The night before they left, they had dinner on their balcony overlooking the hillside, cobalt-blue water stretching as far as the eye could see.
“You know,” said Merritt thoughtfully, “it’s kind of funny that you love ABBA so much. Because of the wholeMamma Mia!thing.”
Niko glanced at her, his face blank. “What’sMamma Mia!?”
She stared at him incredulously until he broke into a grin. “Just kidding. The Crested Peak Community Players did it a few years ago; I helped build the sets. It was pretty fun.”
She laughed, then wrapped her bare ankle around his. “This really is the most incredible place,” she said softly. “Thank you for showing me.”
“I feel lucky I got the chance to.”
“Should we just stay here forever?”
He looked out over the ocean, like he was actually contemplating the idea.
“Nah,” he said, meeting her gaze, the side of his mouth turning up, his eyes crinkling at the corners. “Let’s go home.”
Epilogue
One year later
“How was that?” Sadie asked.“Should I do one more?”
Merritt looked up from her monitor, meeting Sadie’s eyes on the other side of the glass, and pressed the button that sent her voice through Sadie’s headphones in the soundproof booth. “Totally up to you,” she said. “But I thought that one was fucking great. Do you want to come in here and listen, or do you want to just knock out another while you’re still in the zone?”
Sadie gnawed on her bottom lip, then took a sip of tea, humming to clear her throat. “Let’s do another one.”
Merritt nodded, then cued up the backing track, leaning back in her chair and closing her eyes as Sadie sang.
When they’d returned from Greece, Merritt had informally contracted Niko for one last job: transforming the empty space downstairs into a custom-built recording studio. They finishedjust in time, because as soon as Sadie’s album came out, “Something I Said” took off like a rocket. Even though Merritt had braced herself for a new wave of attention from their collaboration, the intensity of it had overwhelmed her—but not, surprisingly, in a bad way.
She declined Sadie’s invitation to be her date to the Grammys but watched them for the first time in years, cuddled up with Niko on the couch. Sadie lost Best New Artist (you don’t want that curse anyway, Merritt had texted immediately) but brought home Best Rock Song—which meant, as a credited writer, Merritt had won, too. She’d sat stunned as Niko had whooped and clapped, unable to comprehend that this was her life again.
After that, the requests to record with her had started pouring in—helped by a strategically placed spread in a renowned architectural and interior design magazine, highlighting how she’d preserved and updated the house’s quirky charm, on top of the spectacular location. She considered each one carefully, rejecting most; it was disruptive letting someone else work in your home, even if the studio was fairly self-contained, with a separate entrance. But more months than not, she had someone in there, whether she was producing, cowriting, or simply renting out the space and making herself scarce.
None were as close as her collaboration with Sadie, though. She’d been staying in their spare bedroom on and off for the past few months, a rotating array of musicians renting houses close by. The two of them would sit on the floor of her living room, sorting through Merritt’s extensive record collection for inspiration and samples, or take long walks in the mountains together, humming hooks into their phones and tossing lyrics back and forth. Even though they still had a long way to go on the album,Merritt was incredibly proud of what they’d done so far, waking up every morning energized and ready to get to work.
She’d been working on her own material, too, slowly, quietly, sneaking down to the studio while Niko slept whenever she’d wake up in the middle of the night with an idea. She didn’t even tell him she was working on anything until she was five songs in, out of superstition.
When she had a dozen semi-polished recordings, she played them for him before anyone else, the two of them sitting silently in the lounge area of the studio after dinner one night. Eleven of them weren’t about him—after a decade-long break from writing, she had plenty of material. But the twelfth she saved for last: a quiet, simple ballad called “Easy.” It had spilled out of her in fifteen minutes, perfectly formed—not counting the year and change it had been baking already.
He didn’t look at her while they listened, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. When it was done, he was quiet for a long time, his face still in shadow.
“I don’t have to release that one, if you’re not comfortable with it,” she said, suddenly self-conscious. “I know you’ve probably had enough of being a nonconsensual muse.”
When he finally met her eyes, the look on his face made her heart feel too big for her rib cage.
“Why wouldn’t I want the world to hear that?”
She crossed the room to the couch, easing onto his lap, kissing the tears off his eyelashes and the pink off his cheeks.
She decided to wait until another time to tell him she wanted to use the portrait he’d done at the pageant as the album cover.
As Merritt listened to Sadie, the aroma of roasted vegetables began to drift through the house, which meant Niko was back from his own studio. After he was done building hers, he’drenovated the freestanding garage, adding windows and skylights until the light was good enough for him to paint in there.
That turned out to be his last construction project, since the momentum from the magazine profile—not to mention being prominently featured on certain celebrity social media platforms—made sure he had more painting and woodworking commissions than he knew what to do with. His show at the local art gallery had sold out, and he was currently finishing up a set of paintings for a gallery in Miami that had reached out to him shortly after.
“I think the mic picked up my stomach growling,” Sadie said, as soon as the outro faded away.
