"But the person you have to live with the longest is yourself," Lula said. "You can ask people to help carry the weight. You cannot ask somebody else to carry your conscience for you."
At midnight, Zara lay awake listening to her brothers breathe. She imagined Chase sleeping in a mansion in the hills with lawyers and publicists protecting him from the consequences of his own words. The comparison made her angry and then tired. She closed her eyes with a single wish: that one adult with enough power to change the story would decide she was worth believing.
The first unexpected answer arrived not from a lawyer, a teacher, or a television executive, but from a recording studio in Atlanta. At seven fifteen on Sunday morning, Sophia Mitchell turned on her camera and sat alone beside a microphone she had used on hundreds of sessions. Framed gold records hung behind her, most bearing the names of artists who had never publicly mentioned hers. She had spent much of the night reading messages about an eleven-year-old girl she had never met.
Sophia was thirty-eight and had been singing professionally since her late teens. She possessed a crystalline upper register that producers loved because it could float above complicated arrangements without losing pitch or character. She had sung advertising jingles, television themes, gospel projects, and the kind of polished pop hooks people remembered without ever asking who performed them. In recording studios, everybody knew she could do the work. Outside those studios, almost nobody knew her name.
Fifteen years earlier, a producer associated with Chase Hendricks had hired her for a session on Higher Ground. Sophia was twenty-three and trying to pay for her father's medical care while building a career she still believed would eventually put her onstage under her own name. The contract promised two thousand dollars for the recording and described her contribution as additional vocals. It also included an unusually strict confidentiality provision that her inexperienced attorney at the time advised her to accept if she wanted to keep working.
She remembered standing in the studio while the producer played Chase's lead take. His verses were convincing, his voice attractive, his phrasing practiced, but the climactic passage had been attempted again and again without the result the record demanded. Someone suggested a session singer could layer the upper line and smooth the transition. Sophia stepped to the microphone, sang the requested phrase, and heard the producer laugh with relief behind the glass.
They used her take as the defining high passage. Other voices surrounded it, and the final mix concealed the seam so well that most listeners assumed the entire phrase came from Chase. Sophia was promised a line in the credits and told the recording would make her valuable to everyone on the production team. Instead, the record became an enormous hit, the high note became Chase's signature, and Sophia discovered that her compensation stopped at the check she had already deposited.