I slept for three days.

I know that because when I finally opened my eyes, the light through the floor-to-ceiling windows was the same pale gold as when I'd closed them—but the city below had cycled through its rhythms three full times without me. Morning. Night. Morning again.

I didn't dream. I just disappeared for a while, and some quiet part of me was grateful for it.

The penthouse was still when I finally got up. My feet found the floor. Someone had left a glass of water on the nightstand and a folded gray sweater on the chair by the window. Not my sweater. It smelled clean. I put it on anyway.

I moved through the hallway slowly, trailing one hand along the wall. The apartment was enormous and spare—no clutter, no decorative noise, just clean lines and floor-to-ceiling glass and the Hudson glittering thirty stories below like it had somewhere important to be.

I found the studio by accident.

A door I'd assumed was a closet. I pushed it open and stood there in the frame for a long moment, not moving.

It was a full room. Acoustic panels on the walls. A mixing board along one side. A standing lamp in the corner throwing warm light. And in the center, a Yamaha upright—the U1, the exact model I'd been using since I was nineteen—positioned under a window that looked out over the water.

On the piano bench: a stack of staff paper. The heavy kind, ninety-pound weight, the kind that doesn't buckle when pencil presses hard into it.

I walked in slowly. I picked up one sheet. Ran my thumb along the edge.

My throat tightened.

"I had the space."

Mael's voice came from the doorway. I turned. He was leaning against the frame with a coffee mug in one hand, dressed simply—dark shirt, no tie—watching me with an expression that gave nothing away. He didn't meet my eyes when he said it. He looked at the piano instead.

I set the paper down carefully. "This isn't a space you just had."

He didn't answer. He just pushed off the doorframe and walked toward the kitchen, and after a moment, I followed.

---

He made eggs. Simple, no ceremony. I sat at the kitchen island and watched him move and tried to remember the last time someone had cooked for me without wanting something in return.

We ate without talking. The city hummed thirty floors below us. My coffee was hot and the eggs were good and my cheek had faded from burning to a dull, distant ache.

Then he set down his fork.

"Three years ago," he said, "I heard a demo at an industry mixer. No production. Just voice and piano." He paused. "I spent two weeks tracking down who made it. When I found out, I reached out."

I looked up.

His eyes were steady. "I never heard back."

The kitchen was very quiet.

I knew. Before he finished the sentence, some part of me already knew. The knowledge settled into my chest like something cold and heavy, finding the exact shape of the space that had always been hollow there.

Damien.

Of course it was Damien.

I set my cup down. I stared at the counter. The marble was pale gray with thin white veins running through it, and I traced one with my eyes from one end to the other because I needed somewhere to look that wasn't Mael's face.

Three years ago. I would have been twenty-six. Still believing. Still writing his name into every song I finished, still thinking love was supposed to cost that much.

If I had gotten that message—

I pressed my fingers flat against the counter.

If I had gotten that message, I would have had three more years. Three years of my own name, my own work, my own voice going somewhere that wasn't his pocket. Three years I could have been building something that was mine.

He took them. He read that message and he made a choice and he took three years from me like it was nothing. Like I was inventory.

I sat with that for a long time. Mael didn't rush me. He just waited, the way I was beginning to understand he waited for most things—with a patience that didn't feel passive. It felt deliberate. Like a choice he made every single morning.

"How long have you known?" My voice came out steady. I was surprised.

"Long enough," he said quietly. "That I should have tried harder to find you."

I finally looked at him. There was something in his expression I couldn't name yet—not guilt exactly. Something older than guilt. Something that had been sitting with him for a while.

I picked up my coffee cup. My hands were steady.

"I'm going to need that studio," I said.

The corner of his mouth moved. Just barely.

"I know," he said.

Mael set a folder on the kitchen island the next morning.

I was on my second cup of coffee. The cheek still ached when I chewed, but the swelling had gone down. I'd been pretending not to notice the folder for ten minutes.

