Chapter 22: The Curb

"No," I said. "I made me."

Dax stood in the dark of the wings with his ruined voice and his empty hands.

Abel's fingers tightened around mine, and neither of us said another word.

On Monday morning I went back to the Chapel.

The fourteen staff were waiting on the front steps in the cold, with coffee in paper cups.

The engineer stood in the middle of them, and he had put on a tie.

Behind them, on the sidewalk, stood a line of cameras and reporters ten deep.

Dax's town car pulled up at the curb at ten o'clock exactly.

He got out in sunglasses and the same black suit, with a young lawyer holding a briefcase beside him.

He climbed the steps and stopped in front of me.

"This is my company," he said.

"Is it?" I said.

"The shares are in my name. You signed them over."

"I did, in year two, to keep a bank loan alive. I signed because you swore you'd never use it."

"I'm using it."

"Go ahead," said the engineer. "We'll stand here."

"Who is we?"

"Everybody," said the woman who ran the front desk. "We resign at noon if she isn't in that chair."

Dax laughed.

It was a short, wrong laugh, and no one joined him.

"You can't run a label without a star."

"Which star?" I said. "Yours stopped singing six years ago."

A reporter near the front shouted a question, and another one repeated it.

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