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“You don’t get a plus one,” Grayson says immediately, snapping another piece of his apple.

“She comes or there’s no cake.”

Grayson groans, pinching his nose. “Iris.”

“No cake, Grayson.” Iris takes a serene sip of her perfect coffee. “I’ll make Dominic a box of Funfetti from a Betty Crocker pouch and tell him his best friend in the whole world wouldn’t let my best friend in the whole world come to his birthday party.”

Grayson runs his hand over his buzzcut and sighs. “Fine. Okay. She can come.”

“I don’t know what’s wrong with you,” she narrows her eyes on him. “You love Sienna. Why can’t she come?”

“I don’t have to come.” I cut in fast, my brain already six steps ahead of the room. A party. People. Phones. Somebody squinting at me a beat too long, realizing I’m Echo and mindlessly posting that they spotted me in Maine before I’ve finished my first drink. “Really. I should probably keep a low profile; I’m not exactly supposed to be⁠—”

“Are you kidding?” Iris lights up. “Dominic will lose his mind. He is the biggest Echo fan on the planet. He has your album in his truck on a CD, Sienna, a physical CD, like a serial killer.”

“Iris—” I start.

“You should come.” Grayson takes a slow bite of his apple, his eyes burning holes through my clothes. “You can earn your keep. Consider it rent.” His voice drops half a register. “You can be Dom’s birthday present.”

His gaze drags down and back up, slow and heavy, like if he can’t get me out of his house he is going to make me sweat in it instead. My face goes warm. My pulse drops somewhere unhelpful. Every reason I had ten seconds ago for not going to the party evaporates on the spot.

“Fine,” I manage. “I’ll come.”

7

SIENNA

I don’t know what I expected of Bar Harbor, but it wasn’t this.

The Old Port Diner where Iris and I used to get cheese fries after marching band is a hot yoga studio now. The record store with the cat in the window is gone. Half the storefronts downtown have been replaced with candle shops and green smoothie places catering to tourists with too much money and leisure time. Eight years, and the whole town has been soft-focus gentrified into a New York elitist getaway.

Maybe coming home was a mistake.

Nothing is how it was when I left. Most of my friends are gone. Half of my favorite places have disappeared. Nobody knows me here, which somehow feels just as isolating as being recognized everywhere.

At least in the version of Maine I left behind, Grayson was still talking to me.

Everywhere I turn, he’s there, and still there’s so much distance between us.

He is up at five fifty-eight every morning, two minutes before I come downstairs for coffee. He is in the pantry when I want the pantry and in the upstairs bathroom when I want the upstairs bathroom. Seven days since the coffee fight, and he hasn’t said more than “morning” to me, but I cannot turn a corner in that house without finding the back of his head or him rolling his eyes at my existence. Which is somehow more exhausting than if he just yelled at me. I wish he would yell, cuss, tell me to get the hell out of his life. At least then he would be talking to me, and I would have a chance of figuring out what went wrong.

I lie wide awake every night across the hall from him thinking about the last time we saw each other, and what he meant by calling me a coward. Grayson doesn’t mince his words, so if he believes I’m a coward, then he has his reasons, and there is nothing worse than being seen as coward by a cowboy.

I’m starting to think that we don’t remember the same night. Whatever happened the last time we saw each other, he and I walked out of it with two different versions of the story. And one of us is wrong. Or both of us are wrong, and the only way to figure it out is to actually sit down and talk to him, which would require him looking at me for longer than ninety consecutive seconds, which he hasn’t done since Tuesday.

So that’s going great, but when I’m not torturing myself with Grayson, I’m bored.

Iris has been at the bakery from five a.m. to nine p.m. preparing a wedding order I am pretty sure could feed a small monarchy. She comes home, eats whatever Esme left covered on the stove, kisses my forehead, and falls face-down on top of her covers with her shoes still on. Which leaves me to lounge around the Douglas house in a hoodie like a morose teenager, reading the same two novels, roaming the halls, chit-chatting with Esme and rewatching all the movies I’ve missed over the last couple of years. All of which is officially making me stir-crazy.

This morning she left a little later than usual. When I complained about it to Iris over a shared piece of toast, she tossed me the keys to her Subaru and asked Grayson for a ride into town. I borrowed her faded Red Sox cap on the way out, and twenty minutes later I was driving myself into Bar Harbor with Nina Simone on full volume, because I got her CD stuck in Iris’s deck senior year of high school, and apparently, she still can’t get it out.

The only thing in this whole downtown that hasn’t changed is Mason and Hender’s Fenders. The sign is still up on the corner of Cottage and Main, same hand-painted block letters Mr. Mason has had on the storefront since I was eight. It’s where my mother took me for my very first guitar lesson when I was seven. It’s where I bought my first pack of replacement strings with twelve dollars I earned weeding Mary’s garden. It’s where every kid in Hamilton County who has ever held a pick learned how to play, especially now that this place is known for creating Echo, the popstar of our generation.

I cross the street on instinct, because over there at least someone will know me and keep it secret that I’m here. The construction workers reported a black car with some suits asking if they’d seen me which means Nicki and the record company are tired of waiting me out and are now actively searching for me. When I round the corner to the store, I pause outside the door.

Because I’m right there in the window.

Or at least, Echo is. A glossy eight-by-ten of me aged twenty-one in a straight dark-purple wig and a black bandage dress, microphone pressed to my mouth, eyes closed mid-belt, the lights blowing out behind me in pink and white. The shot is from my very first stadium concert, the one Nicki booked the second my EP ‘All the Ways to Kill a Rockstar’ went platinum, and I officially became the talk of the music world. Across the bottom of the photo, in silver Sharpie, in my own handwriting: Rock on, losers, x Echo.