Chapter Two: Aftermath of the Leak

The knock on my door came before I’d even set the phone down.

“Ms. Santiago? Building security. We got a call about a disturbance.”

I opened it to a man in a dark uniform, radio crackling at his shoulder, and I made myself sound calmer than I felt. “It’s fine. I saw something on the roof across the way. It’s probably nothing.”

“You want us to check it out?”

I thought about the message on the glass behind me, still there, smeared and drying. I thought about how it would look, Rhea Santiago hysterical over a shadow, calling security at midnight over a prank. The headlines would write themselves.

“No,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.”

He didn’t look convinced, but he left anyway. I locked the door, then the balcony door, then checked both twice, and told myself that was the end of it. It wasn’t. I didn’t sleep. I sat on the couch with every light in the penthouse on until the sky went gray, and when my alarm went off at seven I was still sitting there, still fully dressed, still watching the door like it might tell me something if I stared at it long enough.

There was no one to call about any of it. That was the part nobody understood about my life from the outside. A team of people whose entire job was to be near me, a phone full of numbers, and not one I could dial at three in the morning and just say I’m scared and mean it. I scrolled through the comments on the leak instead, thousands of them, strangers telling me they loved a song I hadn’t agreed to share, and somehow that made the loneliness worse, not better. All that noise, and still nobody who’d notice if I disappeared until the next single was due.

Gerald’s assistant called at eight. “He wants you in the office. Now.”

“Now, now? Or business-hours now?”

“Now, now.”

I knew what it was about before I even got there. I’d seen the numbers overnight, the album two weeks in and barely moving, the single that was supposed to save it leaked and burning through the internet without me getting a cent for it. I put on the jacket that made me look like I had my life together and went in anyway, because that was the job. Looking like you had it together, even when you didn’t.

Gerald didn’t stand up when I walked in. That told me everything.

“Sit down, Rhea.”

“I’ll stand.”

“Sit down.”

I sat, because there was no version of this conversation where standing changed the outcome, only how much it cost me to keep my voice steady while I was in it.

He had a folder open on his desk, and even upside down I recognized the shape of a sales report. I’d learned to read my own failure from across a desk over the years. That was its own kind of education, one nobody warns you about when you’re seventeen and someone’s telling you you’re going to be a star.

“The numbers are bad,” he said.

“I know the numbers.”

“Worse than bad. And now this.” He turned his laptop around so I could see it, the leaked track, the view count climbing, my own voice playing tinny out of the speakers before he muted it. “Doesn’t matter that it’s good. Doesn’t matter that people love it. It’s free. Nobody buys an album when the single’s already sitting on every phone in the country for nothing.”

“That wasn’t me.”

“I know it wasn’t you.” He said it like it didn’t matter either way. “Doesn’t change what it costs us.”

“So help me find out who did it. Get legal on it. Get anyone on it.”

“That’s not my job anymore, Rhea. Your contract’s not performing. The board wants to know why they’re still funding it.”

“Give me two weeks.” I heard my own voice climb and hated it and couldn’t stop it. “Two weeks, that’s all I’m asking. I’ll do the press. I’ll do every interview you put in front of me. I’ll re-record the whole album acoustic if that’s what it takes, I’ll do whatever you need, just don’t —”

“Rhea.”

“I’m not finished.”

“I think you are.” He said it gently, which was worse than if he’d shouted it. “It’s not my decision to make anymore. It’s already gone above me.”

Something in my chest went very still and very cold, the kind of stillness that only comes right before you understand you’ve already lost. I’d sat in a room like this before. Different office, different year, a woman with sharp, careful eyes who used to call me her best discovery and then, almost overnight, stopped returning my calls at all. I’d been seventeen the first time someone built me up just to see what I’d do when they knocked it back down. I’d promised myself I’d know better the next time it happened.

I didn’t know better. I was sitting in exactly the same chair, feeling exactly the same thing.

“Is that everything,” I said.

“Almost.”

He closed the folder and folded his hands over it, and something shifted in the way he was looking at me, careful, like he was choosing each word before he let it out.

“I’ve already started fixing this. Damage control. Something to buy us time while the numbers turn around.”

“What does that mean.”

“It means don’t make any plans for the next few weeks.” He stood, finally, like the meeting had only just become worth the effort. “You’re not going to like it. But you’re going to do it anyway, because right now it’s the only thing standing between you and the board pulling this album entirely.”

“Gerald. What did you do.”

He didn’t answer. He just held the door open for me, which was somehow worse than anything he could have said.

I made it all the way to the elevator before I let my face do anything. Not in front of the assistant at her desk, not in front of the two interns who went quiet the second I passed them, not in the hallway where the walls were lined with framed covers of albums that had actually sold. I held it together right up until the doors closed and it was just me and my own reflection in the brushed steel, and then my hands started shaking and I couldn’t make them stop.

I didn’t cry. I want that on the record too, even if it was only for myself. I stood there with my arms crossed tight against my chest and I breathed until the doors opened again, and by the time I stepped out into the lobby my face was doing exactly what it always did in public. Fine. Composed. A woman who had everything handled.

Nobody in that building would have believed that underneath it, I had absolutely nothing handled at all.