They Stole My Songs

Chapter 8

The radio station in Nashville had acoustic tiles on the studio walls, a row of framed gold records, and a folksy host named Cal who leaned straight into his microphone in a faded denim shirt.

"Scarlett, honey, the whole country has been talking about your tour opener," he said, drawing out the southern vowels. "Folks are saying all kinds of things online about who sang what. Clear it up for us right now. Give us a little of 'Glass Halo,' right here, no band, just you and the good Lord's acoustics."

I listened to the interview on a live stream in my kitchen, with Dylan's settlement check still resting on the table beside my cooling tea. On the screen, Scarlett gave a bright, practiced laugh. She told Cal that life on the road was hard on a voice and a singer protects her instrument. Cal, who had survived forty years of Nashville, smiled like a man who had received an unexpected package and wanted to see what was inside.

"Just the bridge, darlin'. Eight bars. For the folks."

She sang two lines.

The notes wandered around the melody without ever landing squarely on pitch. The rhythm was a rumor. On the third line her voice went looking for the staircase and found nothing. Scarlett stopped, her voice tight and high. "You know what, my throat is just closed today, this tour is killing me — Cal, tell them about the new album—"

The station broadcast cut directly to a commercial for pickup trucks.

When the programming returned, the studio phone lines were flashing behind the soundproof glass. The third caller slipped through before the board engineer could hit the delay switch: a woman whose voice carried hard across the kitchen speakers. "I was in row nine in Los Angeles," she said, "and if Scarlett can't sing it in a radio studio, who was singing it in the arena?"

The host let the question hang on the live broadcast for an extra second, because Cal knew a moment when he was standing in one.

A week later I found out what happened after the red on-air light cut off. Noah had the story from a mastering engineer whose cousin worked board operations at the station: Cal's board producer had exported the raw audio file and sold the unedited board tape to an entertainment television show before the commercial break ended. The video of Scarlett pulling back from the microphone was playing in hotel lobbies across the country by evening.

For four days, the check stayed on my kitchen table. My mother was asleep on my couch that week after a treatment, with a hospital bracelet still ghosting her wrist. At one in the morning, and again at three, I sat across from the document with a pencil in my hand, setting the clinic's scheduled fees against my name on a legal release. The check covered the entire year. Twelve months of infusions, consultations, and lab work, bought and paid for on the condition that I signed away the truth.

What decided it was not an impulse. While carrying the original folders to the bank safe-deposit box earlier that week, I had opened the first notebook to the opening page of "Static Bloom." Across the top margin, under the date from the year I turned nineteen, sat a sentence I had written in blue ballpoint: If nobody ever knows, it still happened. I had underlined it at nineteen, before anyone at Sterling had ever spoken to me.

I returned the check on a Tuesday.

I did not send it by courier or mail it to the corporate office. I requested the meeting this time, and I chose the place: the same outdoor café off the lot. In the zippered interior pocket of my shoulder bag, my phone was running an audio utility. Elena had sent me the link the night before, along with specific instructions: "It's a public café, Maya — his choice of table, voices anyone could overhear. That's not a private conversation. Let him talk. Men like him cannot resist explaining the world to the help."

Dylan arrived ten minutes late, carrying a leather folio. He pulled out the chair opposite mine and dropped into it without removing his sunglasses.

"I hope this is a negotiation," he said. "Because if this is a speech about dignity, I have a three o'clock."

"It is not a speech." I took the white envelope from my bag, set it flat on the glass tabletop, and pushed it across the midpoint between us. "I'm not signing. And I'm not selling."

Dylan stared down at the unopened envelope. His jaw hardened, the condescending ease vanishing from his mouth. "You stupid girl," he said, keeping his voice low and tight. "Do you realize what you're doing? Without this company, you are nothing. You couldn't book an open mic on Sunset. You couldn't get a meeting in this town if you paid for the parking. The songs don't matter, Maya — songs are just product. The machine is what sells it. I am the machine."

"Then the machine should be able to sing its own bridge," I said.

Dylan picked up the envelope, slid it inside his jacket pocket, and stood up from the table. "You wrote some tunes in a notebook. That's all. They're good because you wrote them — and it doesn't change a thing, because nobody will ever be able to prove it, and in six months nobody will even care. Go home, Maya. Take care of your mother. That's the life that belongs to you."

He turned and walked down the brick path toward the studio security gate. I remained at the table until the waiter cleared his untouched water glass. When the sidewalk cleared, I reached into the zippered lining of my bag and pulled out the phone.

The screen was active. The display showed the audio capture interface, with its digital timeline stretched across the glass. But the timer beside the transport controls read 11:42.

The conversation at the table had lasted forty minutes.

Somewhere in the middle of his lecture, somewhere between you are nothing and they're good because you wrote them, the little red light had gone out, and I had no way of knowing which of his sentences were still in my hand.