They Stole My Songs

Chapter 15

Scarlett Vale came to my apartment at one in the morning, alone, wearing an oversized grey hoodie with the drawstrings pulled tight.

She had climbed four flights of stairs. Her shoulders heaved on the landing, her chest rising and falling against the dull yellow stairwell light. She wore no makeup, had brought no assistants, and carried no trace of her tuned laugh. Her hair was pushed roughly into the hood, damp at the temples. She looked the way she had looked for one second in the Burbank rehearsal hall when the playback stopped: someone suddenly stripped of the apparatus around her.

"You can't be here," I said, holding the apartment door half open.

"I know." She held up both hands, palms out, fingers trembling slightly. "That's why it's me and not a lawyer. Please. Five minutes. I'll stand. I don't even want to sit in your house."

I kept the apartment door anchored with my sneaker and let her stand in the narrow entryway. The linoleum was cold under my bare feet. My right hand slipped into my cardigan pocket. Elena's recording app was already installed on my phone; my thumb found the volume button, toggled the screen awake, and pressed the red circle on the touchscreen before I asked what brought her up the stairs at that hour.

"I need a song," Scarlett said.

I laughed. The sound came out flat, with no humor in it.

"Listen to me. Just listen." She took half a step into the hallway, pulling the hood lower over her brow. "The tour is gone. The sponsor is gone. The new album is — you saw the pre-order livestream. Everybody saw the livestream."

I watched her hands clench into the sleeves of her hoodie. The fabric was frayed at the cuffs.

"Dylan says we wait it out," she continued, her voice tightening. "Victor says I'm an asset in a holding pattern. An asset. I have been an asset since I was nineteen." She fixed her eyes on my face, looking directly at me in a way she had never done across my reception desk in three years. "They're meeting next week about my replacement. My replacement, Maya. Like I'm a set list."

She paused, swallowing hard, before her voice dropped lower.

"And the only thing that has ever worked, the only thing that ever made a room stand up, is your melodies. I know that. I've always known it. I can't live without them. That's the thing nobody will print. Take your songs away and there's no singer left. There's just a girl who's good at photographs."

"Say it publicly," I said.

"What?"

"You heard me. Say it where it counts. Not in my doorway at one in the morning. In the light. Say whose songs they are — say it once, Scarlett, and half of this ends for both of us."

Her shoulders caved inward. Her entire posture collapsed toward the floor, her chin dropping to her collarbone as the tension drained out of her frame. She stared down at the worn welcome mat by the door sill.

"I can't," she whispered. "If I say it, I confirm everything. The fraud. The lip-sync. My contract has a clause. Dylan walked me through it, he was proud of the clause. I'd owe them my whole—"

"Your whole life," I said. "Yes. I know the paperwork. I signed the other copy of it."

I stepped out onto the landing and pulled my apartment door shut behind me, the lock engaging with a dull click. I walked her down all four flights of stairs. Neither of us spoke on the way down. The concrete steps echoed under our soles while the phone in my cardigan pocket recorded the descent. At the street door, under the flickering exterior lamp, her hand rested on the metal push bar. Scarlett turned back toward the stairs.

"You know he doesn't delete anything, right?" she said. "Dylan. All that ceremony — wiping drives in front of witnesses. It's for show. He's a hoarder."

She gripped the push bar tighter, leaning back toward the stairwell. "There's a box — an actual box, in his office, I saw it when I went for the tour contracts. Printed emails. Years of them. He prints everything and keeps it, because he doesn't trust Victor not to bury him, and paper is the only—"

She caught herself. Her fingers slipped off the bar. "Forget it. I didn't come here. I was never here."

The street door clicked shut. I stood at the bottom of the stairwell with the red light still running on the phone in my pocket, her sentence finished in my hand all the way to the end this time.

The email broke eleven days later.

It did not come from our camp. An entertainment reporter with long-standing industry sources published it on a Tuesday morning, complete with full routing headers.

It consisted of four lines of internal correspondence sent from Dylan Cross to a subordinate in copyright administration, dated three days after I had delivered "Neon Heart." Reading the printout over Elena's shoulder, I noticed the recipient line immediately: copyright administration. The little office on five, where Walter Hines had worked for nineteen years.

Once the buyout paperwork clears, remove the Reed attribution from all registrations and working files. Originals and masters to Vireo Lane. Do not keep copies on the Sterling server. Confirm when done.

Sterling Records issued a formal statement before noon. The company labeled the message an outright fabrication, deplored what it termed a criminal forgery, and pledged full cooperation with authorities to identify whoever had manufactured a cruel hoax during pending litigation.

The company's position eroded anyway. By Friday, the corporate goodwill had fallen off a table. Two major commercial sponsors paused their marketing contracts with the label. A national morning program that had scheduled Scarlett for an exclusive broadcast segment canceled her interview and replaced her appearance with a cooking demonstration.

Under every clip of the dead pre-order stream, which Sterling's lawyers could not pull fast enough, the comments had a new refrain: confirm when done, confirm when done, set to the rhythm of a song I wrote in a stairwell.

Elena sat behind her desk, tracing the technical metadata of the published document with the back of her pen. She examined the transmission logs, the routing hops, the server relays, the unique message identifier, and the originating server string sitting in the header block.

She turned the page over, looking up from the desk. Then she smiled the smile I had first seen across a diner napkin.

"Forged or not forged," Elena said, "is a question for their press release."

She tapped the originating server string with the tip of her pen.

"Here's the question for a judge, Maya. Whatever server sent this — whoever typed it, whoever faked it, whoever they're going to blame for it — that machine is still in Victor's building. And machines, like receptionists, keep everything."