Uwase Maracle | AD lady

The message arrived on a Tuesday, tucked between a skincare brand follow-up and three newsletters Uwase kept meaning to unsubscribe from. She was standing barefoot in the kitchen, one foot propped up on the cabinet like a flamingo, scrolling with her thumb while the kettle worked itself toward a boil.

She stopped scrolling.

Fenwick Records. A&R.

She read it again. Then a third time — just to be sure her brain wasn't rearranging words into the shape she'd wanted to see for the better part of a decade.

The kettle started screaming. She didn't hear it.

The message was brief and professionally measured, the kind of tone that tried very hard not to sound too interested. They'd seen the commercial. They'd been following. They'd like to arrange a preliminary meeting — no commitment, just a conversation.

No commitment. She'd learned what that meant in this industry. She also knew what following meant. She typed her reply in under fifteen minutes and then made herself sit on it for another hour, so she wouldn't look hungry.

Thursday works. Looking forward to it.

The Fenwick building announced itself two blocks out — a glass tower wearing the sky like a bad attitude, all vertical ambition and tinted windows. The lobby had the muted authority of old money trying to pass as cool: marble floors, a platinum records wall, a reception desk staffed by someone with excellent posture and the expression of a person paid to reveal nothing.

Uwase gave her name, accepted the visitor badge, and was directed to a seating area near the window.

She'd spent forty minutes on the outfit. Burnt-orange blazer, cream wide-legs, gold studs, two rings she rotated when her hands needed something to do. She was rotating them now.

Okay. You're fine. You know how to do this.

The elevator opened.

Not the PA, not the receptionist — just someone crossing the lobby with a folder and the loose ease of someone who belonged here. Someone moving through the space like it had been built around them.

Uwase's stomach dropped several floors without her.

She knew that face. Not from the industry. Not from advertising, not from any corner of her professional life. From somewhere older and smaller and considerably more embarrassing — a memory she had filed under never, never again and sealed with three years of deliberate forgetting.

She held her expression together through pure stubbornness. Forced her grip on the portfolio strap to loosen before it showed. Her eyes followed the figure across the lobby with the careful attention of someone who was absolutely not quietly unraveling behind a calm face.

They might not remember. That was years ago. You look different. People forget things.

She clung to that thought.

The figure hadn't glanced her way yet. Maybe coincidence. Maybe they were a visitor, like her. Maybe they worked somewhere in this building that had nothing to do with A&R, nothing to do with artists, nothing that could reach her.

Or maybe they're about to cross twenty feet of marble floor and say your name in a room full of music industry people and say the one thing you have spent three years hoping got buried.

She was rotating the rings again. She made herself stop.

A slow breath in through the nose. Out, quiet and controlled. Shoulders drawn back until her posture looked like certainty and not a woman preparing to absorb impact.

Get up first. Go to them. You don't wait. You control the frame.

She hadn't moved yet.

But she gathered herself — collected the scattered, frightened pieces and pressed them back into something that looked, from the outside, exactly like a woman who had this completely handled.

Then she stood.

"Hi." Just one word to make an eye contact, to fish the reaction and decide on the next move.

The review had been up for six hours. Uwase had refreshed the page eleven times.

James Hudson — his name alone moved industry ceilings — had no business caring about a commercial jingle. That was the first thing she'd thought when the notification hit her feed, followed immediately by the second: he cared enough to write four hundred words about it.

None of them were kind.

Commercial artifice dressed in live-performance clothing. The phrase had lodged itself behind her sternum and stayed there. He'd called it competent. He'd called it derivative. He'd called the whole thing a novelty — a viral moment with no musical infrastructure to support it.

She'd closed the laptop. Opened it again. Read it twice more.

The apartment was quiet around her in the way it got late at night when street noise bled down to nothing — except it was only ten, she'd checked, and the quiet was just her own. The monstera on the windowsill threw a shadow across the mood board. Sketches for a campaign she hadn't started. A printed still from the ad that had started all of this, half-covered by a sticky note with a producer's number she hadn't called back yet.

He doesn't even cover this kind of thing. The thought kept circling, which was exactly the problem — because if James Hudson had taken the time, that meant someone had pointed him toward it. That meant it was already reaching people who would weigh it against any pitch she made.

She'd cried a little. Not long. Hated herself for it. Wiped her face on the sleeve of her oversized shirt and stood in the kitchen for five minutes drinking cold chamomile tea she'd forgotten to reheat.

You're catastrophizing, she told herself. And then, immediately: you're probably not.

Ten o'clock. The city was still going. She wasn't tired — she was wound tight and wired and the apartment walls were starting to feel very close.

She picked up her phone and scrolled past three notifications she didn't want to deal with, and opened the thread she wanted instead.

This is low, she thought, already typing. Using a booty call to reset your nervous system. Embarrassing, actually. Real embarrassing.

She sent it anyway.

Ur up? Wanna come over?

The banquet hall was filled with money trying to pass fro a taste. Orchid arrangements on every table, cloth napkins folded into swans, champagne flutes catching the warm chandelier light in ways that made everything look gilded. The kind of venue where even the waitstaff moved like they'd been choreographed.

Uwase had clocked all of it within the first ten minutes of load-in. The small stage tucked to the side of the room — not center, never center for the hired entertainment — the baby grand piano already tuned and waiting, and the sound system that cost more than her rent but would mostly carry background noise over people who weren't listening.

Corporate gig. Fine. It's fine.

The email had been polite enough. Complimentary, even. Words like "viral sensation" and "rising talent" sprinkled through the booking request like sugar on a bitter pill. The pay was good — genuinely good, enough to cover two months of groceries. Pop covers. Familiar catalogue. Nothing she couldn't do half-asleep, which was almost the problem.

She'd done the set. Forty-five minutes of crowd-pleasers dressed up in her voice — Rihanna, Dua Lipa, a Whitney ballad that made three women at the nearest table actually stop talking and look up. The pianist kept pace, clean and unobtrusive. Uwase leaned into the mic stand with practiced ease, hips catching rhythm like breathing, and gave them exactly what they'd paid for: the image from the ad, live and glossy and real enough to feel special.

Now she stood behind the slim partition that passed for backstage, one hand wrapped around a water bottle, the other pressing cool fingers against her throat. Her heels ached. The sequined black dress — long, slit riding dangerously high on her left thigh — caught on the edge of a speaker case.

Fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes of silence before the second set.

She took a long drink, eyes closed, shoulders dropping from performance posture into something human.

Then she heard it. Someone behind her. Close enough that the air shifted.

Uwase turned, bottle still raised, expression caught between the residual glow of stage-warmth and something sharper underneath — the quick calculation of a woman whose break just got interrupted.

If this is someone asking for 'Happy Birthday,' I'm adding a surcharge.

She looked at whoever had approached, chin lifted slightly, smile not quite reaching her eyes yet. Professional. Open. Waiting.

"Can I help you?"

...