Cecilia folded her arms.

“A touching story.”

Elena turned toward her.

“You said that then, too.”

They climbed the stairs together.

Maxwell went first, followed by Elena and Arthur. Vanessa came behind them. Cecilia followed after a moment, perhaps deciding that whatever lay upstairs was more dangerous unattended.

At the landing, Maxwell asked Arthur to call the police.

Cecilia stopped walking.

“For what possible reason?”

“To help us establish what happened.”

“You’re humiliating your bride.”

Maxwell looked at Vanessa.

She stood very straight, her bouquet hanging at her side.

“Let him call,” she said.

Cecilia’s face hardened.

The music-room door stood at the end of the corridor, beyond a long runner faded by afternoon sun.

Elena halted several feet away.

Maxwell noticed that she was looking at the floor.

“What is it?”

“That’s where I was sitting.”

He waited.

“She told me to wait outside while she spoke to someone.”

“To whom?”

Elena glanced at Cecilia.

“I heard a glass break. Then your mother called my name.”

“That is enough,” Cecilia said.

“She was on the floor by the piano. There was tea on the rug. She kept trying to take a breath.”

Maxwell felt his own lungs tighten.

“She gave me the key. She said, ‘Find Cricket.’ I didn’t know who that was.”

He looked down at the tiny engraving.

“She used to call me that because I made so much noise at night.”

Elena nodded, tears slipping silently down her face.

“I thought it was another child.”

For fourteen years, he had pictured his mother dying in bed, peacefully, because that was what Cecilia had told him.

Now he saw her on the floor.

Calling a child.

Calling for him.

He inserted the key.

It resisted, then turned with a dry metallic click.

The door opened.

Dust lay over everything.

The piano stood beneath a white sheet. The curtains had been drawn, allowing thin blue seams of twilight into the room. There were shelves of music, a writing desk, and a low chaise beside the fireplace.

On the mantel stood a photograph of Maxwell at eight, missing a front tooth.

Beside it was another photograph.

A dark-haired man sat on a garden wall, holding a small girl and the amber violin.

Elena made a sound Maxwell would remember for the rest of his life.

Not a sob.

Something smaller, as if the room had struck her.

She crossed to the mantel.

“He hated having his picture taken.”

She touched the frame.

“I don’t have any photographs of us together.”

Arthur pulled the curtains open. Evening light washed over the piano, revealing a dark stain on the rug beside its legs.

Maxwell stared at it.

Cecilia stayed in the doorway.

“This proves nothing.”

“Nobody’s said what it proves,” Vanessa answered.