POV: Liam
Jackson's face on the screen was a performance I had seen before, but not this version of it.
I know my father's warmth. I grew up learning the difference between warmth that served something and warmth that was actually warmth.
He leaned forward when Aurora moved. He asked her weight the way someone asks who actually wants to know.
When Jasmine told him the name, something crossed his face that I could not catalogue cleanly — and I have been cataloguing Jackson Blackwood's expressions for thirty-four years.
I sat in the kitchen doorway where he could not see me, where I could see her.
Jasmine held Aurora slightly forward at the screen. Not offering her, exactly. Presenting her. Warm, composed, voice in that register she used for people she was still deciding about — fluent and pleasant and giving nothing away.
I am not sure he was trying to read her.
The business came in at the fourteen-minute mark. Through the side door, framed as observation — the way he always brought the things that mattered most.
"The labels that understand where creative work is actually coming from," Jackson said.
"Those are the ones attracting serious capital right now. The metrics that matter aren't the traditional metrics. It's the authenticity of the pipeline. The organic relationship between A&R decisions and the actual sound coming out of the building."
He paused and let it sit there.
"The people who see that early — are the ones who win the next ten years."
None of it addressed to Jasmine specifically. All of it mapping, precisely, onto decisions she had been informally shaping for the past three weeks.
I watched her face the entire time he spoke. She held Aurora a little closer. That was the only thing that changed.
After the call ended I closed the laptop. I was moving before I'd thought about it — and then I stopped because I saw her.
Her back was to me. One hand raised to the glass, a finger tracing something in the condensation — a line, a shape, already dissolving.
I stopped beside her and said nothing.
She turned around — the finished version of her face. Whatever she had understood, already organized, already turned until she knew which way it sat.
I sat down and she sat across from me and started talking.
"He timed the warmth," Jasmine began. "Weight, sleep, name — in that order. Personal before professional. Establishing grandfather before anything else."
"And then the pivot."
"Then the pivot." She leaned forward slightly. "Walk me through each observation. Exactly."
I gave them back to her in sequence — the creative pipeline, the investor metrics, the A&R comment. She was quiet for a beat after each one.
"That one." She stopped me when I reached the A&R comment. "That maps directly to the Morrison session three weeks ago. I flagged the direction problem. Asher ran with it, but the initial read was mine."
"It's in the quarterly report."
"As an outcome with no named source." She set her hands flat on the table. "Which means either someone with access told him about the contribution without the attribution — or he read between the lines himself."
Another pause.
"Either way — he knows the shape of what I've been doing. He wasn't making conversation during that call. He was telling me he knows. Letting me understand the inventory before he decides what to do with it."
"You think he was signaling."
"I think he was showing me what he has." Her voice stayed even. "Not threatening — just showing. And the name." A brief pause.
"He knew Aurora's name before I said it. His reaction wasn't surprise. It was recognition."
Working it through as I spoke: "The request through his assistant wasn't the beginning of his attention. It was the end of a watching period."
"Exactly. He already knew what he needed to know. The call was for me to see that he knew." She held my gaze steadily. "Which means whatever he's building toward — the groundwork is already laid."
"What does he get out of the clause in your contract? Specifically."
"Control." Jasmine met my eyes. "If those contributions are legally his, then anything I've built here in the last year belongs to Cadence. Which means it belongs to him. And if he ever wants leverage over me that doesn't come through you — he already has it. He just hasn't used it yet."
The apartment was quiet around us. Aurora had fallen asleep against Jasmine's shoulder somewhere during her account, the boneless sleep of someone who does not know there is anything to stay awake for.
"What do you want to do?"
"I want the lawyer first. Before anything else moves. Before he calls again, before we decide how to respond. And I want to know what happened when you asked him about putting my creative contributions on record."
I had not asked him that. She knew I had not asked him that.
"I didn't ask him."
"I know." Her eyes didn't move from mine. "Tell me why not."
"Because I was watching him with Aurora." I held her gaze. "For thirty-seven minutes he was someone I hadn't seen before, and I let that take my attention. He was disarming and I let myself be disarmed. That's the honest answer."
She held that for a moment. Something quieter moved through her face — not softness exactly, but the place just before it.
"He knows exactly which version of himself to show you." Not cruelty in it. Just the particular precision of someone who had been read by people like him her whole life and learned early what it cost to be surprised.
"I know. I grew up with it."
"Which is why it worked."
I didn't answer that. There wasn't a version of an answer that didn't confirm it.
She stood carefully so she didn't wake Aurora and crossed to the window. Stood with her back to me, one hand resting against the glass where the condensation had already dissolved — nothing left to trace.
"He's going to push. And he's going to be warm about it." Her reflection was faint in the dark. "I need everyone in the room to be awake when he does. Including you. Especially you."
"I know."
"Say it like you know it. Not to me. For yourself."
The difference mattered and she was right to insist on it. I sat with it a moment — actually sat with it, let it take up the space it deserved — and then I said it the way she meant.
"He disarmed me. And I understood it too late."
She didn't turn from the glass.
Whatever she decided about whether to believe me, she had already decided it before I'd finished speaking. She was just waiting to see if I'd say it clean.