CHAPTER 17
ROMY
Marisol’s single goes top five in February, and with that, the part of my life that’s mine gets a pulse.
The song is called “Anchorite,” and it’s hers, every word, my fingerprints only on the frame: the drum sound, the space in the second verse, the moment the harmony waits one extra beat.
She performs it on a late-night show and the clip does eight million views, and in the comments, under all the fire emojis, people keep asking who produced it.
Then she does the interview. The one with the quote.
“Romy Wildstone hears the thing underneath the song before you know how to say it,” she tells the journalist. “I came in with a diary and left with a record. She’s not anybody’s wife in the booth. She’s the whole reason.”
I read it in my car outside a grocery store, which is where all my biggest moments seem to happen now, and I sit there with my cart going warm in the sun and I cry about a pull quote, like a person with completely disordered priorities.
The quote travels. Music press, then regular press, then the kind of aggregated sludge that puts my name in headlines without “wife of” attached to it.
Two labels call Ellis within the week asking if I’m taking clients.
A singer I’ve admired for a decade emails me directly: When you’re ready, I’d crawl to work with you.
When you’re ready. As if my readiness is a known fact, a thing the industry is politely waiting on. Maybe it is.
Knox posts about “Anchorite” on his own account: a clip, and a caption — Huge record.
Congratulations to Marisol and the whole production team.
He doesn’t tag me. He doesn’t text me. He amplifies the work and stands back from it, and the discipline of that, the newness of it, lands on me harder than any grand gesture could have.
Dean texts: He read it out loud to the bus. Twice. Proud like a dad at a piano recital. Don’t tell him I said that.
Never, I text back. How’s Salt Lake?
Cold, he says. You good?
Good, I say, and it’s the least I’ve ever lied to Dean.
Because here’s what I don’t tell anyone: attention has a smell now, and I flinch at it.
The last time my name trended, it was because the internet had decided I was a jealous harpy who tore clothes off America’s sweetheart.
Samantha hasn’t posted in weeks. Her silence is professionally sensible, her label mopping up the Denver corridor, and I know better than to trust it, and I trust it a little anyway, because I am tired, and tired is when she does her best work.
Tuesday morning, 7 a.m., I drive to Frogtown with coffee and a plan for the second single.
The studio’s rear door is open.
Not unlocked. Open. The frame splintered around the lock, crowbar work, and I stand in the alley with two coffees and my whole body goes cold before my brain catches up, and I should call Ellis, I should call the police, and instead I push the door wider, because there’s something on the air I know.
It’s quiet. That’s what I know. A studio should never be this quiet.
Inside, the main room is wrecked, but wrecked precisely, a surgeon’s wreckage.
The servers are untouched. Marisol’s drives sit in their rack, unmolested.
The vintage desk Ellis mortgaged his twenties for, intact.
Her masters, her takes, her future: untouched.
I catalog that first, because it tells me this wasn’t rage at the world. What’s broken is mine.
My guitar. The ’74 I’ve had since the club days, the one Romy-before-Wildstone bought with bar money, is on the floor with the neck snapped.
My handwritten lyric sheets, the ones I keep in the flat file, are torn in halves and quarters, not scattered, sorted.
My microphone, the one I’ve owned for nineteen years, the one that cut “Wire and Gasoline” and every home demo since, has been thrown through the booth glass.
It’s sticking out of the frame like an axe in a door.
The framed early photo of me and Knox, the one from the club residency, two broke kids squinting into a future, is off the wall, glass smashed, and the glass is what did the work: someone’s ground the frame face-down into the floor, hard enough to leave gouges in the wood.
And on the console, centered on the desk like a place setting, is a handwritten page.
A fragment of After Midnight. The second verse. Copied out in handwriting I know from a research room’s worth of notes, the vow line underlined twice, and beneath it, no salutation, no signature, because monsters don’t need them:
This is the one she thinks belongs to her.
I photograph everything before I call anyone. Old habits. Then I call Ellis, and the police, in that order, and I stand in the parking lot between calls, shaking hard enough to make the phone blurry, and I am not crying. I’m way past crying. Crying is for the nights. This is a morning thing.
The police are decent and thorough. The security footage is the one lucky break in the history of unlucky breaks: Ellis’s cheap alley camera, installed after a tagger kept hitting the mural, catches her at 3:40 a.m., hood up, face tilted straight to the lens.
She knew exactly where it was. No Wildstone pass needed.
