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.

The message came on a Tuesday, midway through a session on track six.

I was in the booth working through the second verse when Mael's voice came through the talkback: "Take five."

His tone was the same as always. Flat. Steady. I pulled off the headphones and came out, and he was standing by the board with his phone in his hand, reading something. He didn't look up when I walked in. He just turned the phone and held it out.

I read it.

It was three short paragraphs. Professional language, clean and careful. A consulting opportunity. One song. Competitive compensation. Full discretion guaranteed. The intermediary's name meant nothing to me, but the request was written in a voice I recognized—smooth and reasonable on the surface, the way Damien always sounded when he needed something.

I stood there and read it twice.

Then I handed the phone back.

"They're out of material," I said.

"Yes."

"Both of them."

"Kaiya's album rollout starts in six weeks," Mael said. "Her label is already pushing back the single date. And Damien hasn't filed anything with his publishing house in four months." He set the phone down on the board. "They're not coming to you because they want to. They're coming because they have no one else."

I crossed my arms. Looked at the glass. In the booth, the mic was still live, the little red light still on.

Eight years. Eight years of writing every song that mattered and disappearing afterward like smoke. And now they needed one more. Just one more. No public credit required.

Of course not.

"Mael."

"I know."

"I want to—"

"I know," he said again. He looked at me steadily. His voice dropped a fraction. "You know exactly what to do with this."

The room was quiet. The hiss of the board. The city thirty floors down.

I held his gaze for a moment. Then I nodded once.

---

We sat at the kitchen table until three in the morning.

Mael made coffee. I had a legal pad and three different pens and I kept switching between them for no real reason except that my hands needed to move. The Hudson was invisible out the windows—just darkness and the scattered lights of the opposite shore.

We went through the mechanics slowly. Carefully. The way you go through something that has to work.

Silas Wren. I'd known his catalog since I was twenty-two, back when he was releasing EPs on Bandcamp and his fanbase was small and ferocious and exactly the kind of people who noticed everything. He was indie in the original sense—no label, no management, total ownership of every note he'd ever recorded. And his legal team had a reputation. When someone came for his work, they didn't send a letter. They filed within forty-eight hours.

I wrote his name at the top of the legal pad and drew a circle around it.

"It has to be close enough," I said. "The melodic structure. The chord progression in the chorus. Close enough that his team can identify it immediately."

"But finished enough that she doesn't look twice." Mael set down his coffee. "Kaiya won't check. She'll hear a polished track and move."

"That's the arrogance I'm counting on."

He looked at me across the table. Something moved in his expression that I couldn't fully read.

"We contact Silas's team first," he said. "Before you write a single bar. We document everything. Timestamped files. The handoff chain. Every step."

"Agreed."

"He has to be ready to move the moment she publishes."

"He will be." I tapped the pen against the legal pad. "He's been waiting for someone to do something like this for years. Silas hates what's happened to this industry."

Mael nodded slowly. He looked at the legal pad, then at me. "You're sure."

It wasn't quite a question.

I thought about the bench outside Nordstrom. I thought about Kaiya's voice through the phone—pathetic little helper—and Damien's hand connecting with my face and his eyes afterward, cold and unbothered. I thought about the message sitting in Mael's phone, clean and professional. One song. No credit required.

"I'm sure," I said.

---

I spent two weeks building it.

I worked mornings, mostly. The studio before Mael came in, the piano and staff paper and the part of Silas's catalog I knew by heart. I preserved the things that mattered—the ascending figure in the chorus, the rhythmic DNA of the verse, the particular harmonic move in the bridge that was unmistakably his. Then I dressed it up. Polished the production notes. Smoothed the edges until it sounded like exactly what Kaiya would want to hear: commercial, clean, effortlessly cool.

Beautiful wrapping paper on a lit fuse.

Mael sat with me through two of the late sessions. He didn't touch the work. He just listened, head tilted, the way he always listened—with his whole body. Once, around midnight, he said quietly, "The bridge. Don't change the bridge." I hadn't been planning to.

Silas Wren's team confirmed in writing on a Wednesday. They had the documentation. They were ready.

I wrote the delivery email myself. Three sentences. Professional. Warm, even. The kind of warmth that costs nothing.

I hit send and closed my laptop and sat for a moment in the quiet.

The bait was in the water.

Now we waited.