Part 2 — A Song from Twenty Years Ago
The first notes were soft. Almost hesitant. And then they weren't.
Conversations died mid-sentence. A waiter froze with a bottle tilted over an empty glass. Somewhere near the back, a woman in a red gown lowered her phone without finishing the photo she was taking.
It wasn't just that a nine-year-old was playing with the precision of a conservatory graduate. It was what she was playing.
A melody built on a descending minor scale, resolving into a bright, aching major chord — the kind of tune that sounds like a memory before you even know why.
Victor Blackwood's smile did not fade. It simply stopped existing.
He set his glass down on a passing tray without looking at it, and it nearly slipped from his fingers. His jaw tightened. His eyes, gray and unreadable to everyone in that room, fixed on the child at the piano with an intensity that made the guests nearby take an unconscious step back.
Because he knew this song.
He had heard it exactly once, twenty years ago, played by small hands on an upright piano in a nursery that no longer existed in his house — torn out, renovated, erased, the way he'd tried to erase everything else about that year. A song with no title, composed by a six-year-old girl who used to hum it while falling asleep.
His daughter. Evelyn.
The daughter who vanished during a custody dispute gone wrong, taken across state lines by a mother Victor had spent a fortune trying to find and never did. The daughter he had told the press was "traveling abroad" for eighteen years, because admitting the truth — that he had lost her and never gotten her back — was a wound he couldn't survive publicly.
No recording of that melody existed. He'd made sure of that, in the cruelest way — burning old tapes in a fit of grief he never spoke of again.
So how was a nine-year-old girl in a mansion two thousand miles from where his daughter disappeared playing a song that shouldn't exist anywhere except inside his own memory?
Nora stood frozen at the edge of the stage, tray forgotten on a side table, her hand pressed flat against her chest as if she could physically hold her heart in place.
Chloe finished the final phrase, let the last note ring out into silence, and looked up.
May you like
"My mother taught me."
Victor Blackwood's hands began to shake.
