Read Chapter 32: The Recording Session

The recording studio smelled of dust and opportunity—a converted ballroom on Denmark Street where the walls were padded with horsehair and the light fell in gray London rectangles through tall, soot-stained windows. Evie stood before the copper mesh of the microphone, hands clammy, throat tight as a fist.

Julien sat at the grand piano in the corner, fingers resting lightly on the keys, watching her with that patient look he wore when he knew something she didn't. The engineer, a stout Cockney named Mr. Pemberton, fussed with wax cylinders behind a glass partition, waving once to signal readiness.

"Whenever you're ready, Miss Hart." His voice came tinny through the horn.

Evie opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. The first notes of "L'amour est un oiseau rebelle" sat on the tip of her tongue, but they refused to take flight.

She'd sung this song a hundred times. At the Cotton Club, at the Fontainebleau, at the gala where she'd watched Lucien get dragged out in handcuffs with his mouth still moving, still spinning lies. She'd sung through worse.

So why couldn't she sing now?

"Take five." Julien stood, crossing to her with that easy grace that made everything look like choreography. He dismissed Pemberton with a nod, and the engineer retreated through the door, leaving them alone in the cavernous space.

Julien didn't touch her. He never pushed. He just stood close enough that she could feel the warmth of him and waited.

"It's gone," Evie whispered. "The voice. It's just... gone."

"It's not gone. It's hiding."

"What's the difference?"

He smiled—that crooked, half-French smile that had undone her in a Montmartre alleyway a lifetime ago. "Hiding means you know where to look." He took her hand and led her away from the microphone, past the piano, to the tall windows overlooking the gray London street. Below, a double-decker bus rattled past, trailing laughter and coal smoke.

"Close your eyes."

"Julien—"

"Humor me."

She closed her eyes. Felt the November chill bleeding through the glass, the rough tweed of his jacket against her shoulder.

"Where are you?" he asked.

"London."

"No. Where are you *really*?"

She breathed in. Coal smoke and horse dung and the faint sweetness of roasting chestnuts from a vendor below. But beneath that, another smell—cigarettes and cheap perfume and the Mississippi rolling past a New Orleans dock. Her mother's voice humming a lullaby in a room that smelled of jasmine and fear. The smoky backroom of a Harlem club where a man with a scarred face had told her she'd never be anything but trouble.

"And where is the girl who sang before she could talk?" Julien's voice was soft, insistent. "Where does she live?"

"In the before." Evie's eyes stayed closed. "Before I learned to lie. Before I pretended to be a widow. Before I ran."

"And why did you run?"

"Because I sang the wrong song to the wrong man's wife." She laughed, but it came out broken. "And he had connections. And I had nothing but a voice and a ticket to Paris."

"Open your eyes."

She did. Julien's face was close, his dark eyes holding hers with an intensity that made her chest ache.

"You're not that girl anymore," he said. "You're the woman who stood on a stage and watched the world's lies break against her. You're the woman who found a sister. Who loved a man enough to let him fight beside her. You're not running. You're here."

"But I can't—" Her throat constricted. The words wouldn't come, and neither would the music. All the notes she'd ever known had jammed somewhere between her heart and her mouth, tangled in the weight of everything that had happened.

Julien was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, "Sing something new."

"What?"

"Something that doesn't exist yet. Something no one else has ever sung. Write it with me."

He led her back to the piano, sat down, and began to play—not a familiar melody, but something tentative and searching. A phrase that hung in the air like a question, then resolved into a gentle progression that felt like walking along a riverbank at dusk.

"What is that?" Evie asked.

"I don't know yet. Tell me what it sounds like."

She listened. The notes rose and fell, and beneath them she heard something else—the lap of water against stone, the distant sound of laughter drifting across a courtyard, the clink of glasses at a café table. She saw the Seine as she'd first seen it, gray-green and shining, and the way it had looked on the night she'd kissed Julien under the Pont Neuf, and the way it looked now in her memory, a thread of silver tying together every moment of her new life.

"Paris," she said. "It sounds like Paris."

"Then sing Paris."

She opened her mouth, and the words came—not the polished verse of the songs she'd been trained to perform, but something raw and unformed, syllables that stumbled then found their feet.

"Swinging the Seine, swinging the rain..." She stopped. "That's terrible."

"It's a start." Julien's fingers kept moving, adapting to her rhythm. "Go on."

She closed her eyes again, but this time she didn't see the before. She saw the after—the cramped hotel room where she'd first practiced her lies, the smoky club where her voice had finally been heard for itself, the green countryside of Fontainebleau where she'd found Lily waiting with a locket that matched her own. She saw the gala, the chaos, the moment her sister's arms had closed around her like a promise kept.

And she sang.

The melody twisted and turned, incorporating the blue notes she'd learned from the blues singers of New Orleans and the ornamentation Julien wove from classical études. It shouldn't have worked—jazz and classique were oil and water, everyone said so. But as she sang, the two streams converged, braided, became something neither of them could have made alone.

"Again," Julien said when she finished, breathless. "Again, but slower."

They worked for two hours, Pemberton called back in, cylinders replaced, the wax melted and recorded and recorded again. But the magic had broken loose, and it refused to be caged. By the fourth take, they had it—a song that swung and soared, that carried the ache of everything Evie had lost and the fierce joy of everything she'd found.

"We should call it," Julien said, wiping sweat from his brow, "'Swinging the Seine.' A song about a river and a woman who crossed it."

Evie laughed, the sound freer than it had been in months. "And a pianist who followed her."

He caught her hand and kissed it. "Always."

Pemberton emerged from the booth, his round face flushed. "That's the one, Miss Hart. That's the one we'll press." He hesitated. "Though I'll need a credit for the title. 'Swinging the Seine.' Bit unusual, but it's got legs."

Evie looked at Julien. His eyes shone with a light she'd never seen before—not just love, but something rawer. Belief.

"One more thing," Pemberton said, checking his clipboard. "The album needs a name. Something to bind the tracks together."

Evie thought of the river winding through Paris, past the Louvre and the markets and the little cafés where she'd begun to feel like herself. She thought of the sister she'd found and the lies she'd shed and the man beside her whose music had taught her that two different melodies could make one perfect harmony.

"'The River and the Road,'" she said. "Because I am the road, and he is the river, and somehow—" She shrugged. "We keep finding each other."

Pemberton scribbled it down, nodding. "Lovely. I'll have the contracts drawn up."

Later, as they walked back to their lodgings through the damp London evening, Evie felt lighter than she had in weeks. The song was real. The album was real. The future was finally, impossibly, real.

"Julien." She stopped in the glow of a gaslamp. "When we go to the Loire to meet your family—"

"My mother already adores you."

"That's not what I'm worried about." She hesitated. "They're also Lily's family. And the Comte was our father. And I still don't know what I feel about any of it."

Julien tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, his touch featherlight. "Then we find out together."

They walked on, and Evie almost believed she'd left the weight behind in the recording studio. But as they turned onto their street, a figure detached itself from the shadow of a doorway—a thin man in a long coat with a familiar hunched gait.

Evie froze. She knew that walk.

"Monsieur Bisset," she said, as the Baron's former valet stepped into the light, his face gray with fear. "What are you doing in London?"

He held out a trembling hand. "You have to come back to Paris, mademoiselle. Something's happened. The ledger—it's been found." His voice cracked. "And it's not just the Baron's secrets in there. It's yours. All of them."