CHAPTER 21
ROMY
The publishing meeting is the one I’ve been dreading more than the divorce papers, and I couldn’t have told you why until I’m sitting in it.
Dean calls while I’m getting dressed. “You want me to come?”
“It’s a conference room, not a boxing ring.”
“Those are the same venue in this town and you know it.” He lets me laugh, then doesn’t laugh himself. “Romy. The songs. You should’ve been on half of them since 2012. If they try to make you feel greedy today, remember the garage. Remember who cut the second verses.”
“Who told you I was thinking about the second verses?”
“Because it’s you,” he says, “and it’s today.”
I wear the green jacket, the good one, and boots I can stand in for six hours, because you dress for the meeting you’re actually having and the one I’m having is with my own history.
Money was easy. Houses were easy. This is the catalog, two hundred and eleven songs, fifteen years, the whole recorded history of a band that was also a marriage. My name is on eleven of them as a writer, the early ones, the ones from before the lawyers got tidy. My fingerprints are on the rest.
The conference room belongs to a music-rights firm on Wilshire. My lawyer, a publishing specialist named June who talks in decimals, Knox’s people on a screen because he’s in Nashville, and Miranda, dialled in from New York, because the catalog is still partly her kingdom.
June starts with the accounting, and it’s as lopsided as we knew.
The deep cuts that carry the live show, the arrangements that turned demos into anthems, the second verses I cut because they lied — uncredited labor, all of it, legally owned by entities I never had a seat in.
It’s not malicious. It’s worse: it’s paperwork doing what paperwork does: recording who was in the room with a pen, and not who was on the floor with the four-track.
“So that’s the landscape,” June says. “We can contest. I’d estimate eighteen months, meaningful upside, meaningful ugliness.”
“Or?” I say, because there’s always an or.
“Or,” Knox says, from the screen, “you open the folder your assistant hasn’t handed you yet.”
There’s a folder. June slides it over with an expression of a woman who has seen the contents and recused herself from opinions.
Inside is an amendment, already drafted, already signed on his side.
It credits me as co-writer on thirty-eight songs.
The ones I arranged. The ones I fixed. The ones with my harmonies baked into the melody so deep you can’t unbake them.
It backdates nothing — you can’t — but it shares everything forward. Publishing, sync, mechanicals. Half.
I read the first page. Then the schedule of songs, and my own history scrolls past in alphabetical order, titles I haven’t let myself think about in a year. Anchorite isn’t there; that was never mine. After Midnight is there. First on the list.
“You’re giving me half the song?” My voice comes out wrong. I don’t care.
Knox on the screen, in some Nashville greenroom, in the good light of a window I can’t see: “No. Half was always yours. This is the paperwork catching up.”
Miranda speaks for the first time. “I want it noted that the initiative came from the client. The firm’s position was—” She stops. Recalibrates. “The firm’s position is now the client’s position.”
I look at June. June gives me the smallest nod in the history of nodding: this is real, and this is good, and you should say yes before anyone develops opinions.
“There’s a second schedule,” June says quietly. “Page nineteen.”
Page nineteen is one sentence, and it’s the sentence that rearranges the room.
It establishes After Midnight, that song alone, carved out of the whole catalog, as dual-consent.
Neither party may perform it, license it, release a version of it, or permit its use without the other’s written agreement.
Not a majority stake. Not a buyout option. A veto, both directions, forever.
“That’s an unusual structure,” June says, in the tone of a lawyer who argued against it and lost. “Most clients want exit ramps. This has no exit ramp. It’s a locked door with a key on each side.”
“Knox,” I say, at the screen. “That’s your closer. That’s the last ninety seconds of every show you’ve played for fifteen years.”
“Was,” he says. “Until we both say yes, that song doesn’t exist for me anymore. It was never a solo. I just spent a decade and a half singing it alone.”
I don’t trust my voice, so I don’t use it.
My eyes are doing something I decline to have witnessed on a video call, and I take off my glasses and clean them until it passes.
I nod at June, and June notes the nod, and the meeting goes on around the thing neither of us is going to say in a room with lawyers: that he just handed me the only key he couldn’t charm, buy, or outwait.
“Why thirty-eight?” I ask, when I can.
“It’s every song where I could find you in the multitrack,” he says.
“I went through the stems with an engineer. Your voice is on the reference takes. Your arrangement notes are in the session logs from 2014 on — Ellis kept everything, it turns out. I had a year of people telling me what I already knew.” He shrugs, one-sided, tired.
“I didn’t do this to be good, Romy. I did it because not doing it was theft with good lawyers. ”
There’s a question I have to ask, and I hate it, and I ask it. “And what do you get?”
“Out of this? Nothing. That’s the point of—”
“That’s not what I mean.” I set the pen down. “Every grand gesture you’ve ever made came with a door I was supposed to walk through. The house. The tour. The whole life. So I’m asking, in a room full of witnesses: what door is this?”
