Chapter 23: Blank Lines

I picked up the velvet box and held it without opening it.

"You want me to ask," I said.

"You've spent six years being told what to sign and what to be."

"So I should propose to my label owner on the floor of a stage at midnight."

"Yes."

I looked at the gray over his ears and the burn scar on his thumb.

He had waited seven years to learn a woman's name.

"Jude Ransome," I said. "Will you marry me?"

He closed his eyes for a second.

"Open the box."

I did.

The ring was plain, a thin band with one small stone, nothing a magazine would photograph.

It had a scratch on the inside from sixty years of wear.

"It was my grandmother's," he said. "She sang in a church choir in Murfreesboro for sixty years and never once got paid."

My eyes burned.

"Yes," he said. "To the question. Put it on."

I put it on, and it fit.

He pulled me into his arms there on the dark stage.

I laughed into his shirt and cried a little too.

The envelope waited on the boards.

In the morning I took it to Gold Line.

The office was bright, and the floor-to-ceiling window looked over the river.

Tilda sat in the corner chair with her feet up on the sofa.

Jude had asked her to be there, and she had said she wouldn't miss it.

I spread the contract on his desk, uncapped a pen, and wrote with my left hand.

On the first line, under OWNERSHIP, I wrote: All songs, past and future, belong to Joanna Ellery. Publishing, masters, and every copyright.

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