"I was in the control room. Evelyn was on the phone — she thought the talkback was off, but the booth feed was open and I heard all of it." He swallowed. "They found your father, Harmony."
Harmony went very still. "My father's dead."
"He's not dead. Evelyn's people tracked him — he's in Jersey. He walked out when you were six, but he's alive, and Evelyn wants him here. Finale night. She's calling it a surprise reunion." Pete's hands were shaking. "She wants to bring him onstage in the middle of your performance. Cameras on his face, cameras on your face. The long-lost daddy, the tears, the embrace. She said the words ratings weep-fest, Harmony. I heard her."
For a moment Harmony couldn't breathe. The alcove tilted. She thought of a man she barely remembered — a smell of cigarettes, a slammed door, her mother sitting at the kitchen table afterward with her hands flat on the wood, not crying, just very still. She had been six. She had waited by the window for three days.
"He's not a segment," she said, and her voice came out raw. "He's not — he doesn't get to walk onto my stage."
"I know." Pete's eyes were wet. "I know, kiddo."
She was moving before she decided to move — down the corridor, past the dressing rooms, past Vivienne Carr doing vocal warm-ups behind a half-open door, straight to the office with Evelyn Marsh's name on the frosted glass. She didn't knock.
Evelyn looked up from her desk, unsurprised. There was a storyboard spread in front of her, and Harmony could see the photographs — a man's face, older now, unfamiliar — paper-clipped to a card that read REUNION.
"Take it off the board," Harmony said.
"Sit down, Harmony."
"You don't get to spend my life for ratings. He's not a segment. He's my father, and he left, and whatever he is now, he's not yours to unwrap on live television."
Evelyn leaned back in her chair. She was calm the way cold water is calm.
"It's in your contract," she said. "'Reasonable promotional participation.' Your lawyer read it. You signed it."
"Then I'll be unreasonable."
"This is television, Harmony. America loves a reunion. Think of what it does for your story—"
"My story is not yours." Harmony's hands were fists at her sides. "You cut my mic at the audition. You cast me as the contrast act, the poor girl for the sad music. You let Marcus laugh at me on live TV because it was good for the show. I sang anyway. I won anyway. And now you want to drag a man who abandoned me onto my stage so the country can cry? No."
Evelyn's eyes narrowed. "Careful. The contract—"
"The contract says reasonable. There is nothing reasonable about this. You do it, and I walk off that stage mid-song, live, in front of twenty million people, and I tell them exactly why." Harmony was shaking now, all over, but she held Evelyn's gaze. "Try me."
She left the office before Evelyn could answer, and made it to the stairwell before the shaking took her knees. She sat on the concrete steps and called Odette, and when Odette's voice came through — warm, steady, smelling faintly of the kitchen even through the phone — Harmony broke.
"Ti zwazo," Odette said, listening to it all. "Ti zwazo, listen to me. Storms pass. You fly above. You hear me? That woman, she is a storm. She blows, she shouts, she knocks the shutters. But you — you are the bird. You fly above the storm, and you sing where she cannot reach."
Harmony pressed her forehead against the cool wall. "I'm scared."
"I know, cherie. Brave is scared that keeps singing."
Harmony sat on the stairs until her breathing steadied. Then she wiped her face, stood up, and went to find Pete, and then Denise, and then Tee — and told them, quietly, what she was going to do.
Denise listened without interrupting, her arms folded, her expression unreadable. When Harmony finished, Denise let out a long breath.
"You're talking about going off-script on live television in front of twenty million people," Denise said. "Do you understand what that could cost you?"
"My mother used to say a song is a door," Harmony said. "Evelyn wants to put her cameras in my doorway. I'd rather open a door she doesn't have a key to."
Pete rubbed the back of his neck. "The control room will try to cut away. If they bring him out mid-song—"
"They won't get the chance," Harmony said. "I'll be somewhere they can't follow."
Denise studied her for a long moment — the set jaw, the red pick clutched in her fist — and then, slowly, she nodded. "Your mother," she said softly, "would be so proud she'd be insufferable about it."
Tee, who had been silent through all of it, tugged Harmony's sleeve. "Is he really coming? Your dad?"
"I don't know," Harmony said honestly. She knelt so they were eye to eye. "But whatever happens out there, you stay with Pete, you hear me? You don't leave his side."
Tee nodded, his lower lip trembling, and then he did something he hadn't done since he was eleven: he hugged her hard around the neck and didn't let go.
She would perform. She would not run, and she would not let Evelyn's cameras eat her alive. But she would perform on her own terms, with a plan of her own — a song nobody had heard, a song no producer had cleared, a song that belonged to no contract and no storyboard.
Let Evelyn bring her surprises. Harmony had one of her own.
In the office, Evelyn Marsh looked at the storyboard for a long time. Then, slowly, she smiled — and picked up her phone.
Chapter 16: Choosing the Song
The night before the finale, the shelter kitchen smelled of baking bread.
Odette had started the loaves at dusk, and by nine the whole building carried the smell — yeast and warmth and something golden, drifting up the stairwells and under the doors. Harmony sat at the long kitchen table with her mother's notebook open in front of her, the pages soft at the edges from two years of handling. The guitar leaned against her chair, the chipped wood catching the light.