21 | Nepo Baby #2
The certainty in his voice made me look at him.
He continued before anyone could reply.
“I spent years trying to keep the band together by becoming whatever was missing. If Leo pushed too hard, I made things lighter. If Kadir stopped talking, I filled the silence. I thought that was helping.”
His gaze lowered to his hands. The black polish had begun chipping near the edges.
“It made me easy to ignore.”
Nobody contradicted him.
Wesley looked at me again. “You didn’t let me do that. And I don’t want you reassigned to someone else. I don’t want this to end because the lodge does.”
The directness affected me more than a dramatic declaration would have. Wesley had always given affection freely. Asking for something on his own behalf required more from him.
Kadir shifted beneath me until I could see his face.
“You said I stayed outside everything.”
“You did.”
“I’m not doing that with this.”
His hand pressed more firmly against my stomach.
“I want you after the retreat.”
The fire cracked softly.
I had expected resistance to losing me as their manager. Their music had improved. The label was happy. Nobody wanted a new person arriving to rebuild trust from the beginning.
I had not prepared for them to separate the relationship from the job so easily.
Leo was the last to speak.
He looked toward the fireplace rather than me, which told me the words mattered.
“When we got here, I thought the label had locked us in a rich-person prison until we made enough music to earn release.”
“That was basically your opening speech.”
“I thought you were another person they sent to manage me.”
“Us,” Kadir corrected.
Leo ignored him.
“Now you’re the person I want in the room when we write. Your opinion is the one I look for after we play something. When you leave, I notice.”
The admission came without his usual charm. He didn’t turn it into a lyric or bury it beneath flirtation.
“I don’t want to go back to the exact life we had before this. I don’t want you to be something that happened at a lodge.”
My throat tightened.
They had all reached the same conclusion through different routes.
Wesley wanted to stop making his needs invisible. Kadir refused to remain outside the decision. Leo had finally recognized that control was not the same thing as connection.
The unfairness I had been avoiding pushed upward.
“You can say that because this doesn’t ruin you.”
The words came out sharper than I intended.
Nobody moved.
I shifted on Kadir’s lap, needing enough distance to speak without being comforted out of it.
“If people think you’re sleeping with your manager, you look like rockstars. Reckless, desirable, whatever they already expect from you. If they think all three of you are sleeping with the same woman, it probably makes you more interesting.”
Leo’s expression tightened because he understood where I was going.
“I look like a nepo baby whose father handed her a luxury assignment. I look like an unprofessional manager who slept with her clients and then claimed credit when they started working again.”
The fear sounded uglier aloud.
Wesley’s face fell.
I looked down at my hands.
“I didn’t say any of this before because it sounded pathetic. It still does. My father is powerful. I got an opportunity most people would never get. Three hot musicians want me. Poor me, now strangers might judge me.”
No one laughed.
“That doesn’t make your fear imaginary,” Kadir said.
Wesley moved closer until his knee pressed against mine. “I’m sorry.”
“You didn’t take the video.”
“I treated Lodge Girl like a joke. I kept saying nobody knew anything because that was easy for me.”
Leo leaned forward, elbows on his knees.
“They’ll tell the version that entertains them.”
He knew that better than any of us. Leo had spent years watching the label turn impulsiveness into branding and arrogance into a frontman persona. The public could forgive almost anything if it looked good beneath stage lights.
“The same story makes us wild and makes you dishonest,” he said. “That’s real.”
The conversation settled after that.
Nothing had been solved. The label still might remove me. The meeting still waited beyond the storm. The power remained out, and my phone continued displaying one frozen piece of evidence that the private world inside the lodge had never been as private as we believed.
But the fear no longer belonged only to me.
Wesley eventually reached for the acoustic guitar kept near the living room shelves. He pulled the instrument into his lap and played several uncertain chords.
Leo took it from him after the third mistake.
“You’re a drummer.”
“I know chords.”
Leo began playing one of Midnight Theory’s oldest songs.
The arrangement had originally been loud, fast, and badly produced. Stripped down to one guitar and his voice, the melody sounded sweeter. Less defensive.
Wesley tapped the rhythm against the wooden coffee table. Kadir retrieved his bass from the studio and played it unplugged, the low notes quiet beneath the fire but still audible in the room.
They laughed when Leo forgot part of the second verse.
He blamed the lyric.
Kadir remembered it.
That led to another song, then another.
Between them, the band’s history appeared in pieces.
Wesley talked about the early tours when he had learned to keep everyone moving because conflict meant missed sound checks and missed sound checks meant Leo picking fights with venue staff. He told the stories lightly, but I could hear the exhaustion beneath them now.
Kadir admitted there had been a period when he brought in new ideas constantly. After enough of them were reduced, simplified, or lost beneath vocals, silence became easier.
Leo didn’t defend himself.
He explained how the label gradually began calling him first. Interviews, promotional decisions, singles, visual concepts. He became the person expected to answer, then the person convinced he needed to have every answer.
“If I stopped pushing, I thought nothing would happen.”
Kadir’s fingers moved over the silent strings. “Things happened. You just didn’t hear them.”
Leo nodded.
The blackout removed everything they normally used to hide behind. No microphones. No screens. No playback.
They were three men around a fire, playing songs they had written before success taught them to mistrust one another.
By the time the candles burned lower, the decision had formed without requiring a formal vote.
If the label reassigned me, we would deal with the management problem separately. If I had to leave the lodge, the relationship didn’t have to stay behind with the recording equipment and half-finished puzzle.
Nobody expected me to choose one over the other.
Nobody wanted to return to pretending this was temporary.
We didn’t name what came next. There were schedules, contracts, travel, publicity, and three separate men with three separate bedrooms even when none of us consistently used them.
We would figure it out.
That was enough for one night.