He Held Her at the Concert novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: Reel Nine

Declan's POV

On the phone screen, Trent turned the cassette over in his fingers like it hurt him to hold.

"She was twenty-two," he said. "She gave me this the week before she passed."

Hannah made a sound I will hear for the rest of my life.

I put my hand over the screen and shut it off.

"Don't," Maggie said, in a voice she didn't use for anyone she liked. "Don't touch her, she'll break your wrist."

Hannah wasn't going to break anything.

She was standing with her hands at her sides, and she was perfectly still.

"He's holding my tape," she said. "On television. He's calling it hers. He's calling me her."

"He's lying to people who can't check."

"They can't check, Declan."

"I can," I said.

I didn't know I was going to say it until I did.

"There was a session four years ago," I said. "The producer taped everything, even the talk between takes."

"So?"

"Trent came in with a dub of her tape and played it for the room."

"You never said."

"I never thought of it. I thought it was a demo of him." I was already walking. "The reels are in the label's vault. They're mine. It's in my contract."

The lawyer was still in the conference room, writing.

She looked up when I came back in alone.

"I want my session masters from November four years ago," I said. "Paragraph nine. Reels, logs, the talk tracks."

"You're entitled to access in the archive. Not to remove them."

"Then I'll listen in the archive."

She looked at me for a long moment over her glasses.

Then she picked up her pad and her phone, and said, "I'll come."

The vault was two floors below the lobby, behind a steel door, in a room that smelled like dust and cold plastic.

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