Chapter 76 - The Man Who Kept the First Page
The former production partner did not answer Camille’s first letter.
He answered the second with a question.
Was I trying to complete my mother’s work, or stop somebody else from selling it?
I read the sentence at the studio while Mateo attempted to convince Nadia that walking slowly toward the barre qualified as warming up.
“Both answers make me sound difficult,” I told Camille.
“Then don’t choose an answer for his convenience.”
The man’s name was Simon Vale. He had helped finance the original rehearsal recording before withdrawing from the project. According to the records, his company had never acquired a completed production.
He still possessed a development file.
He would allow his attorney to review it before responding further.
Three days later, he agreed to meet.
We went to his office above a narrow theater bookstore. There was no marble reception desk, no assistant announcing us as though we were arriving at court.
Simon opened the door himself.
He was older than I expected, with silver hair, a walking stick, and the irritated expression of a man whose afternoon had acquired emotional obligations.
He looked at me.
For one second, his face changed.
Then he stepped aside.
“You have her eyes.”
“I also have my own appointment.”
Camille made a small sound beside me.
Simon studied me, then smiled without much pleasure.
“Yes. You do.”
We sat around a table covered with books.
His attorney joined remotely. Camille explained what we were requesting and why. No one asked him to surrender his whole archive because I had arrived carrying grief.
He produced a folder.
Inside were budgets, correspondence, and several versions of a contribution schedule.
The first had my mother’s name.
Marta’s.
A musician named Samuel Wren.
The camera operator.
And mine.
Lena Rostova — originating movement study, house sequence; participation subject to parental approval and final agreement.
I stopped reading.
My name was not handwritten in a margin.
It occupied a line.
A line someone had made room for.
Camille asked about the document’s origin.
Simon identified the copy he had received during development. He could describe his own correspondence and the revisions sent to him. He could not authenticate every signature merely because the papers had lived in his cabinet.
I appreciated his caution.
I hated how much I wanted him to forget it.
“Why did you withdraw?” I asked.
“The project became expensive.”
“That sounds incomplete.”
“It is.”
He looked toward the window.
“Your mother wanted a small work with proper rehearsal. Management wanted something easier to finance through her reputation. Those were not always the same production.”
“Did you agree with her?”
“On some things.”
“And the others?”
“I wanted a recognizable title. A cleaner story. Less uncertainty.”
I looked at the schedule again.
“Fewer names?”
He did not answer immediately.
Then he said, “Yes.”
The honesty did not make me like him.
It made the next question possible.
“Did you ask them to remove mine?”
“I asked for a simplified proposal.”
“Did you know what that meant?”
“I knew it could mean leaving things out.”
Camille let the silence remain.
Simon opened another section of the folder.
There was a letter from my father.
Not elegant. Not legally sophisticated.
Plain.
He would consider limited rehearsal documentation. He would not approve commercial use of his daughter’s image or movement without a separate discussion and clear terms.
At the bottom, he had added a sentence by hand.
She is fourteen. Ask what she wants before deciding what she can be sold as.
I pressed my fingers against the edge of the table.
My father had spent years after my mother’s death seeming unable to protect anything.
The bills.
The apartment.
His temper.
Me.
Yet here was something he had tried to protect before grief took so much from him.
I did not need to erase the failures to recognize it.
“May I have a copy?” I asked.
“That’s why it’s here.”
For the first time, Simon sounded less irritated.
Then he placed another page beside the first.
A revised schedule.
My name was gone.
Marta had become performance support.
The musician’s contribution had been folded into production services.
Elena Rostova appeared alone beneath the heading Principal Creative Identity.
I stared at it.
“That isn’t a credit,” I said.
“No,” Simon replied. “It’s a sales description.”
Outside, I stood on the sidewalk while Camille arranged the formal exchange of records.
A delivery cyclist shouted at a taxi.
Somebody came out of the bookstore laughing.
The city did not pause because a line had been returned to me.
Alexander arrived after I called him.
He looked at my face and did not ask whether we had won.
“What happened?”
I handed him the copy of my father’s letter.
He read it carefully.
Then he looked up.
“He asked them to ask you.”
“Yes.”
I began crying.
Alexander held me while strangers moved around us.
At home, I put the letter beside the little house drawing.
Not in front of it.
Beside it.
Then I opened Simon’s final attachment.
It was an old message from Vivienne.
The simplified schedule would be easier to place, she wrote.
The child’s contribution could be handled later.
May you like
I read that sentence until its meaning became painfully ordinary.
Later had lasted fourteen years.
