Kylie Cantrall's Arc

Chapter 46 of 78

The phone stopped ringing. Kylie left it face-down on the piano and looked around her living room. Glass walls. Balconies. Windows two stories tall. She had chosen this house because it let the light in. Now every pane felt like a lens pointed at them. A drone had filmed her here once. A stranger had recorded their song on the ship. She wanted one night to celebrate the engagement with Arianna alone, and every room in the manor could be seen through. "I want to do something for us," Kylie said. "Just tonight. No cameras. No leak." She held up the ring box, its red stone catching the last of the daylight. "We never marked this. The world almost took it before we did." Arianna glanced at the tall windows. "How? Someone always finds a way in." Kylie walked the ground floor, testing each room. The kitchen faced the drive. The living room faced the yard. Every space had a sightline to the outside. She stopped in the hallway and understood the problem. She could not hide from the windows. So she would go somewhere with none. "The studio," she said. They went down together. The recording room had no windows. Acoustic panels covered the walls floor to ceiling. It was the one space in the manor where no drone could film and no sound could leak. They had recorded their duet here to keep it safe. Now Kylie saw it could keep a moment safe too. She pulled two chairs together in the center of the room. She set the ring box between them on the floor and opened it. The red diamond sat in the gold band, facing up at them both. "Nobody knows we're down here," Kylie said. "Not my mother. Not the label. Not one camera." She took Arianna's hand. "This is the celebration. Us saying it out loud where only we can hear." Arianna's shoulders dropped. For the first time all day she looked at the ring without flinching. "Say what?" "That we're engaged. That I chose it too." Kylie closed the door. The panels swallowed the click. "Your turn." "We're engaged," Arianna said. Her voice, lower than Kylie's, filled the small room. "And I'm not waiting anymore." Kylie laughed. She pressed a note on the equipment and their recorded duet played back, just for them. They stayed in the sealed room until it ended, then a second time. No one buzzed. No phone reached them through the walls. When they finally came up, Kylie's phone had four missed calls from her mother and a text: The label saw the song is finished. They want the release moved up. Call me tonight. Kylie read it twice. They had claimed the engagement for themselves. But the one thing they could not seal away was the song. The fifteenth was slipping, and the label was reaching for the date they had promised was theirs to control.