From downstairs came the first swell of the wedding march.
Eleanor closed her eyes.
After a while, she said, “Will you play for me?”
Elena hesitated.
She kept her father’s violin beneath her narrow bed. Playing it inside the house was forbidden unless Mrs. Anderson requested it; Vanessa said the sound carried.
“I could play something quiet.”
“Play the one you never finish.”
Elena’s fingers tightened around the tray.
There was only one melody she never finished.
She knew its first eight bars the way she knew how to breathe. Her father had said she hummed it as a small child, especially during thunderstorms.
He had never known where she learned it.
“The storm song?”
Eleanor opened her eyes.
“Yes,” she whispered. “That one.”
Elena brought the violin upstairs wrapped in her father’s old scarf.
Samuel Marlowe had repaired instruments in a shop that smelled of pine resin and coffee. He had raised her alone after his wife, Ruth, died when Elena was little more than a baby.
There had been no money for lessons, so he taught her between customers.
“An instrument doesn’t care where you came from,” he used to say. “Only whether you’re listening.”
When he died, he left her the violin, a box of tools, and one instruction she had never understood.
If the Andersons ever ask for Isabella, don’t give her away.
She had almost refused the agency placement at Anderson House.
But debt had outweighed an old man’s unexplained fear.
In three years, nobody had asked about her violin.
Until now.
Eleanor was standing when Elena returned.
She clung to the bedpost, trembling with effort.
“Help me.”
“You shouldn’t—”
“Not downstairs. The music room.”
The room at the end of the upper corridor had been locked for as long as Elena had worked there.
Eleanor drew a small brass key from inside the hem of her shawl.
“I kept one thing,” she said.
Dust moved through the candlelight as they entered.
An upright piano stood beneath heavy curtains. Yellowed sheet music crowded the shelves. On the piano sat a small wooden music box and an empty silver tray.
Eleanor touched the piano lid with the hesitation of someone approaching an old friend after an unforgivable absence.
Then she turned to Elena.
“Play.”
Downstairs, applause erupted.
Maxwell Anderson had married Vanessa Caldwell.
Upstairs, Elena set the bow against the strings.
The first notes were thin. Then the room seemed to recognize them.
Eleanor began to cry before the fourth bar.
At the eighth, Elena stopped.
“I’m sorry. That’s all I remember.”
From the doorway, a man said, “There’s more.”
Maxwell stood there in his wedding tuxedo.
