Updated Mar 28, 2026 • ~5 min read
Chapter 17: Eight Seconds
She heard eight seconds of it.
Joss was in the bus lounge with his laptop and she came in from the rear bunk corridor and he didn’t hear her — headphones on one ear, the other open, the way he listened when he was working on something — and what came through the open speaker was eight seconds of piano and her own voice.
Her own voice. The specific way she’d been singing when she didn’t know the ending yet and was feeling toward it, the rawness of the Nashville take, the room sound of Studio B.
Joss looked up and closed the laptop in one motion.
They looked at each other.
“What was that,” she said.
Joss had a face that was good at a lot of things. He used it now to calculate something she couldn’t quite read.
“You should talk to Dash,” he said.
She went back to her bunk.
She pulled the curtain and lay on her side with her knees up and the tour bus moving beneath her and thought, carefully and in sequence, about what she’d heard. Piano. Her voice. Reverb on the second verse that she had not put there. A production layer — clean, spare, well-made — that had not existed the last time she’d opened those stems.
She knew her own song.
She stayed in the bunk for an hour. She was not going to cry about this, which was the first thing she established. She was going to be specific instead of general, because general was how you ended up somewhere you hadn’t meant to go.
She was not angry that he had produced it. That was the second thing. Underneath the initial cold shock of hearing it through an accidentally open laptop, she knew that what she’d heard in eight seconds was not an act of harm. It was the opposite of harm. It was beautiful — she had that much clarity even through the noise, even angry, even lying in a bunk with the curtain pulled. He’d heard something in those stems and followed it and the following had produced something she would have been proud to release.
That was not the point.
The point was that he hadn’t asked.
Her music had been the most specific thing about her for as long as she could remember. When she was eleven she’d sat at the piano in her parents’ restaurant after closing and written something that was not quite a song yet, some arrangement of notes that felt like it belonged to her in a way nothing else did, and she’d understood in the way you understand things at eleven — not as language but as fact — that the music was the part of her that had a shape. Everything else was shifting, was contextual, was other people’s definitions. The music was hers. She’d been precise about it ever since. Chosen every collaboration, every co-write, every session carefully. Given access when she trusted and kept the door closed when she didn’t.
She had trusted him. She had opened the door in a Nashville studio and let him sit with her for five hours and find the end of a song that had been unfinished for a year. That was a choice she’d made fully, with her eyes open.
She had not chosen to let him take it further. She had not chosen the production, the reverb on the second verse, the version that existed now in some set of files with the alias DW in the metadata.
The fact that it was beautiful made it worse, not better. Because it meant he’d gotten somewhere with her music that she hadn’t gotten to yet. He’d arrived at a version of the song that was more finished than her own version and he’d done it alone, in some hotel room, and he’d put it somewhere on a drive without telling her.
She came out of the bunk at nine.
He was in the lounge reading — or had been reading; the book was face-down on his knee and he was looking at the window. He looked up when she came in.
“You produced ‘Fault Line,'” she said.
“Yes.”
“Without asking me.”
“Yes.”
She stood in the doorway and looked at him. He held the look without doing the thing some people did, which was to fill a silence with explanation or self-defense. He sat with it.
“My music is not a project you can work on because you’re inspired,” she said. “It’s mine.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
He didn’t answer. She waited — a real waiting, not performative, in case something useful was coming — and when the silence continued she went back down the corridor.
She pulled the curtain again. The bus moved on through whatever state they were moving through and she lay there in the dark and thought about eight seconds of piano and her own voice coming through a laptop speaker, and the way Joss had closed the lid in one motion, and the look on Dash’s face when he’d said *I know* — not defensive, not sorry in the way that was about being caught, just quiet, just sitting with what he’d done.
She thought about what it meant that he’d said *I know* as if he’d known before she’d walked in. As if he’d been waiting.
She didn’t sleep for a long time.
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