“Well, you’re the only one who liked it.” I pause. “I pitched you as art director.”
She goes still. “You did what?”
“Album visuals. Tour branding. Pay at market. Firewall between business and whatever this is.” I slide the laptop around to show her a list. “Deliverables, budget ranges, timeline.”
She reads like she’s looking for a trap and not finding one. “You want me to lead.”
“Yes.”
“Not as a favor.”
“As a hire. You’ll set the grid. Approve vendor proofs. Tell us no when we try to make the cover look like a remorseful diary entry apologizing to Troy.”
Her mouth curves, then settles. “I like work that doesn’t apologize.”
“Me too.” I point at her sketch. “The Sagebrush mark works.”
“I’m still refining,” she says, but she looks lit from the inside now. “What’s the timeline really?”
“Four weeks in total. Visuals lock by week three, so the printers can breathe. First single cover inside ten days. Tour key art inside two weeks. Microsite by week four. The budget is healthy if we don’t get wasteful.”
She nods. “I can do that.”
“We’ll pull a crew, let you run that end of things.”
She looks at me like I’ve given her oxygen. “Thank you.”
“You’re not a charity case,” I say before she has to tell me again. “This will be a lot of work.”
“I know. It just feels good to heardeliverablescome out of your mouth instead of pet names.”
“We don’t have time for pet names. We have a calendar.” I hesitate. “But we might make time for pet names. If you’re up for that.”
She smiles with her teeth for the first time today. It makes me stupid for a second. I cover by opening a shared doc and adding dates. She leans in, shoulder to shoulder with me, and our heads brush as we argue about whether the second Tuesday is too tight for the single. The work slides into talk like it always does when people trust each other.
She asks about our mother, and I tell her more than I usually tell anyone. How we learned to sleep on floors and count load-out in reverse. How she taught us to keep cash in two places. How the first time we played the room upstairs from Sagebrush, the owner tried to pay us in drink tickets, and she made him walk to the ATM.
Lou laughs, not at us, but with us. “And Troy? I know that has you knotted up.”
It’s time I talk to someone about this. Probably. Since it happened last year, I feel different. Like I’m shirking my responsibility. It doesn’t sit right with me.
“Kicking him out broke me a little,” I admit with a hiss at myself. “Not because I doubted it was right. I know it was. If for no other reason than he has to learn his actions have consequences. He won’t grow up until he internalizes that.”
“So, you kicked him out for his own good?”
I wince. “No. That’s just a side benefit of what happened. If I hadn’t kicked him out, we would have fallen apart. We were infighting. Houston was in total denial about Troy stealing from us, so he was defending him from Salem, who wanted to strangle Troy after he learned about him stealing from us.” I let out a breath to clear my head. “I was stuck between total denial and life-altering violence with the two of them. Neither was a real option. I chose the one that made the most sense, and they complied.”
“Yeah. But that’s logistics.” Her hand rests on my forearm. “How did youfeelabout it?”
“Like shit” blurts out of me. My shoulders sag. “Because leadership is bleeding in private and smiling in public. I did both. I still am.”
She watches my hands as I talk, like she’s reading the places the words don’t go. She sees me in a weird way for someone I just met. But there’s a part of her that gets it. I can tell when our eyes meet.
Her voice is quiet. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not asking for sorry. I’m telling you the cost. He tried to rip off the family. That’s the line for me. There has to be a line. Everything after that is noise.”
She nods. “Absolutely there does. Maybe I’m wired different or whatever, but family or not, you don’t let that shit slide. You can’t. Money isn’t just money—it’s survival. He stole resources. Fuck that guy.”
