The morning after the jacuzzi, the house had shifted. Aiden said "Morning, Calloway" with no nickname, no barb. Poured his own coffee. Ate without being told. When I handed him his medication schedule, his fingers didn't brush mine. The restraint was louder than everything he'd done on that terrace.
Neither of us mentioned it. I caught him looking at me once across the kitchen island — a troubled stillness I'd never seen. He looked away first. That was new.
Aiden left for therapy. The house exhaled.
Otis arrived twenty minutes later — no coffee this time, no easy grin. He found me in the kitchen and his face had the look of a man who'd come to do something he'd been putting off.
"Allison. Come with me for a minute."
I followed him down the hallway to the office. He closed the door behind us — deliberately, the way you close a door when you don't want what's inside to escape. Then he opened the desk drawer and set something on the surface between us.
My heart stopped.
A notebook. Small, battered, cover warped and dirt-stained, binding cracked, pages swollen with age. The color had faded from purple to something closer to bruised gray.
I knew it the way you know your own handwriting. My vision went narrow — just the notebook, just the dirt still ground into the cover from a schoolyard I'd tried to forget, just the corner where I'd doodled stars during a math class I hated. Something in my chest folded in on itself like a building collapsing from the inside.
"Recognize this?"
My throat closed. I reached for it and my fingers stopped an inch from the cover. The last time I'd seen this notebook, Aiden Blackwell had his shoe on it in the dirt behind a groundskeeper's shed. I'd always assumed he'd left it there — that he'd only remembered the one poem he read aloud, the one that became their hit, the only song of theirs I'd ever heard. But he hadn't just memorized a poem. He'd taken the whole notebook. Every page. Every word I'd ever written.
"Where did you get this."
"Aiden's bedside drawer." Otis sat on the edge of the desk. "Sit down."
"I'll stand. Talk."
Otis studied me. Then he started.
"I met Aiden six years ago. Open mic bar in Silver Lake — tiny place, thirty people. He was performing with friends and he was electric. This fire in his eyes, and the song he was singing was the most beautiful thing I'd heard in fifteen years."
"My song."
He didn't flinch. "I didn't know that then. Signed him that week. Asked him to write more, and he delivered — lyric after lyric, each one extraordinary."
"You found a thief with good delivery."
"First album went platinum in eight weeks. We were building something real." A pause. "Then the second album cycle started and Aiden fell apart."
I stood with arms crossed, nails cutting half-moons into my biceps. "How."
"Couldn't write. Twelve-hour studio sessions, nothing. That's when he told me the truth — just me. The lyrics weren't his. Never were. He'd adapted every song from a notebook he'd taken from a girl in high school." Otis looked at the desk. "He'd used them all. Every last word."
Every last word. The phrase landed like a stone.
"Couldn't create on his own. The gap between who the world thought he was and who he actually was — it ate him alive. Drinking to catch the muse, then to survive the depression. Then the drinking became the whole story."
"And that's the road to rehab."
"That's the road to rehab."
The math assembled itself before he even said it.
"Tour starts in days. Label wants new songs. An album announced after tour. Aiden hasn't written an original word in six years." He leaned forward. "I can get you a session with Adrian Voss. Studio time. Connections to every label head in the industry. I can make you a singer, Allison. Not a coffee shop dream. The real thing."
The ocean crashed below. Another planet. My chest did something it had no right to do — it opened, just a crack, despite everything.
"And what do you want in return."
"I want you to write him lyrics."
The crack sealed shut.
"You knew." Barely a whisper. "The whole time. You knew which café to walk into. You knew my name before I gave it."
"Allison —"
"You watched me for weeks. You saw a resource, not a person." My hands were shaking. "You knew exactly how desperate I was. The panic, the quitting keeper — you made me beg for this job."
Something shifted in his face. The businessman was still there but the warmth was gone, replaced by something harder. "I gave you an opportunity that changed your life."
"You gave me a cage. You used my mother's diagnosis as leverage."
"I used it as motivation. There's a difference."
"There's no difference and you know it." I pointed at the notebook. "Those are my words. My intellectual property. Every lyric Aiden has ever performed — every platinum record, every stadium of people singing along — built on stolen work. I could sue you both. Copyright infringement, fraud."
The last pretense of friendliness left his face. "Sue us. With what lawyer? What money? You couldn't afford your mother's surgery six weeks ago."
My jaw locked. He saw it — saw the hit land — and didn't stop.
"How are you going to prove it? There's no record of that notebook being yours. No timestamp, no witness, no filing. A dirty journal with handwriting that could belong to anyone." He stood up from the desk, and for the first time since I'd met him he looked like what he actually was — not a friendly manager, not a mentor, but a man who built empires and didn't care what got crushed underneath. "I have the money. The connections. A legal team that makes more per hour than you made in a month. What do you have?"
The question hung in the air. No proof. No money. No lawyer. A mother who couldn't walk and a savings account that existed because of the man in front of me.
"What I have," I said, and my voice came out steady even though everything inside me was screaming, "is the only thing your golden boy can't buy. The ability to actually write."
Otis held my gaze. Then something shifted — not victory exactly, but the satisfaction of a man who'd known how this conversation would end before he'd started it.
"So we have a deal."
I looked at the notebook on the desk. My fifteen-year-old heart, poured onto pages that smelled like dirt and betrayal. Eight years ago a boy stole my voice. Now his manager was asking me to hand it over again — willingly, eyes open.
Mom's surgery. The tour salary. Adrian Voss and a future that looked, even through all this, like the life I was supposed to have.
"We have a deal." My voice didn't waver. "But I want it in writing. Every word I write, I own. Co-credit on every song. And if you ever use my mother's name as leverage again, I walk and I take the story to every journalist who's ever wondered why Aiden Blackwell can't write his own music."
Otis smiled — small, careful, the smile of a man who'd gotten what he wanted and been told for the first time it came with a price.
"Deal." He buttoned his jacket, then picked the notebook up off the desk and slid it into his briefcase. My stomach dropped. "That's mine."
"And it needs to be back in his drawer before he gets home from therapy." Something almost human crossed his face. "He carries it everywhere, Allison. Every tour, every hotel, every city. Reads it before he sleeps. Six years I've managed him and I've never seen him without it." He closed the briefcase. "If he knows I took it, we're done before we start."
I stared at the briefcase. My words inside his leather bag, going back to the man who stole them.
"Tour bus at six a.m. tomorrow. Pack light. And Allison —" he looked back over his shoulder "— he doesn't know I'm telling you any of this. Let's keep it that way."
He left. I stood alone in the office with my hands still shaking. I'd held my own notebook for five minutes — felt the cover, seen my handwriting, watched a tear hit a page I wrote at fifteen — and it was gone again. Taken from me twice. Once by a boy in a schoolyard. Once by a man in a suit who promised me a singing career in exchange for my silence.
I pressed my palms flat on the desk and breathed until the shaking stopped. Then I went to pack.