“And she intimated that you wanted me to be with her. Which reminds me that you were the one who suggested, all so casually, that maybe Ella was holding me back—which Monique latched on to awful quick. You said maybe Ella was the reason I wasn’t doing more shows and festivals, making us more money.”

“I never once suggested you divorce your wife, Simon,” Gerard said, his voice as stiff as his neck.

“Didn’t you?”

He drew himself up to his full, unimpressive height of five-nine. “You went to visit the lawyer all on your own.”

I opened my mouth, only to slam it shut again. We stared at each other until Gerard brought his hand to his mouth, once against gnawing at his nails.

“So, do you like Ella?”

“Hell, no! She has you wrapped around her finger. You do whatever she wants you to even if it’s an off-hand text. Look at the three-week hiatus you took last year just as your career was kicking into overdrive. Took us another three months to get back that momentum. And we lost who knows how many hundreds of thousands in revenue because of that stupid decision.”

I snorted. “Wrapped around her finger? That can’t be true since she’s in England and I’m here with a stack of legalese that claims we’re unattaching. All because of an email sent from my account—that I didn’t send.”

Gerard lowered his hands and placed them on his hips. “I don’t like you unhappy. Bad for performances. You stunk last night, and half the crowd disbursed before you finished your set. Don’t give me shit about two performances in one day. Do you have any idea how bad that is for future sales?”

Gerard was such an ass. I had to fix my situation with Ella before Philip Wagner shacked up with my wife. Quick. Especially now that the media was hot on Ella’s trail. She hated the cameras in her face and the constant cattiness of comments about what she wore.

For Ella, success, in the form of us being able to pay off our house and buy her a new car—the first she’d ever owned—was fabulous but fame, recognition, they were a burden. An albatross around my neck that had yoked her in, too.

I’d never really considered it as such before, but Ella’s point had been proven during the past twenty-four hours: this scrutiny, the baited breath with which the world seemed to be hanging on my next move, sucked. And I dragged Ella into it.

Monique must have called all her media contacts yesterday after I fired her. She must have fed them the story of my break-up, complete with the photos of everything from Monique’s kiss to Ella’s bird salute.