Leo Vance had the kind of beauty that made strangers forgive him before he apologised. It was a profitable arrangement with the universe, and Maeve had once mistaken it for goodness.
From the attic hatch, she heard him downstairs asking for her in the voice he used at premieres: warm, worried, calibrated for witnesses. Cillian stood below her on the ladder, one hand braced against the frame, eyes lifted to hers. Dust clung to his dark hair. A smear of plaster marked his jaw. He looked inconveniently real.
“Stay here,” he said.
Maeve almost laughed. “That sentence has never improved a situation in the history of women.”
“It might improve this ceiling.”
“I’m coming down.”
“You’re holding a box full of evidence on a ladder with rot behind you.”
“Then catch me if capitalism wins.”
His mouth tightened, but he climbed down first and waited. Not grabbing. Not commanding. Just there, steady as old stone. Maeve hated how much her body noticed steadiness. It was embarrassing, like discovering you were spiritually deficient in vegetables.
Nessa took the box the second Maeve reached the landing. “I will bite anyone who touches this.”
“Use your words first,” Maeve said.
“I’m in PR. My words are teeth with formatting.”
Downstairs, Leo’s voice rose. “I’m not leaving until I know she’s safe.”
Cillian’s expression went flat.
Maeve knew that look from men in doorways, bouncers at clubs, stage managers before a rig failed: the quiet before practical violence. She touched his arm. Mistake. Warmth, muscle, memory. His eyes dipped to her fingers, then back.
“Don’t,” she said.
“He doesn’t get to force his way into my house.”
“No. But he would adore footage of you throwing him out.”
“This town has thrown better men out for less.”
“Traditional values. Love that for us.”
A shout came from outside. Cameras. Of course. Leo had not followed her home for closure. He had followed the story, dragging his concern behind him like a designer coat.
Maeve took the box back from Nessa. “I’ll speak to him.”
Nessa recoiled. “Absolutely not.”
“I didn’t say privately.”
Cillian looked at the box. “Kitchen.”
“What?”
“Back door, through the old scullery. We put the box in my van. Dara takes it to Aisling’s bakery. Your assistant goes with him.”
Nessa narrowed her eyes. “Why bakery?”
“My sister has a walk-in pantry, a temper, and no fear of men with moisturiser.”
“Valid safehouse.”
Maeve shook her head. “I’m not sending my father’s things away.”
Cillian stepped closer, lowering his voice. “You’re not sending them away. You’re keeping them out of reach. There’s a difference.”
The sentence landed where panic had been clawing. Out of reach. Not gone. Protected. Maeve nodded once before pride could object.
They moved fast.
The kitchen at the back of Hart House had been stripped to its bones, but the old blue tiles remained behind the sink, each one hand-painted with tiny crooked stars. Maeve had forgotten them. The sight struck harder than it should have. Her father had painted one during a school fundraiser after declaring artistic confidence more important than artistic ability. His star looked like a drunk spider. It was still there, above the tap.
She pressed her bloody palm near it, not touching.
Nessa saw. Her face softened for half a second, then business returned. “I’ll take the box. I’ll photograph contents. Chain of custody starts now. Nobody breathes near it without me invoicing them.”
Dara appeared at the back door, pale with excitement and terror. “I’ve reversed the van badly but with confidence.”
“Good lad,” Cillian said.
“That is exactly how men run governments,” Nessa muttered, and followed him out with the box.
Maeve watched until the van pulled into the lane and disappeared through rain.
Only then did she turn toward the front of the house.
Leo stood in the hallway wearing a camel coat and wounded restraint. A solicitor hovered beside him, severe and damp. Two photographers had managed to angle themselves through the open doorway until Cillian stepped into their sightline and shut it in their faces.
The click of the latch sounded obscenely satisfying.
Leo’s eyes flicked from Maeve to Cillian and back. There. The calculation. The private history assembling itself into public usefulness.
