After hours, the studio building emptied out the way a theater does after the last show — slowly, with echoes. Pete Kaminski's sound booth was a small cave of dials and glowing meters on the third floor, and at nine o'clock that night it held three people and one ghost.
"You're sure about this?" Pete asked, turning the cassette over in his big hands. He was in his forties, with forearms like bridge cables and a gentle way of handling fragile things. "Tapes this old, the oxide can flake. One bad pass and it could chew."
Harmony nodded. She'd been carrying the tape for two years without ever hearing what was on it. Her hands were shaking.
"Do it right, Pete," Denise said from the corner, where she'd folded herself into a chair with a cup of tea gone cold. "No rush."
Pete threaded the cassette into a deck older than Harmony, adjusted the heads with a jeweler's care, and hit record on the digital rig at the same time. For a moment there was only hiss — that warm, living static of magnetic tape — and then a young woman cleared her throat, laughed softly, and said, clear as a bell through twenty-five years:
"This one's for my girl."
Harmony stopped breathing.
Then the piano came in — simple, unadorned, the way church pianists play when they're not showing off — and Grace Cole's voice filled the booth. Young. Luminous. Big enough to make the meters jump, tender enough to break your heart. She sang "A Place at the Table" the way the song was meant to be heard — not as a performance but as an invitation, each verse laying out another plate, another chair, another reason for a hungry stranger to sit down.
Set one more plate, make one more chair, there's room at the table, there's love to spare...
Denise wept openly. She didn't try to hide it. Tears ran down her face and she let them, one hand pressed flat against her chest like she was holding something in.
Pete's eyes were wet too, and he kept one hand on the fader, riding it with a tenderness that had nothing to do with technique.
Harmony sat on the floor of the booth with her knees pulled up and the notebook open in her lap — her mother's notebook, the one with the handwritten lyrics — and followed along as Grace sang words that were written in faded ink in front of her. Mama, she thought. That's you. That's really you.
When the song ended, there was a click, a few seconds of hiss, and then the tape ran out. Nobody spoke. The booth's air conditioner hummed.
"Play it back," Harmony whispered. "The digital one. I want to make sure it took."
Pete did. The transfer was clean — Grace's voice came through the monitors as clear as she'd come through the tape, maybe clearer.
It was Denise who noticed the liner notes. The cassette's little cardboard insert had unfolded in Pete's handling, and in faded ballpoint on the inside flap was a name Harmony had never seen before: Produced by Alonzo Pryce.
"Big Alonzo," Denise breathed. "Lord."
"You know him?" Harmony asked.
"He was the best demo producer in Harlem in the nineties. Every singer worth anything cut their first tape with Alonzo. He had this little studio over a laundromat on 125th — the dryers would rumble through the floorboards and he'd say it gave the tracks warmth." Denise looked up, something dawning in her face. "He's still alive, baby. Retired, upstate. I saw him at a funeral two years ago, looked like he'd outlive us all. Grace must have saved every penny to get that session."
Harmony stared at her. "My mama had a producer."
"Your mama had a career starting," Denise said. "And she walked away from it for you." She took Harmony's hand. "Don't you ever let anybody tell you she was small."
That night, in the notebook, underneath the set list and the scales and the notes Denise had given her, Harmony wrote two words in her careful block letters:
For Mama.
She was going to sing "A Place at the Table" at the semifinal. Not her audition song, not something the producers picked for her — her mother's song, with the full band behind her, the way Grace would have wanted it heard. The way Grace had sung it, in that booth, twenty-five years ago, for a girl who wasn't born yet.
"They'll try something," Pete warned as he ejected the digitized files onto a drive and pressed it into her hand. "Evelyn's people. After what happened at your audition —"
"I know."
"I'm running your sound myself that night. Front of house, monitors, everything." His voice went low and fierce. "They cut your mic once, Harmony. They will never do it again. I'll guard your sound with my life."
She believed him. There were people in this business made of money and people made of something better, and Pete Kaminski — who had left her stage monitor live when it cost him nothing to do nothing — was made of the better thing.
"One more thing," Pete said, pulling a small padded envelope from under the console. "A copy of the transfer, on two drives. One for you, one for Denise. The tape itself goes back in your bag tonight, and it doesn't leave your sight again. You hear me? That thing is your birthright."
Harmony zipped the tape into the inside pocket of her hoodie, where it rested against her heart like a second pulse.
Denise drove her back to St. Brigid's that night, past the hour when the doors were supposed to be locked, and Odette let them in without a word, took one look at Harmony's face, and said, "Ti zwazo. Come. I saved you soup."
Harmony ate at the kitchen table while the shelter slept around her. Then she went to the little cot that was hers, lay down with the cassette pressed to her chest, and fell asleep to the memory of her mother's voice — young, luminous, singing her into the dark.
Outside, the Bronx breathed. Somewhere upstate, an old producer named Alonzo Pryce slept without knowing that a sixteen-year-old girl was about to carry his name back into the light.
Chapter 12: Semifinal