Every Song He Stole Was Mine novel · Chapter 20 of 24
Chapter 20: Sixty Percent
Jude's POV
I did not tell Joanna what I had done the night before the hearing.
She had enough on her plate.
At nine in the morning she sat at the long table in the courtroom with her hands folded and her left thumb pressing a mark into her palm.
Tilda sat beside her with a laptop and a hard drive in a canvas bag.
Across the aisle Dax sat with his lawyer and a stack of paper.
He had shaved.
He looked rested, which told me he had slept on a plan.
The judge was the same gray-haired woman from the felony hearing, and she took her seat with a look I recognized.
She had not wanted to see this room again.
"Mr. Kingsley's counsel," she said. "Proceed."
Dax's lawyer stood, a tall woman in a gray coat.
"Your Honor, six years ago, in the first year of the marriage, Ms. Ellery signed an assignment of all her musical work to her husband. It is a signed, dated, notarized document."
She held it up.
"Every song on Paper Sparrow belongs to Mr. Kingsley under its terms."
Joanna did not move.
"Ms. Ellery?" the judge said.
"I signed it," Joanna said. "He put it under a pile of insurance forms the week we married. He said it was for the mortgage."
"Do you dispute your signature?"
"No, Your Honor. I dispute that I ever read it, and I dispute what it covers."
"Then show me what it covers."
Joanna looked at me.
I stood up.
"Your Honor, Gold Line Records has the original multitrack sessions for Paper Sparrow," I said. "Every guide vocal, every take. They are dated by the studio server."
"Objection," said Dax's lawyer.
"Overruled. Show me."
A technician wheeled a screen to the front of the room.
I put the first file up myself.
It was a waveform, long and green, and then Joanna's voice came out of the speakers, small and clean, singing the first verse of Paper Sparrow into an empty room.
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