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“He gave you a number,” he says.

“He gave me a number.”

“How bad?”

I tell him. The stillness that comes over him is the kind that means he isn’t going to yell, he is going to do something more controlled and therefore more dangerous than yelling.

“Stay here,” he warns.

“Grayson, no.”

But he is already walking past me toward the car, his coffee left forgotten on the porch rail, and I turn and watch him go because I know that walk, and there is nothing I can say to interrupt it.

He stops at the driver’s side window.

“You need to start the car,” he says, his voice carrying the flatness that means every word is load bearing. “And you need to drive off this property. Right now.”

Joshua straightens in the seat. “Mr. Douglas, I am here in a professional capacity⁠—”

“I am aware of your capacity,” Grayson says. “Now, I’m telling you mine. You came to my property to deliver a threat to my girl. You delivered it. Now you need to leave, voluntarily, or in pieces. Your choice.”

Joshua rolls up the car window.

I watch the black BMW reverse down the gravel drive and disappear around the bend, my heart thudding dully. Then I realize that I can hear the birds again, and Grayson walks back to me with his hands shoved in his pockets.

I let out a breath. “Thank you,” I say.

“Mm,” he says, which is Grayson for ‘you’re welcome’ when he is still too wound up to say it properly.

Anger rolls off me in waves, my skin hot despite the cool morning air. I stand there on the drive with the contract still sitting in the gravel, and fifty million dollars doing laps around my head, and I know I can’t fix it. Not right now. Not today. The label will do what the label wants to do, and I can’t stop that from a driveway in Maine. I cannot reverse eight years of decisions in the next ten minutes. I cannot make Nicki less of what she is or make the catalog thing less real or make the number smaller by standing here staring at the tree line.

But I can go to Iris.

It’s the one thing in the wreckage of this morning that I can actually do something about. The label, the contract, the fifty million, Nicki, the tour, all of it is out of my hands right now, sitting in a machine that’s going to run whether I push buttons or not. Iris is two miles down the road making pastries and that is somewhere I can drive to. A door I can walk through. A person I can stand in front of and say what I’ve been saying into her voicemail for seven days but haven’t gotten to say to her face.

Yet.

I can control exactly one thing this morning and it is that.“She opened this morning,” I say, already moving toward the front door. “Iris opened the bakery this morning.”

“Sienna,” Grayson says. “You don’t have to⁠—”

“I have to go,” I say, pulling the door open. “Can I have your keys?”

“I’ll come with you,” he calls after me.

“No,” I say, from inside the hall.

“Sienna—”

“No, Grayson.” I come back to the doorway and hold my hand out. “She’ll shut down the second she sees you. This has to be me.”

He runs his hand over his face, letting out a strangled breath.

Then he reaches into his pocket and drops the keys into my palm. “Call me after you’ve spoken to her.”

“Thank you.” I smile thinly, close my fingers around the keys, and go.

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