Silence on the screen. His lawyer looks down. Miranda’s face does something complicated.
“There isn’t one,” he says finally. “You can take the amendment and never speak to me again, and the checks arrive anyway, and the credits print anyway. It’s not a gesture, Romy.
It’s an accounting. Gestures are for an audience.
The only audience for this is a database in Nashville that prints royalty statements. ”
I believe him. That’s the strangest moment of the whole meeting — the believing. A year ago I’d have scanned it for the move. Now I watch him sit with the discomfort of not being trusted and not arguing about it, and I think: okay. He’s learning what things cost.
“Then yes,” I tell June. “We accept. No contest.”
The rest is signatures and decimals. At one point the screen freezes with Knox mid-nod, and for a full minute he’s a photograph in my peripheral vision while June and his counsel wrangle a definition of “derivative work,” and I catch myself studying the frozen version of him: a map of a country I used to live in.
The border’s still there. The roads don’t go where they used to.
He comes back to life mid-sentence, apologizes to no one in particular, and signs where June says to sign.
We’re twenty minutes from done when Miranda clears her throat, and I know that throat-clear; I’ve heard it across fifteen years of boardrooms. It’s the sound of a woman raising a topic she’s been told not to raise.
“One more item,” she says. “Off the amendment. Knox, the new material — the label’s asked about a producer for the next record. They’d like a shortlist.” A pause. “Your wife— Romy’s name is at the top of theirs. Obviously.”
It’s not obviously. It’s the single most loaded sentence anyone could put on this table, and Miranda puts it there with the face of a woman delivering weather she knows will ruin the picnic.
Knox doesn’t look at me. He looks at his hands, and he takes a breath I can hear over a conference line from Nashville, and he says, “No.”
“Knox—”
“No. You don’t ask her that. Not in this meeting, not as a label ask, not with a royalty amendment still warm on the table, so nobody can ever say she traded for it or I bought it.
” He’s quiet a second. “If Romy Wildstone ever wants to produce anything of mine, she’ll say so, to me, in a room she chose, on a day that has nothing to do with money.
Until then her name comes off the shortlist, and if the label pushes, tell them the answer is still no and the no is mine, not hers. ”
Miranda, after a beat: “Noted.” And I could swear there’s something in her voice that wasn’t there a year ago. Respect, maybe. Or its early stages.
The meeting ends. Goodbyes through glass. I’m gathering papers when June says, carefully, “For what it’s worth, in twenty years of music law, that was the cleanest decoupling of leverage from generosity I’ve seen. They usually arrive welded together.”
“They did for a long time,” I say. “Somebody cut the weld.”
I’m in the elevator before I realize my hands are steady and my chest is not.
I stand in the parking garage and let myself feel the thing I’m feeling, which turns out not to be gratitude, and not triumph.
It’s grief, weirdly. Grief for the version of this meeting we should have had in year three, when the first arrangement went uncredited and I told myself credit was a vanity and being needed was the same as being loved.
You should have been able to stop me the first time, I think, at no one. At the industry, at the paperwork, at myself. Maybe especially at myself.
June buys me a sandwich at the place downstairs, a lawyer’s celebration, twenty minutes of shop talk about sync licensing before she says the human thing: “Whatever that was in there, I’ve never seen it end with both people richer than they walked in. And I don’t mean the money.”
I don’t either.
I drive home past Frogtown without planning to and end up in my booth for three hours, not working on anything, just listening to the Input Problems’ rough mixes and writing notes in the margins.
Second verse, cut the second verse, it lies.
Some habits you keep because they were never the problem. The problem was who they were free for.
Ellis knocks once and lets himself in, reads my face, reads the legal folder on the console.
“It went how it went?” he says.
“Half the songs. Both names. Mine first on the one that matters.”
He whistles, low. “Fifteen years of me telling that man the room had two people in it.” He picks up the Input Problems notes, flips them, sets them down. “You gonna play it? Now that you can stop him?”
“No,” I say. “That’s not what the key’s for.”
“What’s it for?”
“Not yet knowing,” I say, and Ellis nods, because he’s the only other person in this town who understands that a song can be a place, and some places you don’t visit until both people agree the war’s over.
He turns the board off for me, the house ritual, the one he used to do when I was nobody’s name on anything. “Go home, Wildstone,” he says. “Your lamp’s got a curfew.”
I go.
That night, an email from June: the amendment is filed. And a text from a number I haven’t saved and don’t need to.
After Midnight has two names on it now, it says. Yours first.
I look at it a long time. Then I type: It always did.
And because it’s true, and because I’m allowed: Sleep well, Knox.
The hallway light’s on. It’s for me. But I’ll tell you a secret — the first time in months, I leave it on a little past when I need it.