do something they don’t like, or if they suddenly decide they want something else from you.
If we take their power—or at least the brunt of it—it will be over.
We can deal with the damage, whatever it is, and move on. ”
I look into her glossy, watery eyes, and mine start to well up too.
How can anyone do this to her? This sweet, incredible girl. She doesn’t deserve this. It’s not fair.
My chest is tight with all the fury I contain. I want to smash something. I want to punch holes in the walls.
Then she forces a sad smile, sniffs, and says, “I can’t.”
“You ‘can’t’ …” I repeat. “What do you mean you can’t?”
Harmony shakes her head. “If I give up the masters, they’ll leave us alone. That’s all they want—I’m sure of it. So I’ll give them up, and then this goes away.”
I stop touching her and gape for a moment. “That’s it? You’re … you’re going to give them what they want … and pretend like that’s what you want too? While I pretend to be okay with that?”
Harmony doesn’t say anything.