Alder Street Sound was more than a studio. The warehouse held two rehearsal rooms, a performance space that seated a little more than two hundred, and a small education program Ethan ran with a local nonprofit. When a touring musician needed a place to record without a label watching the clock, Ethan found an affordable rate. When a school district cut funding for its arts program, he organized weekend sessions and asked other engineers to volunteer.
None of that made him rich. It did give him a stubborn belief that the property was worth more than its commercial valuation. My father-in-law had died five years earlier, and the warehouse had become the one place where Ethan still felt close to him. We had both invested money into its renovation, and years before our marriage began to fail, Ethan had insisted that I receive an ownership interest in the operating company for the work and money I contributed. The agreement required both of us to approve any sale of the property.
At the time it felt like love that he trusted me with his father's legacy. Later, in the ugliest months of my life, I began to treat that same trust as an opportunity to be taken seriously by people who discussed property values in millions. A hotel and mixed-use development group called Westbridge Hospitality had been buying buildings along nearby streets. They had made inquiries about Alder Street Sound more than once, always through intermediaries, always at prices designed to be difficult to dismiss.
Ethan wasn't interested in selling. He wanted to repair the roof, replace the old mixing equipment, and make the business less dependent on his own presence. I wanted, although I couldn't bring myself to say it plainly, a life in which fewer things seemed to require us to sacrifice sleep, weekends, or our future for a building full of musicians who rarely remembered to pay on time. Both desires could have belonged in an honest conversation. We rarely had that conversation, because I had started taking my complaints somewhere else.
Ryan knew about Westbridge long before I did. He had once consulted for one of the developer's affiliates, which he described as a brief assignment of no importance. When I mentioned the purchase inquiries, he tilted his head and asked what Ethan thought. I told him Ethan would never sell, and Ryan gave me a sympathetic look that I had come to crave.
"You built part of that place too," he said. "Does your opinion get a vote, or is your marriage just a system where his feelings count twice?"
I didn't answer because I liked the suggestion that I had been overlooked. He offered to help me evaluate a proposal without telling Ethan until we had something concrete. He made it sound prudent, even protective. Later, when I signed a consulting agreement giving Ryan's firm limited access to booking data and vendor schedules, I convinced myself I was simply gathering information for a business I partly owned.