“Thanks for calling,” she says and I can tell she means it.
“Thanks for picking up. I know I probably don’t deserve it after I abruptly ended our meeting.”
She laughs. It’s quick and genuine. She pulls out the chair across from my desk and sits down, crosses one ankle over the other, opens her notebook to a page that’s already full of handwriting. She came prepared. She’s been prepared since she walked into this studio the first time.
“So,” I say. “I want to do a trial run. I was thinking a month, but I’ll give you six weeks. If it doesn’t work, I need to be able to walk away.”
“Six weeks is fair.” She nods. “And if it isn’t working, I want you to tell me why before you walk. Give me the chance to fix it.”
“I can do that.”
“Good.” She flips to a new page in the notebook. “Then let me tell you what I’m thinking, and you tell me where I’m wrong or if you have another idea.”
She walks me through it. The format: three hours, evening slot, call-in. She’ll produce from here since moving to New York is out of the question. She’ll screen the callers and will cut them off if they veer off topic. She will do all the marketing and has a team for social media.
“Your job is to talk, to answer questions. You’re the face of The Love Line,” she says. “You talk to them the way you’d talk to someone sitting across from you. You listen, you respond, and you share anything about your personal life that you see fit. There isn’t a script. This all comes from the heart.”
“What do you need from me today?” I ask.
“Your trust. And a room I can convert into a booth.”
I walk her down the hall. The room adjacent to the production space is the right size, and she sees it the same way I do. She stands in the center and turns a slow circle, measuring with her eyes, her fingers tapping her notebook.
“This works,” she says. “Sound panels on every wall, new board, a desk for you on one side and the production setup on the other. Glass divider here.” She traces a line with her hand. “I can see you the whole time. I’ll give you a diagram with the hand gestures I use so there’s no question when we’re live.”
I nod and tell her to order what she needs and bill the studio account and to use my name to get stuff here faster. She pulls out her phone and starts making a list before I’ve finished the sentence. I leave her to it and go back to my office. I can hear her on the phone with a supplier a few minutes later, her voicefriendly and specific, asking about lead times on acoustic panels, confirming dimensions.
I pull up my email and scroll past the unread messages from Mira, from the label, and from a booking agent I haven’t spoken to in months. I close the laptop. I sit in the quiet of my office and listen to Bex as she starts to change my life.
By lunch, construction has started.
Paige shows up after school. I hear her before I see her. My daughter has one volume, and quiet is not a part of her range. She comes through the studio door with her backpack over one shoulder and a coffee she grabbed on the way. She’s wearing her hair pulled back in a ponytail and has on one of my old 4225 West tour shirts, the black one with the setlist cities on the back, tied in a knot at her waist. She and her mother have been raiding my closet for years. I own nothing.
She drops the backpack on the floor of my office and leans in the doorway.
“Let me run the social for this,” she says.
She doesn’t say hello first.
“You already run accounts for Sinful Distraction and half of Elle’s roster,” I tell her. “You have school, cheer practice, and you asked if you can work at Ralph’s. You’re starting to make me think you’re desperate for money, which I know isn’t the case. Are you on drugs?”
Paige rolls her eyes. “I’m good at social media.”
At least one of us is.
“I’m an employee,” I tell her. “You’ll need to talk to Bex. She’s the boss.”
Paige stares at me, with her hands on her hips. I shake my head and call out, “Bex, can you come in here?”
Bex comes into my office. There’s dust on her jeans and her shirt is covered in sawdust. I could’ve sworn there was a crew in here working for her, and her not for them.
“Bex,” I say. “This is Paige. She handles the social media accounts for FMG Records, and she would like to talk to you.” I purposely leave out that Paige is my daughter. If she wants this, she needs to earn it on her own skill and not name recognition.
Paige doesn’t waste a second and opens her laptop, much to my surprise. She lays it out for Bex: teaser clips before the show launches, audiograms with waveforms, behind-the-scenes content from the studio build, a full engagement strategy with hashtag structure and platform-specific formatting.
“You post the full clip on one platform, the first fifteen seconds on another, and a still image with the quote on a third,” she says. “Different bait for different fish. The algorithm rewards native content. Cross-posting is lazy and the reach dies.”
I lean forward, captivated by all of this and wondering how the heck she came up with a plan when I haven’t even discussed this with her.
