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Like breathing with my entire lungs for the first time.

“Sienna,” Grayson says. “Please say something. I need to know if you hate me.”

“I told you not to,” I whisper, my voice grating against my ears.

“I know. But I’m not sorry, because I love you.”

I look at him across the candlelight, across the main course neither of us has touched and the second glass of wine, and I think about sitting on the guest room floor reading the contract for the millionth time, and signing it at eighteen because Nicki said it was standard, and I didn’t know yet what standard meant.

I fold the document and put it back in the envelope.

“Gray,” I say. “Get the check.”

I kick my Valentinos off before we are fully through the front door.

One heel catches the entry rug and the other hits the coat rack and bounces somewhere I won’t find until morning, and I don’t care because Grayson’s hands are at my waist and his mouth is on mine and I’ve spent the entire drive home thinking about this exact moment with a focus that was incompatible with road safety for at least one of us.

He kisses me with the lights off and the door still half open behind us, one hand flat against the wall beside my head, and I pull at the lapel of his jacket, and he shrugs it off without breaking the kiss, tossing it somewhere that isn’t my concern.

“I need to show you something,” he says against my mouth.

“Later,” I huff, resting my head against his.

“Now,” he says, and something in his voice means it.

I pull back enough to look at him. “What?”

He takes my hand and leads me down the hall by the low light coming from deeper in the house, past the kitchen, the study, and the staircase, toward the back of the farmhouse to a room I’ve walked past every day for over a month with the door always closed.

He stops in front of it. “Your second surprise of the evening.”

“You’ve done so much, I don’t need--”

The words die in my mouth as he opens the door.

Three floor-to-ceiling windows run along the north wall, reaching from the dark hardwood floor almost to the coffered ceiling, and through them the backyard is visible in the dark, the tree line a silhouette against the Maine night sky, and to the left the oak tree, its crown wide and still. The glass is thick enough that no sound comes through, and the outside world looks like a painting rather than an interruption.

Against the south wall, a honey-toned upright piano sits as though it has always been there, which it clearly hasn’t, the finish still catching the light without the distraction of a single mark. Beside it, a full-sized Yamaha keyboard on an adjustable stand with a padded bench, not my travel one with the cracked corner, a real one, the kind that lets you feel the weighted keys the way they are supposed to feel. On a carved wooden mount beside the windows, my acoustic guitar from the stable and a classical guitar I haven’t seen before. In the corner, a bass guitar hanging from a wall hook.

Acoustic panels line the two interior walls in a deep charcoal that absorbs rather than reflects, and the whole room has the hush of a space designed to hold sound rather than deflect it. A Persian rug in gold and deep blue covers the center of the floor, and two small, recessed lights send a warm glow downward rather than across, the way a theater lights a stage from above.

And in the far-right corner, behind a glass partition that catches the lamplight and doubles it: a recording booth. Small but complete, a microphone on a boom stand, a pair of studio monitors, a compact interface through the glass, a rolling stool, a music stand, and on the ledge below the glass, a pair of headphones coiled and waiting.

He built me a recording studio. In his house.

“Gray,” I breathe.

“It’s yours,” he says from behind me. “All of it. For whatever you want to do with it. You want to record, you record. You want to write at two in the morning, you write. You want to come in here and sit in the booth and listen to yourself back through the monitors until you get it right, you do that. The panels handle it. Nobody will hear anything outside this room.”

I step inside.

My heels are gone. My bare feet hit the Persian rug, and the warmth of it goes through me as I walk to the piano first, running two fingers across the top without pressing any keys, just feeling the finish, and then to the windows to look at the oak tree in the dark, and then to the booth, where I press my hand flat against the glass and look at the microphone inside.

I’ve made records in studios in Nashville, Los Angeles, and London, and once in a converted barn in upstate New York that Nicki said was rustic, which really meant expensive. I’ve stood in front of more microphones than I can count. But none of them have ever felt like this one.

Grayson leans against the doorframe with his hands in his pockets, his jacket somewhere on the hall floor, and the collar of his black shirt open, and he watches me with an expression that makes my eyes fill.

“Sing for me,” he says.