Updated Mar 28, 2026 • ~7 min read
Chapter 24: The Answer
He sat with it for two hours before he admitted it to himself.
The bus was moving south. Portland to the I-5 corridor, the landscape shifting from the green density of the Pacific Northwest to something drier and wider. Dash had the lounge to himself — Joss was at the back with headphones on, the rest of the band scattered in their bunks — and he’d opened his laptop and was supposedly reviewing a mix he’d promised to have notes on by end of week, but the mix had been playing on a loop for forty minutes and he hadn’t noted anything.
He was thinking about what he’d said to Maya.
*Don’t sign it.*
He’d meant it. The clause language was genuinely bad — he’d dealt with production approval provisions before, in his early days with the label, and he knew what they became in practice. They started as a formality and ended as a leash. The advance was real money but the exit provisions were structured to make the advance feel like debt the moment she tried to leave. He’d read the clause fourteen language and recognized it from a contract he’d seen three years ago. He hadn’t been wrong.
But he hadn’t been entirely right either.
He thought about what she’d asked: *for no other reason?*
He had said *I’m not a disinterested party* and that was honest, but honest was not the same as complete. He’d said it and left it there, vague enough to be admitted without being examined, and that was the kind of thing he’d gotten good at — the partial truth that inoculated against the fuller one.
Here was the fuller one:
The co-writing clause wasn’t just bad for Maya in general. It was bad for *him.* Specifically. If Meridian signed her and exercised that clause — if some A&R team decided that her creative association with the headlining act she’d toured with was a conflict of interest, or a story they didn’t want, or simply not on-brand for the artist they were trying to build — then they could block it. And he would lose the thing he’d found in Nashville, the thing that had put him back in the room with a song he actually believed in. He would lose the collaboration. He would lose the reason he was writing again.
He had not been lying to her. He was also protecting himself.
That was the part he’d elided and she had noticed — she was not a person who missed things — and instead of addressing it directly he’d said *I’m not a disinterested party* and let her draw whatever conclusions she drew.
That wasn’t good enough.
He put the laptop to sleep and went to find her.
She was in her bunk with the curtain half-drawn, writing in her notebook, and she looked up when he crouched down at the end of it. She waited.
“I said my piece about the contract,” he said. “All of it was honest.”
She looked at him.
“But there’s a part I didn’t say.”
She set her pen down.
“The co-writing clause doesn’t just affect your autonomy in general. It specifically affects what happens if they decide I’m a liability to your brand — or if they decide the DW production credit is a story they don’t want, or the tour association, or anything about us. They could invoke that clause to end what we’ve been doing with the music. And I didn’t say that part. I said *I’m not a disinterested party* and then didn’t explain what my interest was.”
She was watching him carefully, her expression steady.
“I meant everything I said about the deal,” he said. “The language is bad for any artist. The production approval will calcify. The advance is structured to keep you obligated. All of that is real. But I was also protecting something specific to me, and I let you get there by implication instead of just saying it.”
He waited.
“Why are you telling me now?” she asked.
“Because you asked me a direct question and I gave you a half answer.”
She looked out the small bunk window at the passing highway — guardrails, scrub grass, sky. She had her pen in her hand still, clicking the end of it against her palm, which he recognized as a thinking gesture.
“Okay,” she said finally.
“Okay?”
“I’d already figured out the part you weren’t saying.” She looked back at him. “I needed you to say it yourself.”
He absorbed that. “Fair.”
“It doesn’t change the fact that you’re right about the clauses.”
“It changes how much weight you should give my opinion about the clauses.”
“Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe being right and having a stake in the answer can coexist.” She tilted her head slightly. “You know, you’re not the only one who benefits from having a co-writer I can choose freely.”
“I know.”
“So we’re both interested parties.”
“We are.”
She looked at the notebook in her lap. She’d been working on something — he could see a melody fragment notated at the top of the page, and underneath it a line of writing she angled slightly away from him. He didn’t try to read it.
“I’m not signing anything yet,” she said. “I was already going to take more time with it. This doesn’t change that, it just — fills in a thing I needed filled in.”
“Okay,” he said.
“You could have said this earlier.”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you?”
He thought about that. Why didn’t he — the actual reason, not the expedient one. Because he’d spent years learning that the cleanest version of himself was the one who gave good advice without visible personal investment, who held his interest at a professional angle, who was the person in the room who could be relied on to see clearly because he’d trained himself to perform clarity even when he didn’t feel it.
“Habit,” he said.
She seemed to accept that as an answer — not fully, but provisionally, the way she accepted most things: with her own opinion still forming behind her eyes.
“Go finish your mix,” she said. “You’ve been staring at your laptop for two hours.”
“The mix is bad.”
“The mix is fine. You’re in your head.”
He straightened up. He was in his head. He’d been in his head since five in the morning in a Seattle hotel room writing the best thing he’d written in years, and now he was crouching outside a bus bunk admitting his self-interest to a woman who had already identified it — and somehow both things, the writing and the admission, felt like the same action.
“I’ll send you the Portland venue tech sheet,” he said. “The piano monitor was wrong in Seattle.”
“I noticed.”
“I’m putting in a note.”
She picked up her pen. “Thank you.”
He went back to his laptop and put the mix on from the beginning and this time he listened to it. He sent two pages of notes to the engineer by the time they reached the outskirts of Portland. The notes were good — he could tell because they were specific about things that were actually wrong rather than vague about general impressions, and the difference between those two kinds of feedback was whether you’d been present or absent while listening.
He’d been absent for a long time.
He thought about the song he’d written at five in the morning.
*Chose the window over the locked door.*
He thought: honesty was the window. He’d been standing at the door for two hours.
He sent a second email to the engineer with one additional note. Then he closed the laptop and watched Oregon pass by.
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