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You plant yourself like a burr in Nashville as June rolls on, and do your best to stay off the internet.

It isn’t hard. Your days range from “crazy busy” on good ones to “batshit 14-hour marathons” on the bad side, and you have some degree of control over how much you take on.

So you do it all. You work out with your trainer in your home gym; you meet with your vocal coach; you have Zoom sessions with your label, your agent, and your household manager; you begin the Herculean task of signing 50,000 copies of Golden for a flash sale; and you ignore your phone’s browser like you’re on one of your pre-performance social media fasts.

Record Store Day just passed, but your team is already thinking about re-mastering an older album with some bonus demo tracks for next year’s event.

You approve June’s social media content.

You have long conversations with your mom.

You put on big hats and dark glasses and walk the dogs, disassociating as Apollo and Artemis pull at their leashes and sniff every gutter on Music Row.

Although you badly want to, you are avoiding flying Kai up to Tennessee.

He’s deep in contract talks with his agent and lawyers.

It’s big, exciting stuff. For someone who, just over a year ago, couldn’t have conversed intelligently about the most rudimentary basics of what went into signing an NFA deal, you know a lot about what’s going on.

This is Kai’s career—maybe even the remainder of it, at least as an active player.

Guys get hurt all the time. You never know when the most recent contract will be the last. It occurred to you to offer to have someone from your legal team sit in on the negotiations, but you worried that he would see that as infantilizing.

He’s got Pete, his agent, and a good head on his shoulders. So you leave him alone.

Part of you is afraid that, by seeing him too much, you’ll wipe the stain of the scandal all over him.

He flew in when the news broke, held you while you sobbed.

Was every inch of the perfect partner. Now, in his absence, you crave the comfort he brings just by being around.

Sure, Kaius tells you the right things—that it will blow over, that your real fans love you, that there’s no way GoGo can keep his shit together for long enough to continue this lie—but he’s also just huge.

Like a massive, 6’4” wall of protection; the personification of a warm embrace.

You want him so badly that you ache for him, which is exactly why you make excuses to keep him down in Miami.

You guys talk every night, and the sight of his concerned, gorgeous face is enough to make you almost lose it each time.

I’m fine, you say. It’s allergies. It’s just a crazy couple of days.

It’s fine. It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine. (It’s not fine.)

Maeve is supposed to be working out of New York this week.

Manhattan is her home base, and you always try to limit how much jetting around you subject her to, but the woman has a damnable sixth sense for when you are in distress, and repeatedly puts the “personal” in “personal assistant.” She shows up in Nashville on a Friday evening and doesn’t even bother to knock; just lets herself in with her own key.

“What if I was walking around naked?” you ask her by way of greeting, barely looking up from your Sharpies and the tidy piles of CD inserts stacked on your kitchen bar. Your hand is cramping, but you won’t let yourself stop until you’ve knocked out at least two of the stacks.

“Then I would see your ass,” Maeve answers matter-of-factly. She sets her carry-on down beside the island, and bends to scratch Apollo behind the ears. Her phone is, as ever, glued to her left hand. “You didn’t sound right when we talked.”

“I haven’t called you in a week. How do you know what I sound like by text message?”

She shoots you a withering glance that you feel rather than see. “Seriously? I have no idea, Sterling. It’s not like you pay me to know these things.”

“I don’t know if the guest bedroom is made up,” you grumble, putting slightly more flourish on the cursive “G” than you intended. Permanent marker skids off the glossy booklet and onto the table, making you curse under your breath.

“I texted your housekeeper before she was scheduled to arrive this morning and had her do it,” she says. “If you don’t want me in your immediate space, I have a room reserved at the Conrad. I just need to cancel by three if I’m not using it. You have any other objections?”

“I’m sure I can think of a few.”

Maeve slides into the chair beside you. At this point, trying not to look at her is a matter of principle. From the corner of your eye, you get an impression that her black hair is tied back. She’s wearing something short-sleeved and pink.

“You forget that I have access to your calendar,” she says. “Are you trying to speed-run working yourself to death?”

“Thomas Jefferson said that hard work was a virtue,” you mutter.

