"That's me," Beatrice whispered. "I was there."
Maya, observing under an agreement not to record personal reactions, turned her notebook facedown. Dr. Shen sat very straight, looking as though she might collapse if she relaxed. Nia knew the transfer did not automatically settle a complex authorship claim. The tape could show collaboration, but it might not establish who owned publishing rights. It did something else first: it returned the noise of a young woman's imperfect voice to a work that had been polished until the person vanished.
Owen made two preservation copies under a documented chain of custody, leaving the original in a secure box controlled by the estate. Maya requested permission to quote from the recording only after everyone had time to think. Beatrice asked her to wait. Nobody argued.
On the ride home Nia stared through the bus window at storefronts closing for the evening. The city had never seemed so full of music. A street performer tapped a bucket at a stoplight; someone in the next seat played a game with an electronic jingle; a child sang a song to keep herself awake. How many of those sounds would be remembered without the name of the person who made them?
That night Gideon Sloane called Nia directly. She answered before she had considered what to say. He sounded more tired than he had at the gala, and he dispensed with his usual charm.
"You found the rehearsal tape," he said.
"How did you know?"
"People talk. It won't prove what you think."
"I haven't told you what I think it proves."
He was silent. Then he offered to meet at his office with a mediator. He said there were facts about Lena Wu that Nia did not understand. Nia asked him to send the proposal in writing and include Dr. Shen. He agreed.
Before hanging up, Gideon asked an unexpected question. "Did my father sound happy on the tape?"
Nia considered the preserved laughter and the counting. "He sounded like he was listening," she answered. "I don't know whether he was happy."
The line clicked dead. Caleb looked at her from the doorway. "Are you going to meet him?"
"If we can do it properly."
"Do you think he'll tell the truth?"
"I think he'll tell a truth," Nia said. "Our job is to find out what it leaves out."
CHAPTER 11
What the Contract Could Not Sing
The meeting took place in a conference room at a public mediation center, not Gideon's office. Nia insisted on the neutral location and brought Evelyn, Dr. Shen, and an attorney from a nonprofit arts-law clinic named **Priya Shah**. Gideon came with Helena March and a battered leather portfolio that looked older than his usual briefcase. His ruby treble-clef pin was absent.
He opened by acknowledging that the original recording included ensemble contributions. It was the first public concession anyone associated with Crescent had made. Then he pushed forward a photocopy of a 1999 agreement signed by Lena Wu. The agreement granted Arthur's publishing company broad rights to create, arrange, and distribute the festival work in exchange for a lump-sum payment.
Nia read the figure twice. It was small enough to have covered only a few months of rent.
"She agreed," Gideon said. "I don't know how else to explain it."
Priya pointed to a paragraph beneath the signature. "This appears to transfer economic rights in specified materials. It doesn't settle whether the final published attribution is accurate. Authorship and licensing are related, not identical, questions."
Priya also warned that old creative contracts rarely gave simple answers. A musician might license a recording while retaining the right to be identified as its creator. An ensemble might distribute certain permissions through an administrator without ever understanding the broader implications. And law could recognize formal authorship differently from the way a group remembered an improvisation. Her job was not to promise that every historical wrong could be remedied through a lawsuit. It was to distinguish what the evidence showed, what participants had consented to, and what could still be negotiated. Nia asked whether they should quit if a court could not guarantee a victory. Priya shook her head. "The law is one language for resolving disagreement. It's not the only language in which people can tell the truth." Gideon watched them, uneasy that an attorney he hadn't hired was refusing to treat the available contract as the end of the conversation.
Helena nodded. "That distinction is fair."
Gideon's jaw tightened. "We've funded concerts, education, preservation. Are we to apologize for keeping music alive?"
"Keeping it alive isn't what anyone objects to," Dr. Shen replied. "It's telling listeners it had only one parent."
Priya proposed a full forensic review of the agreements, manuscripts, festival tapes, and publishing records, conducted by experts whose fees would not depend on the result. She also asked Gideon to pause further claims that Nia had fabricated her connection to the composition. Gideon refused the last request on the grounds that his press office had never used that exact word.
Nia opened her notebook. She read his televised phrase about a "social media myth" and asked whether a reasonable listener could interpret it as a warning not to believe her. He stared at the tabletop, unwilling to answer.
The meeting might have ended there, but Gideon placed another object on the table: a photograph of Arthur beside Lena, their sleeves rolled up, arguing over a score. On the back Arthur had written, *She hears what I haven't learned to hear.*