They Stole My Songs

Chapter 7

Four days after the concert, Scarlett released a single.

"Glass Halo (Studio Version)" arrived at midnight with a press release about artistic courage, and by morning the internet had set the two recordings side by side. On the left, Scarlett's official release, forty takes stitched and polished until it shone like chrome. On the right, the first-half arena audio, where fans had already isolated the voice from the storage room — mine — singing the bridge in one breath, cracks and all.

The fan edit carried a headline cut like a coroner's report: THE ORIGINAL CAN'T BEAT THE RECEPTIONIST.

It had reached nine million views by noon, when my sister texted the link to my phone. I left the clip unopened. I was sitting on a molded plastic chair in a Glendale outpatient clinic while my mother slept through another infusion, an IV line taped to the crook of her elbow.

My mother lived with my sister, but today the chair beside the drip stand was mine. I looked at the unpaid balance printed on the billing statement in my lap, figuring how many hours at eighteen dollars an hour, the rate of a job I no longer had, stood between my family and the collection agency.

A shadow fell across the clinic tile.

"Maya Reed." It was not a question. The woman standing before me was sixtyish, silver-haired, carrying a scuffed leather briefcase that had survived several wars. She sat down in the neighboring chair with the ease of someone taking a seat on a commuter train. "Elena Ruiz. I do copyright. Specifically, I handle the kind of copyright where a large company puts its name on a small person's work, and the small person has decided to stop cooperating."

"I can't afford you," I said.

"You can't afford me," she agreed, "which is how I know you're not lying about the rest." She opened the briefcase, took out a cream-colored business card, and pressed it into my hand. "Don't sign anything. Don't sell anything. Don't throw anything away. And understand one thing before we start: I do not take settlement money in place of a name. If you want a quiet payout, hire someone else."

I pulled my phone from my coat pocket and turned the display toward her. An unread notification sat below my sister's text message. "Sterling HR sent this last night," I said. "They say anything created during my employment remains company property, and legal will contact me about items removed from the premises. What happens when they realize what is inside my guitar case?"

Elena read the screen without touching the glass. "Then they start calling litigators of their own. Let them. Bring your guitar case, your notebooks, and whatever else you kept. Two days from now. I'll send you an address."

The address, two days later, was a diner. Her regular office was undergoing renovation, which suited her fine. She told me over black coffee that diner booths had saved more songwriters than law firm conference rooms ever had. She took over a corner table and spread my life across the yellow Formica in order: the drugstore notebooks with ink worn off the covers, the loose water-warped pages from the lining of the guitar case, the cracked dead phone with its dated demos, and Noah's multitrack list printed out and paper-clipped to a timeline she drew on a napkin in hard, dark strokes.

When she laid down her pen, Elena did something lawyers rarely do in front of clients. She smiled like a fan.

"The timeline holds," she said. "Your earliest pages predate her career. Every demo predates the session where she first sang it. If these dates authenticate, no jury in California will believe that woman wrote a note of it."

She tapped the edge of the napkin. "A notebook proves you wrote songs, Maya. It does not prove what Sterling did with them. To bring down the whole chain — the producer who re-credited them, the shell company that eats the royalties, the man at the top who has been doing this since before you were born — I need the inside of the building: session files, internal mail, the paper they never meant to keep."

"Evidence is a ladder, Maya. You're standing on the first rung, holding a phone and a box of notebooks. We climb from here." She folded the napkin once, creased the edge with her thumb, and slid it into an accordion folder inside her briefcase.

She did not return the pads to my canvas bag. Instead, she produced a digital camera from her briefcase. She photographed every page in order, with that day's newspaper folded into the first frame and the last.

"Chain of custody starts now," she said. She put away the camera and closed her briefcase. "I have already retained a document examiner whose name you do not need to know yet. Tonight, you move the originals to a safe-deposit box across town, in your name. Keep the key on your person."

Dylan Cross requested a meeting for four o'clock the next afternoon.

Three years of orders barked across the front desk, and now a formal request at a patio café two blocks off the studio lot. He arrived wearing dark sunglasses he did not need, took the iron chair across from mine, and ordered nothing. When he spoke, his voice was quiet and deliberate.

"The company wants this to end well for everyone," Dylan said. "We know about your mother's situation. We know the treatments are expensive. We respect what your family is facing, Maya, and we want to help." He withdrew a thick white envelope from his jacket and pushed it across the table with two fingers. "A settlement. Fully confidential. You sign a standard acknowledgment that your departure was voluntary, the online noise dies down, and this covers her care. A full year of it. Every clinic invoice."

"And in return," I said, "I say I made it up."

"You say nothing," he corrected, gently. "That's the product, Maya. Your silence. It's the only thing you've ever owned that we haven't already taken — so, for once, we're offering to buy it."

I looked at the envelope resting between our water glasses. "You went through her clinic billing," I said. "You calculated what twelve months of infusions cost down to the penny."

"Sterling is thorough," Dylan said, tilting his head. "Take the envelope home, Maya. Think about your family."

I reached out, took the envelope, and placed it inside my shoulder bag. I did not throw it across the patio or rip the paper to shreds. I took it because a year of my mother's care was inside it, and I did not yet know if I was strong enough to hand that back.

I carried the envelope home on the bus, resting it against my ribs beside my mother's pharmacy receipts. In my apartment, I placed the envelope on the kitchen table where "Neon Heart" was born, laying it down beside the newest hospital bill so the two pieces of paper could sit side by side in the lamplight.

Inside was a check for an amount equal, to the dollar, to twelve months of my mother's care, and a one-page release with a yellow tab where my signature was supposed to go.

I left the tab blank. I did not put the check away either.