Page 70 of Hard Rock Temptation
“She would have made outlandish requests and refused to sign if the label didn’t meet them.” I began ticking off each statement on my fingers. “She would have gained complete control over my work and my finances. She would have forced us put in ridiculous stipulations that only benefit her. She would have had control over the future of our entire music career!”
Now I was the one getting mad and shouting.
Micah might have been upset with what I’d done, but I hadn’t done it impulsively. I’d thought about it, weighed the consequences, and decided it was worth it.
But Micah didn’t agree, and now he was pissed, just like I’d known he would be.
I inhaled a slow, deep breath to calm myself down. We didn’t need to both be worked up and on edge while having this conversation.
“You’ve seen what she’s capable of,” I said. “You of all people should understand. You know how she treated me. You were there to see it first hand. You were there to hold me every time I cried.” My voice threatened to falter. “You know exactly what she would have done if she had that kind of power over me. Overus. It was better for everyone to keep her out of it.”
“By illegally forging her signature,” Micah said with a scowl.
“Yes,” I said. “Sometimes you have to bend the rules.”
The fact that I was unrepentant seemed to upset Micah as much as the actual deed.
He took in a deep breath and tilted his head back to look up at the ceiling, which meant the gears in his head were turning.
I waited quietly, letting him parse his thoughts.
“Why didn’t you come to me?” he asked eventually, the pure anger shifting to a kind of betrayed, wounded look. “Why didn’t you ask me for help? My parents could have done something, figured something out. We could have had you emancipated. Or gotten you a legal guardian. We could have done something!”
“Do you remember what happened the day after the label emailed us all the contract?” I asked. “That was the day your dad was admitted into the hospital with respiratory issues.”
Micah drew in a sharp breath. I looked him in the eyes. I didn’t need to remind him what had followed. He knew well enough.
“You had your own problems,” I said. “Your family didn’t need to deal with mine on top of that. It was better for everyone that I did it my way.”
“Better?” Micah snorted. “How is jeopardizing all of our music careersbetter?”
“At least this way we actuallyhavea music career!” I shouted, shocking him into silence.
We stood there in the foyer of our mansion, the mansion our music royalties had bought, just staring at each other.
“I can’t believe you would do something like that,” Micah finally said quietly.
“And I can’t believe you don’t understand why I did it,” I said.
“I do understand why you would want to,” he replied. “But that doesn’t mean you should have.”
That vice in my chest continued to squeeze painfully. Was this another one of those differences in core values? Another hurdle we couldn’t get past?
“What are you going to do now?” I asked him. “Tell the label? Tell the band?”
Micah looked away and made a frustrated noise in the back of his throat.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know whether it’s better to get ahead of this or call your mom’s bluff. I need to think.”
“We should do whatever’s best for the band,” I said.
Micah let out a displeased huff through his nose and looked back at me with a narrow-eyed glance as he turned to leave the mansion.
“I think you’ve done enough.”
THIRTY
MICAH
