CHAPTER 11
ROMY
Knox’s company owns a studio complex in Silver Lake, the one we call the Vault, because half the band’s history is shelved in it. Masters, live boards, wardrobe, photography, forty years of Wildstone in climate control.
I’m there on a Thursday to collect my own production files from the server room, the stems and sessions from the EP arrangement work.
My name, my work, my copies. Since the shove, I’ve been quietly making sure that everything of mine exists somewhere Knox’s company doesn’t control, and if that’s the behavior of a woman preparing for something, I’ll just say the divorce rate among session aces is high and my hard drive is none of your business.
Ellis Grant is the one who gave me somewhere to put it all.
Ellis has run an independent studio in Frogtown for fifteen years, produced half the records I wish I’d made, and been my friend since the club days, purely, uncomplicatedly, in a way nobody’s ever written a gossip column about, which is its own small miracle.
When I called and asked if he had storage, he said, “I have a whole room,” and didn’t ask why.
When I brought the first boxes over, he didn’t ask then either.
He made tea and we listened to his new mic preamp for an hour and I felt like a person again.
“I’ll ask eventually,” he said, at the door.
“I know,” I said. “You’ll hate the answer.”
“I hate most answers,” Ellis said. “The room’s yours anyway.”
Third floor, past the tape library, there’s a corridor of edit suites and research rooms. One door is propped open with a trash can, and the paper sign taped to it says SAINT PROJECT / RESEARCH in a PA’s handwriting.
I know I should keep walking. I hear the rule in my own voice, the one I’d give anyone else: keep walking, Romy.
The room is empty. The lights are on. The walls are covered.
I’m not proud. I go in.
First I stand in the doorway a full thirty seconds, listening for footsteps, phone already in my hand, and the corridor stays empty, and the room hums its climate-control hum, and the paper sign flutters once when the air kicks on. That’s all the permission I get, and I take it.
At first, it’s exactly what the sign says, and my whole chest unclenches, because it’s so defensible it’s almost boring.
Press clippings in archival sleeves. Tour books, flagged with sticky notes.
Stage reference photos, lighting plots printed from old tours, interview transcripts with passages highlighted.
A timeline of the band’s career pinned across one whole corkboard, cards and string, the kind of wall a documentary researcher builds because it’s their literal job to build it.
Aaron’s people confirmed weeks ago that the film commissioned extensive archival research.
This is that research. This is what the job looks like, done properly.
There’s a section on me, and even that is defensible.
I was there. I’m in the history. I was there.
I’m in the history. Photos of me side stage, me at soundboards, me in the ’03 fringe.
Notes on the live arrangements. A researcher studying the band would study me same as any long-tenured crew chief. I’m in the history.
So I stand there ready to feel foolish. I’ve got the feeling all queued up, the little speech I’d give Knox: I walked into a research room and it was full of research, imagine that.
Then I see the second table.
It’s behind the door, out of sight of the corridor, and the folders on it aren’t tabbed or sleeved. They’re working folders, handwritten, and the first one I open has no heading at all, just a list.
Knox’s coffee order. Not the public one, the tour-rider one. The home one. Oat milk, one sugar, the stupid specific temperature he likes it, which I know because I’ve made it ten thousand times.
His pre-show rituals. The real ones. The ones no journalist has ever been told, because they’re not charming, they’re private: the four songs he hums in the shower, the way he has to eat standing up, the call to me from the wings, every night, even from stadiums. Especially from stadiums. She has the call. She has it written down.
The way he rests his hand between my shoulder blades when we’re standing in a crowd, flat and warm, a lighthouse of a hand. It’s on a list titled HABITS — HERS. Not his. Hers.
My wedding hairstyle. The name of the woman who did it, who has done nobody’s hair in six years, who I had to be introduced to twice before I remembered her. She found her.
The address of the first apartment. Sycamore. The actual street number.
A list of my old stage looks, dated, with notes on where to source the fringe.
And a page matching songs to events, the band’s catalog cross-referenced against our marriage, milestones only two people know. After Midnight has its own sheet. Naturally. Across the top of it, in handwriting I’ve come to know from a hundred session notes, she has written:
This is the one she thinks belongs to her.
I don’t scream. I don’t cry. What I do is take out my phone, and I start photographing, page by page, folder by folder, steady hands, documentation, because I have been the keeper of evidence in every production I’ve ever run and I am not about to forget how now, not now, not with my own marriage spread out on a table in someone else’s handwriting.
I’m four pages in when she arrives.
“What are you doing in here?”
Samantha, in the doorway, two coffees in a carrier, a researcher behind her with an armful of mailers. Her voice is wrong. I’ve heard every version of her voice there is, and this one is new, stripped, no warmth anywhere in it.
I hold up the page with the Sycamore address.
