Chapter 5

He went down the hall. In the large bin by the elevator he found what she'd thrown away.

Seven years of ticket stubs from films they'd seen together. A pair of misshapen clay figurines they'd made at a studio one rainy afternoon. Photographs. And at the bottom — the pull-tab ring from a drinks can.

He'd made it for her on a night when he had nothing else. She had treated it like something precious and kept it hidden under her pillow for years.

She'd thrown it away now. When she was supposed to be almost the first Mrs. Harrington.

She hadn't been bluffing. She'd been waiting.

He stood in the hallway for a long time, holding the crumpled ring.

Then he remembered the watch box.

The leather case that had sat on her nightstand for as long as he could remember. She'd never moved it. When he'd once joked that it made him jealous — you look at it more than you look at me — she'd gotten quiet and said: It's all I have left of him.

He had smashed the watch inside it. He had let Serena grind it underfoot.

And he had not stopped either of them.

He dropped to the floor in the middle of the empty room and hit it with his fist.

Once.

Twice.

A third time. Until his knuckles cracked and the skin broke.

He deserved worse.

He got up suddenly, went to the door, and pushed past Serena who had somehow followed him there.

"What happened? Ethan—"

"Get out." His voice was so quiet it frightened her. "I said get out."

The house was hers now, in every practical way he had arranged it to be.

And it had never felt so completely empty.

Geneva in the small hours.

A clear sky, quiet streets, the cold that comes before dawn.

I recognized my mother the moment I saw her — even after so many years apart.

She saw the bandaging on both my hands. Her expression shifted for just a moment. Then she smiled and tilted her head toward the car.

No questions. No mention of Ethan. Just the two of us in the dark, driving through the city.

She had made dinner. Five dishes and a soup, all the ones I'd grown up eating. The smell of them hit me before I was through the door.

My eyes stung.

"Let the past stay past," my mother said from across the table, sliding a bowl toward me. "You got out. That's what matters."

She didn't press for details. I didn't offer them.

After dinner, she told me what had really happened between her and my father, years ago.

There had been no affair.

Only a marriage that had quietly run out of feeling. My father had blamed himself for all of it. The guilt had become depression, and the depression had become unbearable. He had died by suicide.

My mother had left carrying a reputation she hadn't earned, built her way back from nothing in a foreign country, and turned the craft she'd grown up with into a business — an artisan lifestyle brand rooted in the aesthetic she'd known since childhood. Ninety-eight locations now. Revenue in the hundreds of millions.

"Vivian," she said, holding my bandaged hands. "Even if you never touch a piano again, I can take care of you. Anything he gave you, I can give you."

I shook my head and smiled.

"What I lost, I'll get back myself."

The doctor saw my hands the next morning. Minor lacerations, no tendon damage. Piano was fine.

After that, I found a restaurant in the old quarter of the city and asked if they needed a pianist.

They did.

I wore a fitted jade-green dress, my hair pinned up, a pair of pearl studs — that was all.

My mother came on the first night, standing near the back of the room, clapping loudly enough for both of us.

I closed my eyes.

I let myself go back to the early years — the three of us in that small apartment, my father holding up a thumb, my mother guiding my hands over the keys.

The music had been in my fingers all along.

Not in the kitchen. Not in the soup. Not in the seven years I had spent making myself invisible so that Ethan could feel large.

It was here. Right here.

I lifted my hands and began to play.

What is yours cannot be taken. What is in you cannot be practiced away.

Ethan had been wrong about that, along with everything else.

What he didn't know — what I had never told him — was that my mother's business had ninety-eight locations and a valuation that made his pharmaceutical company look modest.

She had no intention of making me her heir.

She just looked at me across the table and said, quietly:

"You've already lost one seven years. Don't lose another."

I nodded.

I signed a three-year performance contract with the restaurant before the week was out.

They told me I played like someone with a story to tell.

I stood in the bathroom mirror that night and looked at my palms. The cuts were closed. Still ugly, but healing.

Even the deepest wounds close eventually. It just takes time.