Chapter 11: What He Doesn't Know
1239 Words
The credit correction hit the internet at 9:47 a.m.
Elena was on a scaffold three floors up, shooting the glass facade of a building that didn't deserve the amount of natural light it was getting, when her phone started going off in her vest pocket. She ignored it. She always ignored it on a job. The light was doing something specific to the upper panels and she had maybe four minutes before a cloud bank moved in and killed it.
She got the shot. She got six versions of the shot. She climbed down.
She checked her phone.
Forty-seven notifications.
The first was from a number she didn't recognize, which turned out to be a journalist she had spoken to exactly once, two years ago, about a gallery show that had gone nowhere. The second was from Theo. The third, fourth, and fifth were from Nessa, escalating in punctuation.
She opened Nessa's last message first.
IT'S EVERYWHERE. ELENA. IT IS EVERYWHERE.
Below it was a screenshot.
She had to look at it twice before her brain agreed to process what she was seeing.
It was Kai's official social accounts, all of them, posted simultaneously, which meant it had been coordinated and it had been deliberate. The image was simple. Black background. White text. No graphics, no branding, nothing that looked like a PR move, which was exactly what made it look like one, except that she knew his handwriting, she had known it for years, and the note in the image was handwritten.
It said:
Three years ago, a song was registered under my name alone. That was wrong. The original creative work, the photograph that became the visual foundation of that song, and a significant portion of the melodic structure, belong to Elena Reyes. Her name has been added to the official songwriting credits and the streaming registration, effective today. This is not a negotiation or a statement. It is a correction. It should have happened three years ago. I am sorry it did not.
Below the post, forty-two thousand comments in the first hour.
Elena stood on the sidewalk outside the building she had just been photographing and read it three times.
Her hands were steady. She was proud of her hands.
Her phone rang. Unknown number, LA area code.
She answered it.
"I was going to give you a warning," Kai said. "I was going to text first. Sloane called my lawyer at eight this morning and I decided if I waited for a good time there would never be a good time."
"Kai."
"The streaming services will take a few days to update the metadata. The physical catalog is more complicated, but my team is working on it. You'll get the back royalties from the date of original release. My accountant is going to reach out to you directly, I need an email address or a lawyer's contact, whichever you prefer."
"Kai."
He stopped.
"Why," she said.
A beat. "Because it's yours."
"Why now."
The pause this time was different. Not the pause of someone choosing words. The pause of someone who had the words and was deciding whether they were brave enough to say them.
"Because I saw your face," he said. "On that stage. You were forty feet away and you had your camera pointed at everything in that building except me. And I missed my cue." He stopped. "I've played twenty thousand seat arenas and I have never missed a cue. You looked at me for two seconds and I lost the next line of a song I have performed four hundred times."
She didn't say anything.
"That's not an explanation," he said. "I know that. I'm not trading you a story for forgiveness. I just." He exhaled. "I needed you to know the credit was real. Not a strategy. Not Sloane's idea. She fought me on it hard this morning and I did it anyway."
"She's going to make your life difficult."
"She already does."
A cab went past on the street. Someone's music drifted out of an open window two floors up, something with a lot of bass, nothing she recognized. The cloud bank she had been watching from the scaffold moved across the sun and the whole block went gray.
"There are things you don't know," Elena said.
"I know."
"I don't mean about the credit."
A beat. "Okay."
She had not meant to say that. She had meant to say thank you and hang up and go back to the corporate architecture job and pick up Wren at six and make dinner and not feel any of this until it had compressed itself into something she could manage. She had a system. The system worked.
"Elena." His voice was careful. "What don't I know."
She watched the cloud move.
"Not on the phone," she said.
The silence stretched. She could hear him breathing, could hear the particular quality of a room around him, the low ambient hum of something that sounded like a hotel.
"Okay," he said. "Tell me when and where."
"I need to think."
"Take whatever time you need."
"Don't say that like it's easy."
"It's not easy," he said quietly. "But it's true."
She closed her eyes. Behind them she saw Wren's face this morning. The gap-toothed smile. The mismatched button eye on Biscuit. The way she had said who's the man with the simple factual curiosity of a child who had never had reason to ask that question before and did not yet understand why it mattered.
"I'll text you," Elena said.
"Okay."
"Kai."
"Yeah."
"The correction." She stopped. Started again. "Thank you. For doing it without making it about anything else."
He was quiet for a moment. "It was always yours. I should have protected it when I had the chance."
She hung up.
She stood on the sidewalk for another thirty seconds. The cloud passed. The light came back, that specific sideways morning light that made every surface look more itself, sharper and cleaner than it actually was.
Her phone buzzed. Theo this time.
She ignored it.
She put the phone in her vest pocket and picked up her camera and looked up at the building she was supposed to be shooting. Glass and steel and reflected sky. Completely ordinary. Not worth the amount of light it was getting.
She raised the camera.
She thought about a man in a hotel room somewhere in this city who did not know he had a daughter.
She thought about a four-year-old three blocks away who had never once asked where her father was and one day would.
She thought about the door she had just cracked open on a phone call she had told herself she would never have.
She got the shot.
She got six versions of the shot.
She did not let herself think about what came next until she was back on the sidewalk with the camera lowered, and then she thought about it all at once, everything at once, and it moved through her like weather.
Then she straightened her shoulders.
She had a job at noon.
She had a daughter to pick up at six.
She had a man she needed to tell something to, and no idea how to say it, and no version of the next conversation that didn't split the world in half.
But she had tonight.
She would think about it tonight.
She started walking.
- Writer