No plausible anything. It’s her, and it’s trespass, and it’s vandalism, and it’s on video, and even the detective uses the word “straightforward,” which in LAPD is practically a love song.
Ellis arrives white-faced and leaves me only once, to get me a chair I refuse. His studio. His mortgage. His broken booth glass. He looks at the wreckage and then at me and says, “Whatever you need this to be, it’s that,” and I love him purely and forever for not saying anything wise.
The detective is wrapping up when he pauses at the console and says, careful, “One question. This page. You’re certain it’s directed at you? The content is… a love song.”
“Read the bottom line,” I say.
He reads it. He’s maybe thirty, has kind eyes, and I watch him do the math that Knox couldn’t do for a year: the copied verse, the underlined vow, the pronoun. “She thinks,” he says.
“She thinks,” I agree.
“Okay,” he says, and writes it down in his notebook, verbatim, and something about seeing it enter an official notebook, in a policeman’s blocky hand, undoes me worse than the guitar did. Somebody wrote it down. Somebody wrote it down and it’s a record now.
Then I fold the photocopy the detective made for me — the original stays with the report — and I drive to Knox’s label office.
I don’t call ahead. His people know me; the front desk goes pale and lets me pass, because whatever else has happened this year, I am still Romy, and the building still answers to my face.
He’s in the big office with Miranda, a strategy meeting, coffee and lawyers’ binders, and they both stand when I come in, because I can hear my own footsteps and so can they.
I throw the photocopy on his desk. It slides across the blotter and stops against his coffee cup, my whole marriage’s song on a sheet of precinct toner, in her handwriting.
“Still just weird?” I say.
The room is very quiet. Miranda steps back from the desk, slowly, a woman leaving the blast radius.
The two lawyers freeze with their binders half-open, and nobody tells me I can’t be here, because the news is already moving faster than I drove, and this building knows exactly what happened at 3:40 this morning, and to whom.
Knox looks at the page. He doesn’t touch it. He reads it where it lies, the verse, the underlined vow, the sentence, and I watch twenty years of belief drain out of his face. The reasonable explanations. The innocent objects. The committee meetings. All of it, draining.
“No,” he says.
“I told you months ago.”
“I know.” His voice is barely there.
“No.” I lean over the desk, both hands flat on it, close enough to make him meet my eyes, and I say it with everything I have, because this is the last time I intend to ever say it. “You know now.”
He doesn’t argue. He doesn’t defend the year, or explain the objects, or reach for me.
He stands there and takes it, all of it, and then he does the first fully right thing I’ve seen him do in fourteen months: he picks up the phone and says to Miranda, “Get our lawyers, her label, the venue security council, and the police liaison on one call. Now. And nobody minimizes anything on this call, or they’re fired before it ends. ”
Miranda’s already dialing.
I turn to go. I’ve said what I came to say, and staying would only make it about us, and it stopped being about us at 3:40 this morning in an alley in Frogtown.
“Romy.” His voice, at the door. Not a reach. A fact. “I’m sorry. For all of it. For the part where it had to become this before I believed you.”
I stop in the doorway of his big glass office, with the whole floor pretending not to watch.
“Yeah,” I say. “That’s the part I left over.”
And I walk out, past the platinum records, past his whole shining history on the walls, and I don’t look back at any of it.
The police take it from there. The lawyers take it from there. Samantha Saint’s label calls mine within the day, and the word they use is “cooperation,” and nobody says her name to me kindly ever again, which is its own small justice.
I drive back to Frogtown, because Ellis is there with brooms and contractors, and there is glass to sweep and a booth to rebuild and a record that still needs its second single.
Marisol shows up mid-afternoon with her brother and three friends and a broom each, unasked. She takes one look at the snapped guitar and bursts into tears, and I end up comforting her, which is backwards and exactly right.
“We’ll get you another guitar,” she says.
“You don’t replace a ’74,” I say. “You bury it or you burn it. We’ll decide.” I put my arm around her. “The drives are fine. Your record’s fine. Nothing of yours was touched. That’s the only thing about today I intend to remember.”
She pulls back and looks at me, this fierce nineteen-year-old, and says, “She came for your stuff because your stuff is you. And you’re still here. So she still lost.”
Out of the mouths of artists.
The work continues. We rebuild the booth in nine days, and the second single is better than the first, and when it’s done we stand in the repaired glass and listen to it on the big monitors, loud enough to shake the alley.
She could’ve asked anyone how I handle the work. She could’ve just asked me.
I’m still standing in the room. That’s the answer.