“That was Ben Franklin, actually. Thomas Jefferson got a lot of flack for spending too much time riding his horse. Plus, there was the whole Sally Hemings problem… I mean, we really don’t want to emulate Thomas Jefferson. How long have you been autographing those things?”

“I can’t remember. I just sign them as UPS brings them in. I empty the boxes and fill them back up. UPS takes them away.” You shake your head. It’s starting to hurt. Could be staring at the booklets for hours on end; could be your tight ponytail.

“Why haven't you seen Kaius? Hasn’t it been, like, ten days? He doesn’t have mandatory mini-camp for another week.

Why don’t you head to Florida and get out of Dodge for a while?

Or, if you aren’t feeling Miami, I could book you guys that villa in Positano that you enjoyed that one time.

You could eat margherita pizza and lemon sorbet and make love on the terrace… ”

That makes you look up. “I don’t need to fly to the Amalfi Coast to have sex with my boyfriend.”

She shrugs. “True, but you could. There has to be some upside to being Sterling Grayson.”

“Sterling Grayson is currently getting roasted by environmental activists over his excessive and tasteless use of his private jet,” you counter.

“I can’t imagine that long weekends overseas just for the hell of it are going to help.

Donating to reforestation efforts and buying triple carbon credits doesn’t do it. The least I can do is not rub it in.”

“Yeah, because they’d rather you flew commercial and put everyone on the plane in danger by being an enormous target? That’s so much better.” Maeve rolls her eyes. “Where’s the heat on Kim K’s carbon footprint?”

“It’s been an issue for a long time,” you say, “but it seems like everyone in the world with a gripe against me has come out of the woodwork to shout about it in all caps on the internet right now.”

That earns you a sympathetic grimace. “Everyone’s worried about you, Ster. Desiree wanted me to text her when I got here to make sure you were holding up.”

The sound of your public relations executive’s name is enough to send a shiver down your spine. “Desiree is going to need a 300% raise by the time this shit-show is over. She has the worst job in the world right now.”

“I doubt that she thinks that. It’s not like you DUI’d and crashed into somebody’s house or went on a bender and assaulted a police officer. We all know that this situation is a bunch of BS. You’re great to work for, Ster. I know Desiree thinks so. We all do. We’ve just got to ride it out.”

You squeeze your eyes closed against a particularly bright and hot jolt of pain between your brows. “That’s what I’m doing. Working. Riding it out.”

Maeve purses her lips and stands up again.

“I’m guessing there’s no real food in the house?” she asks.

“What does it matter? It’s not like you cook.”

She peers in the refrigerator anyway. Your groceries get delivered twice a week when you are in town, and your housekeeper puts them away. She doesn’t get further than the bottles of Pellegrino arranged in neat lines on the left-side middle shelf.

“It’s dinnertime,” she announces. “What am I ordering? ‘Nothing’ isn’t an option.”

You pull a bit at the place where your hair tie meets the crown of your head, trying to alleviate the soreness. “I honestly don’t care.”

“Let’s do STK,” she suggests. “I know you like the lobster linguini.”

You frown, making your signature blur on the last insert you signed. “No pasta tonight. Just the chicken breast, no jus, and a side of asparagus.”

“So, you want the linguini!” It’s as if you didn’t speak at all. “And definitely the cheesecake. I want the cheesecake, and I can’t eat the whole thing. So we’re going to split.”

“Maeve…”

“You’ve been hitting the gym twice a day most days,” she interrupts.

“You scaled back your diet when tour ended, because you aren’t on stage dancing for three hours a night anymore.

Okay; understandable. But you are still working out like a fiend.

And, if I had to guess, you probably haven’t had more than your morning green smoothie today. Am I right?”

You don’t answer. (She’s correct.)

She pauses in the middle of punching the order into her phone. “Somebody has to take care of you, Sterling. Me, the rest of the team, your mom, Kai…” She shakes her head. “We’re here for you. But you have to try to take care of yourself, too.”

The concern in her voice is not doing wonders for your headache. The path of least resistance is just going along with it. Reluctantly, you push the markers and the inserts away. They’ll still be there when your alarm goes off at 5:45 tomorrow morning.

“There’s too much crap up here to eat around,” you say, trying not to let the weariness overpower your voice. “I’ll set the table in the dining room.”