“What documentary question,” I say, “requires my old apartment’s street number?”
“Put that down.”
“What scene in Aaron’s film covers my wedding hairstyle? My husband’s shower songs?” I turn a page toward her. “This one? ‘Habits, hers’?”
“Researchers gather everything.” She’s not looking at me. She’s looking at my phone. “That’s what they’re for. They gather everything and then the director decides what’s relevant. You have no idea how films are made.”
“You’re not researching Knox.” My voice comes out level, almost gentle, the way it gets when I’m finally, finally done. “You’re researching me.”
And she lunges for the phone.
It’s fast and graceless and completely silent, that’s the thing I remember later, how silent it is, no shouting, just her hands on my phone and my hands on my phone and both of us pulling, and the researcher frozen in the doorway with his mailers, and my elbow clips the table lamp on the third wrench and it goes over and shatters, and the phone hits the floor and skids, and she dives for it and I get there first, on one knee in broken glass, and that’s the picture security walks in on.
Her standing over me. Me on the floor in the shards, holding my own phone.
Two guards. The researcher talking over himself. Samantha’s voice arriving fully restored, breathless, concerned: “She was going through the project’s private materials, she was photographing everything, I asked her to stop—”
By the time Knox gets there, forty minutes later, the room has been tidied.
Folders closed. Pages turned face down. The corkboard is just a corkboard, career timeline, cards and string, a documentary doing its homework.
Samantha sits in the corner with an assistant and a blanket someone gave her, pale and shaken, a woman surprised in her workplace.
Her people are already saying the word trespass. Mine aren’t there at all.
Knox walks the room slowly. He reads the corkboard.
He opens two folders, the two nearest the top, the ones anyone would open, and they’re stage references and press clippings.
He looks at the broken lamp. He looks at me, standing by the table with my phone full of photographs I can’t make him scroll through, not here, not with three lawyers’ worth of tension in the room and her people watching.
“The research is excessive,” he says finally, to Aaron’s line producer, who has materialized with a carefully horrified expression.
“Some of it should never have been gathered. As of today, the film loses access to anything non-public, anything personal, anything about my wife’s life that isn’t her professional work.
Someone from my team audits this room before another page gets photographed by anyone. ”
It’s decisive. It’s correct. It’s the incident handled, again, and I watch him handle it, and my heart is slamming, because I can see what he can’t, which is that the table is cleared and the smoking gun is in my pocket and even he can’t build the whole picture from a corkboard and a broken lamp.
In the parking structure, alone, I show him. Page by page. The coffee order. The shower songs. The lighthouse hand. Sycamore. The looks. And the last one, the one I make him stand still for, the sentence across the After Midnight sheet.
He reads it. He reads everything once, like I do, and then he stands there between our two cars with my phone in his hand, and I watch him try.
“Romy, this is—” He stops. Starts again. “It’s disturbing. I see that. I see exactly what’s disturbing about it.”
“But.”
“But the room was commissioned research.” He gives me back my phone, careful, like I’m made of the same glass as the lamp.
“Ninety percent of what’s in there has a legitimate explanation, and the ten percent is notes.
Obsessive, invasive notes, and I’m shutting the access down today, and I’m not defending it.
But you’re asking me to call it evidence of a plan to— what?
Become you? Romy. She’s a pop star with a research team and no boundaries, and I’m handling it, but you want me to burn her whole life down over handwritten notes, and I can’t get there from a lamp and a folder. ”
“She is studying how to become me,” I say.
“She’s studying the band.”
“I stood in that room, Knox. You held four pages of it in your hand. The hallway light. The shoulder blades. The address. What part of your wife, itemized, is ambiguous to you?”
“None of it.” His voice cracks a little. “None of it is ambiguous, it’s wrong, and I’ve shut it down. What name do you want me to give it? Whatever I call it, I’ve already shut it down.”
Gone. I want you to call it gone. I want her out of our professional lives completely, not audited, not managed, not handled. Out.
I don’t say it. Because he’s looking at me with honest, frightened eyes, doing arithmetic with two numbers that won’t add, and I understand all at once that this is the thing about the explanations being good.
They don’t have to be true to win. They just have to be good enough that the person choosing them can still call himself reasonable.
“Okay,” I say.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it,” I say, and get in my car and drive home alone.
The photos are backed up to three places before I reach the gate.
On the drive home I take the long way, up through the hills, and I let myself think the whole thought for once instead of filing it.
The outfits. The photograph. The hallway light.
She doesn’t want to hurt me. Hurting me is incidental, a line she’ll happily sing backwards if it scans better.
She wants to be me, standing where I stand, harmonizing where I harmonize, lit the way I’m lit, and she’s been assembling the kit for months in a rented room with a trash can holding the door open.
She thinks the room is the worst of it. The room was just the filing system.
The plan is the worst of it.