Chapter 9: Studio

Declan's POV

My studio was a converted garage in Red Hook with a good tape deck and a bad couch.

I put the cassette in the machine myself, because my hands needed something to do.

Hannah sat on the couch with Maggie beside her and her coat still on.

She hadn't taken it off in an hour.

"Are you sure you want to hear it here?" I said.

"I want to hear it somewhere with a good speaker."

"It's a cassette."

"Then I want to hear it on a good cassette player."

That almost made me laugh.

I pressed play.

There was a hiss, the scrape of a chair, and a girl's voice saying, "Is it on? Maggie, is it on?"

Maggie, beside her, made a sound.

"It's on," said a younger Maggie, off-mic. "Go."

Then a piano began.

It was a bad piano, a little flat in the top octave, but she played it like she knew it.

And then she sang.

I had heard her voice at the diner, and I'd heard it in the arena, mouthing the second verse.

I had never heard it open.

It was bigger than mine.

She didn't hold anything back, and she hit the high note in the chorus clean.

It was the song I'd sung nine hundred times, and it was a different song.

It was hers.

Nobody had ever been in it but her.

I stood with my back against the console and listened to the second verse, the one I always lost, and I understood why.

It had been written by a woman who was twenty-two years old and in love with nobody yet.

I had sung it for four years as if it were mine.

Then the key lifted a third, and the bridge came.

Four lines I had cut with a pencil in a studio at three in the morning because Trent said the label wanted it under three-fifty.

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