“Maeve,” he said. “You frightened me.”
“You adapted quickly.”
His brow creased. “I’m here because I care about you.”
“You’re here because cameras are.”
“That’s not fair.”
“You keep saying that today. Buy a second line.”
The solicitor cleared his throat. “Miss Hart, my client is concerned that materials relevant to an active rights dispute may be removed from this property.”
“This property,” Cillian said, “is mine.”
The solicitor looked at him as one might regard a tradesman interrupting opera. “And you are?”
“The owner.”
Maeve saw Leo absorb that too. Cillian Byrne, owner of the lost house. Cillian Byrne, childhood friend. Cillian Byrne, broad-shouldered and inconveniently photogenic in a way that would make comment sections feral by dinner.
Leo smiled with no warmth. “I didn’t realise you two were still close.”
“We’re not,” Maeve said.
Cillian said nothing.
The silence somehow sounded worse.
Leo’s gaze dropped to the gold star on her coat. “You’re bleeding again.”
Maeve refused to look. “Then I’m consistent.”
“Maeve.” He softened his voice. The old key in the old lock. “This has gone too far. Come back to the hotel. We’ll speak calmly. We’ll work out the song. There’s no need to turn your grief into a weapon.”
For a second, every room in her went quiet.
There were phrases that revealed the architecture of a person. Not because they were loud, but because they were load-bearing. Your grief. A weapon. He had not stolen from her art, then. Not in his mind. He had merely corrected an excess. Managed a woman. Edited a wound.
Cillian moved, barely. Maeve felt it more than saw it.
She lifted one hand.
“No,” she said.
Leo blinked. “No?”
“No to the hotel. No to calm as a leash. No to you standing in my grandmother’s hallway and telling me what my grief is allowed to become.”
The solicitor opened his mouth.
“And no to him,” she added, pointing, “speaking before I finish.”
Cillian made a small sound that might have been cough, might have been praise.
Leo’s face changed. The softness drained. For one bare second the man beneath the performance looked out, annoyed and cold.
Then the mask returned.
“You’re upset.”
“I’m awake.”
Outside, someone shouted, “Maeve! Did Leo write the chorus?”
The words entered the hallway through the old glass like a thrown stone.
Maeve laughed once. Not because anything was funny. Because fury needed somewhere to put its coat.
Cillian turned toward the door.
She caught his sleeve. “Don’t.”
He looked down at her hand again. “I’m beginning to think don’t is your main strategy.”
“It’s been a day.”
Leo watched the exchange with sharpened interest. “This is what you want? To hide in a derelict house with a builder and pretend that’s dignity?”
Cillian smiled then.
It was not friendly.
Maeve stepped between them before old Emerald Harbour masculinity could discover fresh funding. “You should leave.”
“My legal team will pursue recovery of any relevant materials.”
“Recover away.”
“And the concert?” Leo asked.
The trap gleamed.
If she cancelled, she looked guilty. If she performed, she risked legal escalation. If she performed badly, she became pity content. If she performed well, Leo would claim the storm had inspired her. Every path had teeth.
Maeve touched the gold star.
The bent point pressed through wool, into skin.
“I’ll be there Saturday,” she said.
Leo’s eyes narrowed. “Singing what?”
“The truth, if I can find a key it likes.”
Cillian’s gaze shifted to her. Something unreadable warmed there, quick and gone.
Leo left with his solicitor and his performance of concern. The cameras chased him down the path. Through the lace of rain on the front window, Maeve watched him pause at the gate, angle his face toward the press, and say something she could not hear but understood perfectly.
Poor Maeve. Difficult Maeve. Brilliant Maeve, unstable Maeve, grieving Maeve.
A woman framed by adjectives until the noun disappeared.
When the street finally emptied, Hart House seemed larger. The kind of silence after a fight, when even the walls waited to see what version of you survived.
Cillian locked the door.
“You need tea,” he said.