"Open it," he said.

I opened it.

A contract. Maybe six pages. My name was at the top in clean black type. ELISE RYAN. Not a pseudonym. Not a credit buried in fine print. My name, the way it appears on a driver's license.

I read the first paragraph twice before the words made sense.

"Your debut EP," he said. He was leaning against the counter, arms folded. Watching me. "I produce. You write. Your songs, your voice, your name. Publicly. No ownership transfers to me. No strings."

My throat tightened.

"Mael—"

"Read it."

I read it. I read all six pages while my coffee went cold. The terms were almost embarrassing in their generosity. He was offering me the kind of deal artists wait twenty years for. He was offering it like he was passing the salt.

I closed the folder. My fingers stayed on the cover.

"The old songs," I said. My voice came out smaller than I wanted. "They were really collaborations. Damien had input. He shaped them."

The words came out fast. Automatic. Eight years of muscle memory.

Mael didn't move. He just looked at me, and the look was so steady it felt like a hand on my shoulder.

"Elise."

I didn't look up.

"Every manuscript is in your handwriting," he said. Quiet. Almost gentle. "Every voice memo is your voice. Every demo file has your timestamp."

I swallowed.

"Stop protecting someone who never protected you."

The kitchen was very quiet. The Hudson kept doing its thing thirty stories down. Somewhere a kettle was cooling. I could feel my pulse in the cut on my lip.

I didn't say anything for a long time.

Then I picked up the pen he'd left on the counter and signed.

---

The studio sessions started the next day.

I thought I knew what working with a producer looked like. I'd watched Damien do it for years from the cheap seats—half-listening through earbuds while I finished the lyrics he'd take credit for the next morning.

This wasn't that.

Mael sat behind the board for ten hours straight. He didn't compliment. He didn't comfort. He listened with his whole body, head tilted, eyes half-closed, and when I finished a take he'd say, "Again. Don't perform it. Mean it."

The first day, I cried in the bathroom for fifteen minutes during a break and came back with my mascara redone like nothing happened. He didn't mention it. He just queued up the next track.

The second day, he made me sing the bridge of track four eleven times.

The third day, I broke.

It was past midnight. The bridge was the most honest thing I'd ever written. It was about waking up alone in a bed you'd shared for eight years. I'd buried it under a wall of harmonies in the demo, the way I always did—pretty it up, soften the edge, make it palatable.

"Strip it," Mael said through the talkback. "Just the voice. No harmonies. No reverb."

"It won't work bare."

"It only works bare."

"Mael, I'm telling you, it needs—"

"Elise." His voice through the speaker was calm. Immovable. "Sing it like you wrote it."

I put the headphones down on the stool. Walked out of the booth. Walked out of the studio. Walked out of the penthouse. Stood in the hallway by the elevators with my arms wrapped around myself, breathing like I'd run somewhere.

I didn't go anywhere. I just stood there for forty minutes and then I went back inside.

The studio door was open. The light was on. Mael was at the board exactly where I'd left him, scrolling through something on his laptop. He didn't look up when I walked in. He didn't say anything about where I'd been.

A cup of jasmine green tea was sitting on the small table next to the piano bench. Steam still rising.

I sat down. Picked it up. Wrapped both hands around it.

"Ready when you are," he said quietly.

I sang it bare. Just the voice. The bridge cracked in the middle and I let it crack. When I finished, the room held the silence for a long moment, the way a room holds a held breath.

Then Mael, very softly, said, "That's the take."

---

That night I found the note on my pillow.

The headphones were on the bed beside it—noise-canceling, the good ones, still in their case. The note was on a square of cream paper, folded once. His handwriting was sharp and angular, the kind of script that didn't waste a single stroke.

The bridge in track four made me stop breathing.

I sat on the edge of the bed for a long time, holding it.

