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The photo underneath is grainy, but it is unmistakably me. Standing outside Mason and Hender’s Fenders on Cottage Street in Bar Harbor, wearing Iris’s Red Sox cap, my nose almost touching the glass. Taken from across the street. I never even saw anyone.

I scroll. There are more. The diner. The back road near Mary’s house where I borrowed Iris’s car. Someone at the party, an angle caught through the garden fence, my face half turned toward the stage.

The comments are loading faster than I can count them.

Grayson watches me read, his shoulder against the doorframe, arms crossed.

“How bad is it?” he asks.

“Bad,” I say. “The absolute fucking worst.”

14

SIENNA

Iris hasn’t spoken to me for a week.

I can manage the tabloids. I can tell them to fuck off, or release a song, or go live, give them something to shut them up.

But none of this matters when my best friend isn’t talking to me. She doesn’t want to see me. She even crawled out the window like we were teenagers, and apparently she’s staying with fucking Dominic. Her bakery is temporarily closed. I know because I’ve driven past it every day. I need her to talk to me. Yell at me. Do something. The silence is killing me, and the noise from the media only makes it worse. There’s no one I can talk to, besides Gray, and he is busy fighting off reporters and spending time with his father. Besides, he genuinely believes she will get over it.

But I saw her disgust. Her brokenness. When she said, “I trusted you,” I felt something between us shatter into a million pieces and now I don’t know how to repair it.

The only thing worse than this is Nicki. She has called the Douglas landline relentlessly since the news broke, which means she is managing the press loudly, and without me, and I haven’t stopped her. The story is out. My face is on the internet outside a guitar shop in Bar Harbor, and there is nothing I can do about it now except wait for the next story to come along and knock it out of the cycle. Which, given the amount of time I’ve been missing, may never happen.

I dial Iris again.

It goes straight through to voicemail, and I sit on the edge of the guest bed in Grayson’s old Brown sweatshirt and loose sleep shorts, with my braids undone and my feet cold against the hardwood floor, and I wait for the tone.

“Iris,” I say, “please, I’m so sorry. I love you. Call me back.”

I end the call and toss the phone onto the duvet.

Then I lie back and stare at the water stain on the ceiling, the one shaped like Florida that I’ve been staring at since I was nine years old and cannot stop seeing now. I used to stare at it during sleepovers when Iris fell asleep before me. I’m staring at it now for the same reason: my brain won’t stop running, and there is nobody left awake to talk to.

Grayson and I haven’t talked about what we are.

There hasn’t been space for it, and neither of us is in a hurry to put language around something this new and raw. He shows up at my door every morning with coffee; at night, he leaves whatever Esme made plus my favorite things, the small specific ones he has no business knowing after two years of silence.

Then I eat alone in the guest room and listen to him on the other side of the wall handling everything else. The Douglas Corp board. The reporters who keep pulling into the driveway like the gravel is a public road. Maggie, who has been quiet since Richard had a hard night earlier this week. Richard himself, who Grayson checks on twice a day even though his dad is barely aware of his presence. He carries it all without saying a word, and he still somehow finds the time to knock on my door every morning and remind me Iris is going to come around.

I lie in the dark at night, listening to the old house settle, and think about the rain and the bark and the ‘I love you’ spoken like it had been waiting in his chest for years and had finally gotten tired of staying there.

Knock. Knock.

“Come in,” I say to Florida.

The door opens. He leans against the frame before I look, the specific sound of his shoulder hitting wood that I’ve been hearing for twenty years and cannot unhear now.

Grayson is in dark jeans and a thermal, his buzz cut grown out slightly from when this all started, the shadow along his jaw permanent as always. He looks at me with the expression he has had since the night in the rain. Not quite soft. Not locked down. Something in between that makes my pulse race and my knees tremble.

“She’ll get over it,” he says.

“Gray, you didn’t see the way she looked at me,” I say, sitting up. “She crawled out of a second-floor window to avoid talking to me.”

“Yes, but you know Iris.” He says, his arms still crossed, his voice even. “She just needs some time to implode and then she’ll come back, and you’ll talk it out, and everything will be just fine.”

I study him for a long moment. He’s not wrong. Iris and I barely argue, but when we do, we always make up. I don’t know what I’d do if we never made up.