“Kira, if he has the demo files, the time stamps—he can prove you didn’t write ‘Gravity.’ That’s your signature song.”

He looked back at the control room. Chloe was watching, her hand over her mouth. He looked at the camera in the corner, its little red light winking like a patient, hungry eye. He had the footage of a lifetime. The fall. The rise. The knife fight in the dark.

He held up the phone. Leo zoomed in with his camera. On the tiny screen, Haze’s Instagram story was a black-and-white photo of Kira, maybe nineteen, crying in a studio booth. The caption, in elegant serif font, read: The Diamond is a fraud. Her new album was written by ghosts. I have the receipts.

“If you release that,” he said, “it’s not a documentary anymore. It’s a weapon.”

The truth, he’d learned, was not a single image. It was the gap between them.