They Stole My Songs

Chapter 3

The morning show was called Sunrise Coast, and it played in the lobby every day at eight, because Victor Sterling liked the talent to see themselves in the building's glass.

Scarlett was the Friday guest, promoting the tour, dressed in white. The host, Kelly Brandt, was three questions in, the dress, the tour, the new puppy, when she leaned forward with the bright, warm smile she saved for the question she actually cared about.

"Okay, I have to ask you about the bridge in 'Neon Heart.' That chord change, the drop to the minor six, right where the lyric turns. Critics are calling it the most honest moment in pop this decade. Where did it come from?"

Scarlett laughed. It was a good laugh; she'd had it professionally tuned. "Honestly? I heard it in a dream. I woke up at like three a.m. and it was just... there. The song kind of wrote itself through me."

On the lobby screen, the live comments scrolled up the side:

she doesn't know her own song lol dream?? girl be serious ask her what a minor six IS

I stood at my desk with a stack of call sheets in my hands and did the thing I had sworn never to do where anyone could hear me. I answered the question. Quietly. To nobody.

"It drops to the six because the lyric is lying," I said. "She's saying she's over him. The words are finished with him, but the chord isn't. That's the whole song. The voice says go, and the music stays."

"Say that again."

I turned around. Noah Bennett was standing behind me with a hard drive in one hand and a coffee in the other, and he was looking straight at me, which Noah almost never did.

"I read it in a review," I said.

"No, you didn't." He said it gently, which was worse than loud. "Reviews don't talk like that. Songwriters talk like that."

"I'm the front desk," I said, and turned back to my call sheets, and willed my hands to behave. "I answer phones, Noah."

"You answer phones in complete chord theory," he said. Then the lobby filled up for nine o'clock, and he walked toward the elevators with his hard drive, and I decided that was the end of it.

It was not the end of it.

He found me at six that evening in the stairwell, where I go to eat a granola bar in the four minutes of the day that belong to me. He sat down two steps below me, kept his hands between his knees, and looked at the door at the bottom of the stairs instead of at me.

"Three years I've engineered Scarlett's sessions," he said. "She can't find a harmony with both hands and a map. She calls the bridge 'the sad part in the middle.' And the big ones arrive finished. Demo, arrangement, everything, plus a voice on the scratch track that the label makes me delete before she ever hears it." He looked up then. "I've wondered for a long time whose voice that was. Today I stopped wondering."

"You want to know what happens to the scratch vocal?" he said. "Dylan has me bounce it, print it, then wipe the session drive in front of him. Like evidence. Fourteen sessions, Maya. I've wiped your voice off fourteen sessions." He rubbed a hand over his face. "I counted, on the drive home last month."

"Noah." My voice came out thinner than I wanted. "Whatever you think you know, un-know it. I'm serious. It won't do you any good, and it will end me."

"Did you write those songs, Maya?"

He was the first person in that building to ask it as a question instead of an accusation. I could have lied. I had lied about it a hundred small ways, shrugged, smiled, said isn't she talented through my teeth. Instead I told him the one true thing that made all the other truths useless.

"When I was twenty-two, HR gave me a stack of onboarding papers as thick as a phone book," I said. "Page fourteen, paragraph nine. Everything I create, melodies, lyrics, recordings, quote, whether or not produced during working hours, belongs to Sterling Records. In perpetuity, Noah. That's the actual phrase. My mother had just gotten her diagnosis. I needed the insurance more than I needed my name. So did I write them? Legally, there's no such person as me."

Then I stood up and brushed off my skirt, because the four minutes were mine and he had used three of them. "You asked, I answered, and now we both forget this stairwell," I said. "Eat your lunch somewhere else tomorrow, Noah." I left him sitting there.

At my desk, my phone lit up with a photo from my sister: our mother asleep in her recliner, a hospital bracelet still on her wrist from that morning's appointment, looking smaller than any person has a right to look. Underneath, my sister had written: she's fine, just tired. call when you can.

I typed how did it go, deleted it, and typed call you tonight instead. The insurance that had bought my silence was, at that moment, paying for the chair she was sleeping in. I put the phone face down and finished locking up my desk.

At nine, I passed Studio B and saw the light on.

Noah was at the console, alone, an old session spread across the monitor, ancient, from before the label's current system, the file names raw the way they were the night they were made. NEON_HEART_v1. I stopped in the doorway before I could decide not to.

He right-clicked the master file. A properties window opened, small and grey and ordinary.

I watched his shoulders change.

Then he turned around in the chair and looked at me, and Noah Bennett, the careful man, the quiet one, was pale all the way to his mouth.

"Maya," he said. "Come here. You need to see whose name is on this file."