The Long Game

I've kept a list since the first tour, and every line on it is a number that refused to sit still. I've always known where the money went. I've never been able to prove it — and the only man who can is the one who walked out of my life six years ago without a word.

I'm the quiet one. The guitarist who takes the amp apart on her knees and watches the room while everyone else talks. For six years I've watched Jesse Kiln manage us like a portfolio he didn't care for — a little off every settlement, a shell company with a mailbox and no cars, a warm voice telling each of us to stay gracious and stay quiet and, above all, stay separate.

Knowing isn't proving. And the tour ends in days, which is when he re-papers everyone and the door swings shut for another decade.

Then the label puts a man on the one seat the fraud is visible from. Audit rights. The only man in this whole rigged building Kiln can't fire.

Pete Sidleman. Who reads money like nobody else alive. Who read me like a ledger, once, until somebody handed him a reason to stop. My ex. The one I never called to ask did you really.

We have days to build a case out of six years of receipts, across a table, pretending the laminate between us is a wall. We finish each other's math. We don't finish each other's sentences — that's for people in love.

Then, digging through the man's own hard drive to bury him, I find a folder with my name on it. And I learn what Jesse Kiln actually did to me, and to Pete, and why.

He didn't only steal our money. He took the two people who would have caught him inside a year and cut us apart on purpose — with a laser printer and a sorry face — and let us spend six years believing we'd done it to each other.

The fraud is how we end him.

That is why I'm going to enjoy it.

THE LONG GAME is the finale of Touring for Revenge — four standalone, one-sitting rockstar romances about a band of women who stop being managed and start getting even. Second chance, forced partnership, two rational people who learn some truths can't be audited, and the found family that was meant to break them and forged them instead. Every couple gets their HEA. The manager gets what's coming. No cliffhanger — the whole series lands here.