The first time Elena Marlowe learned she had a mother, two hundred wedding guests were close enough to hear her heart break.

She stood in the doorway of the abandoned music room, clutching an antique violin against her charcoal-grey uniform. Candlelight trembled across its dark amber wood. Behind her, silk whispered against silk as guests crowded the upstairs corridor, craning to see why the groom had left his own reception.

Maxwell Anderson stood beside the piano, his white rose boutonniere crushed beneath one hand.

“Mother,” he said, his voice breaking. “Tell me this is a lie.”

Eleanor Anderson did not look at him.

The frail woman in the faded cream nightgown was looking at Elena.

For three years, Elena had washed her teacups, changed her sheets, and opened her curtains. For three years, she had believed the old woman’s silences were the remnants of an illness nobody would explain.

Now Eleanor reached for her hand.

“Twenty-six years ago,” she whispered, “I gave you up to save your life.”

Elena stepped backward.

The violin knocked against the doorframe with a small, wounded sound.

“No.”

“Elena—”

“I cleaned your floors for three years.” Her voice cracked. “Three years. And you never told me?”

Eleanor pressed a hand to her chest.

“Every time you played Isabella, I wanted to say it. And I couldn’t.”

Isabella.

The name burned through Elena’s confusion.

It was what her adoptive father had called the violin.

He had never told her why.

Six hours earlier, Elena’s greatest fear had been losing her job.

She had been kneeling outside the bridal suite, gathering the pieces of a champagne flute Vanessa Caldwell had thrown at the wall.

“Honestly,” Vanessa said, watching her from a velvet chair, “you people make incompetence look exhausting.”

Elena placed the last fragment in a dustpan.

The bride’s ivory gown spilled around her like expensive foam. Diamonds glittered at her throat. Her blonde hair had been swept into a style that had taken two women ninety minutes to construct.

On the vanity lay a small velvet jewelry box.

Elena recognized the pearl earrings inside it. She had polished them every Friday for Eleanor, who never wore them but always asked whether they were safe.

“Mrs. Anderson’s earrings,” Elena said before she could stop herself.

Vanessa looked down.

“Yes?”

“She asked to wear those today.”

“Mrs. Anderson isn’t attending.”

“She’s been ready since noon.”

Vanessa’s expression sharpened.

Then she smiled.

“Dr. Pierce says excitement would be harmful. You wouldn’t want to harm her, would you?”

Elena thought of Eleanor sitting upright in bed, her lavender shawl carefully folded across her knees, asking every twenty minutes whether Maxwell had remembered to send someone.