The Space Between Songs

Chapter 1: The publicist and the songwriter

Priya Anand saw the world in schedules, damage control, and the particular exhaustion of being the most competent person in every room she entered. As the most sought-after music publicist in Nashville, her entire career rested on one iron principle: never get attached to the talent. Talent was unpredictable, self-destructive, and chronically incapable of making a 6 a.m. radio call on time. She managed artists the way an air traffic controller managed planes with precision, detachment, and the permanent low-grade terror of everything that could go wrong at once. She had never once broken her own rule.

Then her agency signed Declan Shaw.

Declan was the kind of songwriter other songwriters hated the sort who wrote a number-one single at twenty-two, disappeared for four years into a cabin in the Smoky Mountains, and came back with an album so quietly devastating that three separate critics had used the word irreplaceable without apparent embarrassment. He arrived at their first meeting eleven minutes late, in boots that had seen actual weather, carrying two cups of coffee one of which he set on her desk without asking if she wanted it and proceeded to listen to her entire campaign presentation without a single note or interruption, which was either the most respectful thing a client had ever done or the most alarming.

“You’ve built this around the comeback narrative,” he said, when she finished. “I understand why. I just want to be honest with you I didn’t come back to be a comeback. I came back because I finally had something worth saying.”

Priya looked at him over the rim of the coffee cup she had, without consciously deciding to, picked up and drunk from. “The industry doesn’t care what you came back for,” she said. “It cares what the story is.”

“Then help me make the story true,” Declan said simply. “You’re clearly good enough to do it. I’d rather have a publicist who believes what she’s selling.”

Priya set the cup down and studied him the unhurried directness of him, the way he had brought her coffee as though it were the obvious thing to do and felt, in the vicinity of her famously well-defended chest, a small and unwelcome movement that she catalogued immediately as a professional hazard and filed away.

She ignored it successfully for six weeks. Then the tour bus broke down outside of Knoxville at half past ten on a Thursday night, stranding the two of them at a roadside diner while the rest of the crew waited for a repair van, and the careful professional distance she had maintained across twelve cities and forty-three media appearances quietly ran out of road.

They sat in a corner booth under fluorescent light that was unkind to everyone except, she noted with irritation, Declan, and he ordered pie with the genuine enthusiasm of a man for whom a broken-down bus was simply an unexpected opportunity rather than a crisis. Priya had three unanswered emails on her phone and the bone-deep tiredness of someone who had been managing other people’s lives so efficiently that she had not had time to examine her own.

“Can I ask you something?” Declan said, pushing the pie toward her. “Not about the campaign.”

“You can ask,” she said carefully.

“When did you last do something that wasn’t work?”

Priya opened her mouth to answer and found, to her genuine surprise, that she could not immediately locate one. The silence that followed was long enough to be its own answer. Declan did not fill it, which was either very kind or very perceptive, and she was becoming increasingly unable to determine which of those things he was doing at any given moment.

“The album,” she said finally, because it was true and because the coffee and the fluorescent light and the lateness of the hour had apparently dismantled her usual filters. “I listened to it properly, the first night. That wasn’t work. That was” She stopped.

“Was what?” Declan asked. His voice was quiet, with the same quality it had on the recordings careful, unhurried, as though the words mattered too much to rush.

“It was the first thing in a long time,” Priya said, “that made me feel something I hadn’t planned to feel.”

Declan looked at her across the diner table the pie untouched between them, the rain starting against the windows, the whole accidental intimacy of a broken-down Thursday night and said nothing at all. But the way he looked at her said everything that a man who made his living choosing the exact right words had decided, for once, not to put into them.