The studio is in a converted barn at the end of a lane with no sign, and the manager's instructions said to come after dark and park behind the trees. I am Romy, thirty-one, and I have written eleven songs that other people sing on the radio. None of them carry my name. That is the deal, and I have always liked the deal.
Nick Rivers opens the door himself. No entourage, no shoes, a guitar he's clearly been holding for hours. He is older than his posters and better than his photographs, and he looks at me the way you look at someone who has arrived to fix something you broke.
“You're the ghost,” he says.
“I'm the writer.”
“Same thing, out here.” He steps back to let me in. The barn is all cables and candles and one enormous window on the dark fields. There is a notebook on the floor with most of the pages torn out.
He plays me what he has. It's half a chorus, repeated, and it's not good, and he knows it, and he watches my face while I listen because he wants me to say so. I don't. I ask what he was thinking about when he wrote it. He goes very still. “A phone call,” he says. “Two years ago. I didn't pick up.” Then he puts the guitar down and says, “Nobody knows you're here. Nobody can know. If this album fails, it fails as mine.”
I pick up his guitar. It's tuned a half-step down, the way I like it, and I don't ask how he knew. I play the chorus back to him with one chord changed, and his head comes up like a dog hearing its name, and he says, “Again,” and moves to sit closer on the floor than the barn requires. It is almost midnight. We have thirty days and one rule, and I can already feel where the rule is going to bend.