Maeve stared. “I need a lawyer, a forensic musicologist, a family therapist, two paracetamol, and possibly a priest with media training.”
“Tea first.”
“That is aggressively Irish.”
“It’s an evidence-based intervention.”
The kettle in the stripped kitchen was his, stainless steel and dented. He found two mugs in a box, rinsed plaster dust from them, and put tea bags in without asking how she took it. Then, after a pause, he added a brutal amount of milk to one and no sugar.
Maeve looked at the mug he handed her.
“You remember.”
“I remember abnormal tea crimes.”
“I was twelve.”
“You were wrong then too.”
The laugh surprised her. It came out cracked, rusty, alive.
Cillian’s face changed when he heard it, and that was dangerous. Not lust-dangerous, though there was heat under everything now, unwanted and obvious as a stage lamp. Worse. Tender-dangerous. The kind that made a person imagine being seen without invoice.
She took the tea and looked at the blue tiles. “My mother said I wanted rid of the house.”
“I know.”
“She knew I didn’t.”
“I figured.”
“Then why buy it?”
He leaned against the counter. “Because the developer wanted to turn it into three luxury lets called The Muse, The Lyric, and The Hideaway, and I decided violence was bad for business.”
Maeve almost smiled. “That’s the whole reason?”
“No.”
The honesty startled them both.
Cillian looked toward the front room, where the covered piano waited. “Because this house was kind to people when people weren’t. Because the town needs rooms that aren’t just for selling coffee to tourists. Because your grandmother asked me once, years ago, to promise that if the place ever went, someone would keep music in it.”
Maeve’s throat tightened.
“She asked you?”
“She asked half the town things. She was a menace with biscuits.”
“She never told me.”
“She probably thought you’d try to save everything.”
Maeve looked into the tea. Pale. Familiar. Ugly by café standards, perfect by home ones. “I did try.”
Cillian’s voice softened. “I know.”
Two words. No pity. No lecture. Just witness.
It nearly undid her.
Her phone buzzed. Nessa.
FOUND CASSETTE. NOTEBOOKS. ALSO PHOTO OF YOU IN STAR PIN LOOKING LIKE TINY DICTATOR OF BROADWAY. BRINGING TO BAKERY VAULT. AISLING SAYS THAT IS NOT A THING. I SAID IT IS NOW.
Another message followed.
Also: Leo’s team just released a statement.
Maeve opened the link.
Cillian watched her face as she read. She knew because his went still in response.
The statement was elegant. Devastating. Full of concern, affection, and legal poison. Leo claimed he had tried privately to support Maeve through a “difficult grief cycle”. He claimed Home Before Morning had emerged from an “intimate collaborative period”. He claimed he would “always protect the truth of what they made together”.
At the bottom, a single line turned her blood cold.
Out of respect for Maeve’s wellbeing, Mr Vance will not comment on the private recordings currently circulating.
Private recordings.
Maeve’s hand went numb around the mug.
Cillian took it before tea spilled.
“What recordings?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
But she did. Not specifically. Not yet. But memory had already opened a door: Leo’s Chelsea kitchen. Her voice memo app. Tears. A chorus sung into midnight. A fight she thought was private. A confession about her father. Maybe worse. Maybe nothing. Maybe enough.
Her phone rang.
Unknown number.
Then a message appeared from the same number.
You should have stayed gone.
Below it was an audio file.
Ten seconds long.
Maeve stared at the little play button while the house held its breath around her.
Cillian said her name once.
Not like Leo had.
Not ownership. Not performance.
Like a hand held out in the dark.
Maeve pressed play.
Her own voice filled her grandmother’s ruined kitchen, raw and young and breaking over the first line of a song no one was supposed to hear.
Home before morning, love, or don’t come home at all.
Then another voice, her father’s, laughing softly from thirteen years ago.
“That’s the one, starling,” he said. “That’s the one they’ll try to take.”