"She's right about the track," he said from the sound desk.
His voice traveled through a talkback channel that a production assistant had accidentally left open. The whole room seemed to turn toward him at once. Aaron stared at the little switch that had betrayed him, then stood up because there was no longer a reason to hide behind his chair.
"I've run the show for five years," he continued, his voice rough. "Every time we reach that phrase, I bring in the same prerecorded vocal. Chase sings the rest of the song, but that note isn't coming from his live microphone. It never has during any performance I've mixed."
Chase looked at him with cold disbelief. "You're fired. Get away from that board."
"I thought you would say that." Aaron placed his headset on the desk, carefully, like an object he might need to describe in a witness statement later. "I've been afraid of losing this job for years. She was afraid of you for five minutes, and she still asked the question."
The silence became a different kind of silence. It was no longer the uncertainty that followed Chase's cracked note, but the shock of hearing an adult corroborate what a child had risked everything to say. Guests who had previously smiled at Chase were now staring at him without expression. The sound of a mobile phone falling against a chair made several people jump.
"You think a fired engineer proves something?" Chase demanded. "Every major artist uses backing vocals. You're going to act like I invented the practice?"
Yolanda Carter rose from the front row. She was a respected R&B singer whose records had played in Denise Williams's kitchen since Zara was small. She had not agreed to judge the gala, exactly, but had been invited as a featured guest and mentor for the youth showcase. "Using a backing vocal isn't the problem," she said. "Making a child a spectacle because she noticed your arrangement is the problem."
Chase's attention swung toward her. "Yolanda, stay out of this."
"You brought her into it," Yolanda answered. "You told the room she couldn't sing. You made this test public. Now that the question is about your performance, suddenly the stage is a private matter."
Several guests applauded, then stopped as Marcus Webb stood beside her. Marcus was a Black American producer in his fifties, a man whose calm manner concealed decades of experience in recording studios. He had mixed the original album version of Higher Ground and knew details that nobody else in the audience had any reason to know. He had spent years persuading himself that studio credit disputes were not his responsibility, and Zara's frightened face made that excuse seem unbearably small.
"I need to correct the record," Marcus said. His voice trembled slightly, not from fear of Chase alone, but from shame about his own silence. "Sophia Mitchell supplied the upper lead vocal on the recording. She was paid as a session singer, and her contribution was buried under a general credit. I was in the room when it was recorded."