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She’s staring at me with those hazel doe eyes, in a white crop top that ends two inches above her belly button. She has flour streaked across her left cheek and a dot of something red on the tip of her nose. Her blue hair is braided into two pigtails with the curly ends puffed out, and she holds a baking sheet to her chest. Sienna is standing in my mother’s kitchen like a regular day after school and not like she has been on the cover of magazines every month for the last eight years.

The flour on her cheek is bright against her brown skin. Her plump lips are parted. She bites the inside of her cheek as she watches me, and nothing has changed. Two years and my heart still beats to the same tune it always has whenever Sienna is around. The last time she stood in front of me in white it was a sundress, there was sand on the backs of her legs, and the sun was coming up over the beach behind the lake house. Tonight it is a crop top and flour on her cheek, and my body cannot tell the difference.

And I’m going to kill my sister for not telling me.

“Surprise!” Iris shrieks. “Birdie is home!”

Iris throws the rolling pin onto the counter and launches herself at Sienna, wrapping both arms around her waist, jumping up and down hard enough that Sienna almost drops the baking pan as she laughs. Not the laugh I’ve heard on her records. Not the laugh she does in interviews. The other one. The one from when we were kids, and I would pull her braid in the back of my dad’s truck, and she would turn around and try to bite me.

I hate that I still remember which laugh is which.

“Grayson, stop staring,” Iris snaps, her chin on Sienna’s shoulder, eyes cutting into me.

I clear my throat. “I thought you had a mental breakdown.” Because that’s what I’ve dreamed of saying to her for the last two years. Jeez.

Sienna’s laugh dies in her throat. Her shoulders go up. She tucks a stray curl behind her ear with one floury finger and gives me a small, awkward smile that doesn’t reach her eyes.

“No,” she says. “Not yet anyway. Just a PR story.”

“Nice, well…” I grab an apple out of the fruit basket in the middle of the counter, just to do something with my hands. “Welcome home, Songbird.”

She smiles tightly, and before I can feel my chest cave in, I leave the kitchen.

6

SIENNA

I couldn’t sleep last night.

Not because of Grayson. Because my body still runs on popstar time, which means adrenaline rushes all night, the kind I used to get from shows or from recording sessions that started at one a.m. and ended somewhere around ten the next morning. Two weeks off tour and four months out of the studio, and my body still hasn’t readjusted to the quiet of Maine.

Last night, I did what I’ve done every night since I got back to Maine; I tried to wear myself out. I ate my way through a plate of Iris’s new strawberry jam sugar cookies. We watched two of our top five favorite movies: Sixteen Candles and Dirty Dancing swapped out for Boomerang because I cannot watch Dirty Dancing in this house without thinking about Grayson. And then I lay in the guest bed across the hall from Grayson and tossed and turned until the sun came up.

I gave up around seven, pulled on a pair of sleep shorts and the gray hoodie I’ve basically fused to my body over the last two weeks, and padded down the back stairs of the Douglas farmhouse before anyone else was awake.

I haven’t eaten breakfast in years, so I make coffee. I scoop the grounds, start the machine, and lean against the counter while it spits and hisses to life.

The worst part of this is that I’m not losing sleep over a hook, and I’m not on cloud nine from singing in front of my fans. Here I can’t sleep because I’m lying eight feet of hallway away from Grayson Douglas, listening to the floorboards in his room and trying to figure out whether the creak means he’s awake too.

I’m almost starting to think the tour was easier.

I grab my favorite four-leaf-clover shaped mug, dip my spoon into the sugar, and dump two heavy spoonfuls into my cup.

I can’t stop thinking about our oh-so-brief reunion. After two years of silence, he’s barely said a word. His gaze was so cold, like I’m a stranger, and I don’t think I can handle the thought of him hating me so much.

I know my version of what happened the night he came to my concert in Boston. I know he stopped answering. I know I sat in the lobby of that Boston hotel for hours with my phone in my hand waiting for a text that never came. He left me, but I forgive him. Fame isn’t for everyone. I have stalkers who think we’re one intimate moment away from being married, and insanely passionate people who know almost every detail about my personal life. I can understand him not being able to handle it, but I didn’t think he’d hate me for it, and I’ve no idea how to ask him about it without cracking myself open.

So, maybe the better move is the one I keep circling around. Maybe I should call Nicki. Maybe this is too much. Maybe I should just go back on tour.

The coffee maker beeps. I pour it into my cup, stirring in the sugar and then adding lots of hazelnut creamer. I lean over the counter and blow the steam off my coffee, and my eyes catch on the landline on the wall.

If I call right now, I can have a car by noon. A flight to Dublin by six tonight. A free makeup show for all my Irish fans, organized and announced by Monday, sixty thousand people screaming along to songs I wrote about Grayson, and I get to go back to being the version of myself who is too busy to think about the country boy she left behind.

It’s got to be easier than this. Easier than lying awake across the hall from a man who can’t even look at me. Easier than pining over a man I cannot have anyway, not if I want to keep Iris, and Iris is the whole reason I came home.

If I left for Dublin now, she would understand. That’s the worst part. She would hug me at the door and tell me she got it and mean it, and then she would resent me for the rest of our lives.

And I would deserve it. Because I would resent me for it too.