Taylor wanted her songs back, and she had no idea what she'd signed to lose them. She sat on the floor of her recording studio, surrounded by gold walls and boxes of paper. Every song she had ever written now belonged to the label that once promised to protect her. She meant to take them back. But she couldn't fight a contract she had never read. Her lawyer had asked for it three times. The label kept stalling. So Taylor drove out to the studio herself, the one they'd built her years ago, before the deal turned sour. She still had a key. Somewhere in these rooms, the original paperwork had to exist. She pulled open a filing cabinet behind the mixing board. Contracts, invoices, old lyric sheets. Her hands shook as she flipped through folders. Coffee stains. Dead phone numbers. Nothing with her signature on it. Then she found a locked drawer at the bottom. She jammed a letter opener into the seam and pried. The wood cracked. Inside sat a single manila envelope, her name printed across the front. Taylor tore it open. The contract was thirty pages long. She read fast, then slow, then again. On page nineteen she stopped. One clause named a buyback price. Another set a deadline. She could reclaim every master recording, but only within a ninety-day window that opened when the label changed hands. Her breath caught. She grabbed her phone and searched the label's name. A press release from that morning glowed on the screen. The label had been sold to a new owner at midnight. The window was open. It had opened today. Taylor lowered the phone. For years she'd begged for a chance to buy her songs back, and lawyers told her the door was shut. It wasn't. The contract gave her a way in. She finally knew the exact terms she'd been fighting blind against. But ninety days was nothing. The buyback price on page nineteen was a number she read twice to believe. She didn't have that kind of cash sitting in a bank. Not close. She stood and looked around the gold-walled room, at the boxes, at the mixing board where she'd made half those songs. The deadline was real now. The price was real now. She had traded one problem for a harder one. Taylor folded the contract and slid it into her bag. She had proof, a clock, and a number. Now she had to find the money before the door swung shut again. She locked the studio behind her and drove home to the white house by the coast. The whole way, she counted days in her head. Eighty-nine left. She already knew where she had to start making calls.

Taylor made it eleven days into her plan before the phone call broke it. She had spent those days at the coast house calling banks and old friends, stacking promises into something close to the buyback price. Then her lawyer called at seven in the morning. The label's new owner had already sold her masters to a different company. The buyback clause, her lawyer said, might not survive the sale. She drove straight to the gold-fronted studio where it had all started. The receptionist looked up from her computer, pen frozen over the check-in sheet. "Ms. Swift, you don't have a session today." "I need the contract file," Taylor said. "The old one. Everything the label left here." The woman hesitated, then walked her back. Taylor sat on the plush rounded couch and spread the thirty pages across the marble table. Her cat had followed her from the car and settled on page one, ears folded flat, staring like she disapproved. Taylor lifted her off and kept reading. She found it on page nineteen, the same page as before. The buyback clause was written to bind the masters, not the owner. "Any successor in interest," it read. She read the line three times. It meant the songs carried the clause with them. Whoever bought them bought the deadline too. The new company had inherited her ninety-day window whether they knew it or not. Taylor called her lawyer back. "They can't sell it away," she said. "The clause follows the recordings. Read page nineteen." A long pause. Papers shuffled on the other end. "You're right," her lawyer said. "The successor is bound. But there's a problem." "Say it." "The new buyer paid a premium. They think they own your catalog free and clear. When we send the buyback notice, they'll fight it. Hard. And the clock keeps running while they stall." Taylor looked at the framed row of her album covers on the studio wall. Every one of them now belonged to strangers who didn't want to give them back. She had days left, not months. "Send the notice today," she said. "Certified. Make it official before they can argue they never got it." "They'll come after you the moment they read it." "Good. Then they'll be looking at me instead of hiding the paperwork." She hung up. Her cat jumped back onto the table and knocked the last page to the floor. Taylor picked it up. The sale hadn't killed her chance. It had handed her a signed target, a company legally trapped by its own purchase. But a trapped company fights. She had turned two owners into one enemy, and that enemy had lawyers and cash she couldn't match. The notice would go out today. Tomorrow the fight would come to her door. Seventy-eight days left. And now someone on the other side knew exactly what she was after.