23 | The Call
The men ate breakfast while I watched the time change on the microwave.
Kadir had made toast and potatoes from whatever survived the outage.
Wesley sat across from me at the island with enough food for someone who had spent the previous night performing strenuous physical activity and saw no reason to pretend otherwise.
Leo leaned against the counter beside him, eating directly from his plate.
My plate remained untouched.
The power had returned shortly before sunrise.
I had been asleep on the rug when every lamp we tried during the outage came on at once.
The television started playing a home-renovation show with the volume turned high enough to make Wesley sit upright beneath the blankets.
Heat rushed through the vents. Four phones began vibrating from different parts of the living room while the three men complained about the light and tried to pull me back down between them.
For several seconds, I had been warm, naked, and surrounded by bodies that no longer felt temporary.
Then my phone connected to the network.
The missed notifications arrived so quickly that the screen froze.
Messages, emails, tags, calendar reminders, and several calls from my father appeared together.
The label meeting had been moved to ten thirty after the outage made the original time impossible.
The updated invitation contained more names than it had before.
I had showered before reading all of them.
Now I wore charcoal trousers, a white blouse, and the blazer I had packed for the unlikely possibility that someone important appeared at the lodge.
My hair was smooth. My makeup was careful.
The clothes separated the woman sitting at the island from the one who had spent the night naked in front of the fireplace while three men proved they wanted every version of her.
My body had ignored the distinction. Every shift on the stool reminded me of the blankets, the heat, and the patient way they had held me afterward.
Kadir set my coffee beside my plate. He had already reheated it once.
“You need to eat something.”
I picked up one piece of toast, then put it back down after realizing my stomach had no interest in receiving it.
Across the island, Wesley had my laptop open beside his plate.
He had tested the camera, checked the microphone, and confirmed the internet connection three separate times.
The recordings had finished uploading after the power returned.
Every backup existed in two places, with the most recent demos organized into a folder that did not require anyone to understand my personal filing system.
He closed the laptop and turned it toward me.
“It’s ready.”
“Thank you.”
He watched me for another moment, then returned to his breakfast without offering reassurance neither of us trusted.
Leo had been quieter than usual since reading the attendee list. He finished half his eggs, abandoned the rest, and moved to the window.
Snow covered the property beyond the glass.
The plowed road had disappeared beneath another layer during the night, though the storm had weakened into a fine, steady fall.
Someone had stood somewhere beyond those windows and recorded us.
The footage remained online. Clips had multiplied while we had no service, cut into shorter versions and reposted by accounts that treated the invasion like bonus content.
Screenshots of me sat beside photos from the bar and stills from the lodge video.
Strangers compared sweaters, hair, and body language as if identifying me were a puzzle they had been invited to solve.
They had solved it.
Dasha Elizabeth Vale, daughter of a senior label executive. Midnight Theory’s temporary manager. AKA Lodge Girl.
The search results had become less openly cruel overnight. People discussed which man looked most attached to me, whether I was sleeping with all three, and whether my father had created the retreat so I could live out some elaborate fantasy.
Nobody wondered whether I had spent weeks trying to stop Leo from dismissing every idea he didn’t control. Nobody noticed how hard Wesley had worked to make himself heard or how much it cost Kadir to place an unfinished bass line in front of the others.
The internet had watched through a window and decided it understood the entire room.
I opened my notes again, though I already knew what they contained. A dated outline of each session. Links to recordings. Versions of the first four songs. Notes on the communication changes I introduced and the specific decisions that produced results.
The evidence looked solid when I reviewed it alone.
On a call with legal, publicity, artist management, and my father, it might look like an ambitious attempt to document my own innocence.
Wesley stood and carried his plate toward the sink. He paused behind me long enough to rest both hands on my shoulders. The pressure was brief, firm, and familiar. Then he continued cleaning without saying anything.
Leo turned from the window.
“They should be questioning the person who filmed us.”
His anger had returned to the same point repeatedly since the power came back. The trespassing mattered to him because it gave him somewhere clean to place the blame. Someone had crossed a boundary. Someone had taken something from us.
The label’s concerns were harder to dismiss.
“They can care about both.”
“They won’t.”
“They invited legal.”
“For us or them?”
I closed my notes. “Probably them.”
That ended the conversation.
Leo looked like he wanted to argue, but he had spent enough time around me to recognize when argument would become another task I had to manage. He came closer instead and removed something from the shoulder of my blazer.
I glanced at his fingers.
“Lint,” he said.
Kadir checked the time before I could.
I gathered my laptop, charger, coffee, and notes. The movement made all three men stop what they were doing. Wesley remained beside the sink with water running over his hands. Leo stood near the island. Kadir leaned back from his plate.
Nobody asked to come with me.
We had already discussed it while getting dressed.
I needed to enter the call alone unless the label requested the band.
Having three men crowd behind my chair to defend me would confirm the exact concern I planned to challenge.
I was still their manager. I couldn’t prove that by allowing them to turn a professional review into a loyalty test.
Wesley dried his hands and reached for mine when I passed him. His fingers tightened once.
Kadir’s palm touched the center of my back.
Leo adjusted the blouse he had already inspected.
Their support followed me out of the kitchen without requiring a speech.
The office sat at the opposite end of the first floor, beyond the studio and a narrow hall lined with framed photographs of mountains nobody at the lodge had visited.
I had used the room twice during the retreat.
It contained a desk, two guest chairs, a printer, and shelves filled with decorative books selected by height rather than subject.
I shut the door behind me.
The quiet sounded different from the outage. Electricity hummed through the walls. The heater moved air through the vent. My laptop connected immediately when I opened it.
I entered the meeting four minutes early.
My father was already there.
He sat in his office at the label, wearing the same neutral expression I had seen during budget meetings and employee reviews.
The framed records behind him were positioned perfectly.
His hands rested near the bottom of the screen, and his camera angle made him look like every executive who had ever delivered bad news while insisting it was a business decision.
He didn’t greet me as his daughter.
I understood why.
The senior vice president responsible for artist management joined next, followed by someone from business affairs, Midnight Theory’s A&R representative, and the publicity director who had called me twice during the retreat to approve footage.
Two other names appeared that I recognized without having met.
One worked in employee relations. The other supervised several managers on the West Coast.
My father remained muted while the senior vice president began.
The first several minutes converted six weeks into a list of risks.
My father’s role in assigning me to Midnight Theory. My personal involvement with the band. The footage spreading across social platforms. The possibility that intimacy had influenced creative decisions, access, scheduling, expenses, and the label’s assessment of my performance.
I kept my face still and took notes I didn’t need.
They began with the timeline.
I explained when the personal involvement started without describing what it involved.
The earliest incidents had been separate, consensual, and understood by everyone as temporary.
We had created rules based on the six-week retreat because none of us expected the arrangement to leave the lodge.
There had been no commitment, no exclusivity, and no discussion about continuing after the assignment ended.
The senior vice president asked why I had not informed anyone once the situation involved more than one band member.
The question had been phrased carefully. It still assumed permanence where there had been none.
The label didn’t receive reports every time an employee had consensual sex outside working hours. I hadn’t hidden an established relationship because no established relationship existed. Until the night before, every person involved believed the arrangement had an expiration date.
“I couldn’t report an ongoing relationship when none of us had agreed there was one.”
Business affairs asked whether that had changed.
My father looked directly into his camera for the first time.