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He waits just long enough to confirm I’m not going to answer.

“No. Of course not. But finance does. And my bosses are not impressed—and they’re looking at Ben Sagroy. Who’s ready to sign. Who’s taking your summer slot. Who’ll turn up to every date grateful to be anywhere at all.”

He stands. Buttons his jacket. Slides a folder to the center of the table. Nobody touches it.

“Termination terms. The catalog—what you can and can’t do. My cell’s in there too. Any of you call, I’ll walk you through it.”

The interns scramble up after him like ducklings.

At the door he stops, and for half a second, the polish comes off.

“For what it’s worth, I told them upstairs you four were the best band I’ve signed in ten years. I was overruled.” His eyes find me and stay. “Being good isn’t enough anymore to keep a deal, Cal. Take care, boys.”

Luca’s the first to move. He pushes off the window, comes to the table, picks up the folder and puts it back down without opening it.

“Well,” he says, “that’s it. We are officially screwed.” It sounds heavy from the guy who can usually make light of every situation. “I gave up another spot for this band, you know. Did I mention that? I gave that up because I thought—” He stops. Shakes his head. “Doesn’t matter what I thought.”

Harrison’s got his elbows on the table and his hands in his hair, and when he looks up, his eyes are wet and furious in equal measure.

“Where were you?” He’s not calm like Eli; he’s loud. “What was so important that you blew up not your life, but our lives as well? All of ours. You blew up all four of us and you won’t even give us a sentence of explanation.”

I keep my mouth shut.

“Yeah,” Harrison says, quiet now. “Okay. Yeah.”

He pushes back from the table. He’s about to stand when I open my mouth.

“How much?” I ask.

Harrison stops.

“The shows we missed,” I say. “Each of us. What does it actually come to?”

Nobody answers. Then Eli takes a breath. Eli has always been the one who reads the small print when the rest of us look away. “Twenty-two thousand. Give or take. Each.”

Harrison lets out a long breath. Luca is very still by the window.

Eighty-eight thousand dollars, spread across four people, because I put my guitar down and walked into the dark. Because I had a reason—a very valid reason—and not one of them knows it, and not one of them can.

“Okay,” I say.

“Okay,” Harrison repeats, flat and disbelieving. “Okay is all you’ve got?!”

“I’m going to fix it.” I look at each of them in turn, and I don’t let my eyes drop, because if I look away now, I lose the only thing I’ve still got in this room, the illusion of certainty. In reality, I’ve got no fucking clue how I’m going to fix this. “All of it. Every cent. But I need some time. Give me a year.” I pause. “One year. We each keep working on our craft, you don’t sign with anyone else, you don’t switch bands—and in one year, I come back with the money. Every cent of what we lost. And we write again. The four of us, in a room, no label breathing down our necks, no leash, no fucking clause. We do it on our own terms, and we come back bigger than anything we’ve ever done.” I pause. “The whole backlash calms down. And then we give them something so good they forget there was ever anything to talk about. Cascade becomes some…some fucking distant memory.”

“You’re asking us to wait a year,” Luca says to the window. “On your word.”

“Yes.”

He turns around. His face is unreadable, which for Luca is its own kind of answer—Luca’s face is never unreadable unless he’s already decided something and doesn’t want to argue about it. “I could get offers on the table, Cal. Real ones to play with other people.”

“I know.”

“Paying ones. Touring ones.”

“I know, Luca.”

“You’re asking me to turn those down.”