Then I folded it carefully, slipped it inside the cover of the manuscript on the nightstand, and turned off the light.

I heard it on a Thursday night.

I'd gotten up for water around two, padding down the hallway in Mael's gray sweater and bare feet, half-asleep. The penthouse was dark except for the city light bleeding through the windows—that permanent amber glow that never fully goes away in Manhattan, like the sky can't quite commit to night.

I almost missed it.

A thin line of warm light under a door I'd never seen open. And through the gap, music.

I stopped.

It wasn't a song I knew. It didn't sound like anything I'd heard him play in the studio—no structure to it, no intent. Just a melody that wandered the way thoughts wander at two in the morning, finding its shape one note at a time. It rose and circled back and rose again, and there was something in it that made my chest ache in a way I couldn't name.

I stood in the hallway and didn't breathe.

Through the gap I could see one sliver of the room: the edge of a piano bench, the side of his shoulder, one hand on the keys. He wasn't reading anything. His head was tilted down, slightly. The way you tilt your head when you're listening to something nobody else can hear.

He had no idea I was there.

That was the thing. That was the part that undid me—not the music itself, though the music was beautiful. It was the privacy of it. This was not a man performing even for himself. This was just a man, alone at two in the morning, with a piano and whatever he was working through. Like breathing. Like something that had to happen whether anyone was watching or not.

I thought about the studio sessions. The way he sat behind the board like a wall—composed, exacting, giving nothing away. The way his face stayed still when I came back from crying in the bathroom. I had decided he was built from patience and control all the way down.

I was wrong. He was built from the same material as the rest of us. He'd just learned to keep the soft parts in rooms with the door mostly shut.

I backed away down the hallway without making a sound.

I didn't sleep after that. I lay in the dark and stared at the ceiling and thought about the way a single unguarded moment can rearrange everything.

---

The peonies appeared the following Monday.

I came into the kitchen in the morning and they were there on the counter—pale pink, full-blown, arranged in a low white vase like they'd always been exactly there. My heart did something complicated.

I stood and looked at them for a long time.

Mael was already at the studio end of the penthouse. The door was closed. I could hear the faint hiss of the board from the hallway.

I didn't ask. I made coffee. I touched one petal, once, and went to work.

The second Monday they appeared again.

Same vase. Same pale pink. Fresh-cut, the kind of fresh where the stems are still damp. I pulled one from the arrangement and held it in both hands and looked at it, really looked at it, and thought about all the times Damien had sent me flowers. Red roses, usually. Delivered by an assistant. The note always printed, never handwritten.

I had never once mentioned peonies to Damien. Not once in eight years.

I set the peony back in the vase.

I glanced at Mael's office door. Closed. A thin line of light at the bottom.

I didn't knock.

---

The third Monday, I was in the kitchen early.

Not on purpose. Or maybe on purpose. I had my coffee and the morning light was doing its thing through the floor-to-ceiling glass—going gold, going soft—and I was pretending to read something on my phone when the knock came at the service entrance.

The building concierge. A paper-wrapped bundle in his hands. He handed it to me without surprise, like he'd done this before. Because he had.

"Mr. Jacobs' standing order," he said. "Every Monday."

I stood in the doorway holding the peonies.

"How long?" I asked.

He thought about it. "Since February, I think. Maybe late January."

I thanked him. I closed the door.

I stood in the kitchen and unwrapped the paper slowly. The stems were cool and wet. The blooms were not yet fully open, just beginning—the way things are right before they become themselves completely.

February. Before I arrived. Before the Grammy night, before Nordstrom, before the bench in the cold with my mascara dry and nowhere to go. He had been placing this order before any of it happened.

Just in case.

I put the peonies in the vase. I arranged them slowly, the way you do when you want to give your hands something to do while your chest figures itself out.

From the studio, faint and far away, I heard the board come to life.

I stood at the counter a moment longer. My hand rested on the rim of the vase.

Then I went to go write something true.