That’s on me.
Chapter 18
Byrdie
The music is a siren’s call, impossible to resist.
I creep from my bed in the living room, tiptoe across the entryway, and hover in the music room doorway, my ears filled with magic.
The figure at the piano is so shrouded in shadows that it would be impossible to tell who it was if I hadn’t seen this same man, sat right by him even, as he played the piano for me and asked me if I wanted him to teach me how to read music.
We ate dinner together after Lydia left, all of us gathered at the dining table in the kitchen with Nance, eating family style. I thought Nash might ask if I wanted to take him up on his offer to teach me how to read music, but he didn’t. Mostly we talked about Lydia’s betrayal, about making sure to change all security codes so she couldn’t get back inside, and no one, even though they had to know I spent the night with Vonn, asked us about it.
The notes flutter and dance over my head, beguiling me. My chest hurts, and my fingers throb when the music fades.
“You can join me,” Nash calls out, head down.
“How did you know I was here?” I reply, not moving from the doorway as I continue hungrily eyeing the beautiful grand piano I ache to play.
“I hoped,” he says quietly, turning to look at me. His expression is impossible to read with only the entryway light behind me for illumination. “I keep hoping it will draw you out of that room and back to the girl you were before someone took you.”
“You said you don’t like to play anymore.”
He lifts one shoulder in a half-shrug. “I like it much better when I play with you.”
I thought the music would be the thing to draw me across the room to settle on the leather bench beside him. It wasn’t the music. It was the man.
The leather is slightly warm, and he shuffles over, giving me more space than I need. He did the same before when I was skittish and terrified of men.
It hits me right between the eyes how long it’s been since I noticed the size of the three men in this house. None of them are small. Nash is lean, with the long ropy muscles of a runner, and over six feet tall. Vonn is bigger than most. Between scrubbing floors and dusting bookcases, I stopped noticing their size and just sawthem.
“The piano was a cage,” he says quietly, eyes on his fingers, which he has resting lightly on the black and white keys.
I take in his profile. His strong jaw. His fuller lower lip. The tiny tilt at the end of his nose.
“I spent my childhood shuttled from my nanny to school, then to after-school activities and back to the nanny to take me up to bed and read me a story before she finished her shift at nine. I would eat in the kitchen with Nance, never with my parents. Every minute of my day was planned out and carefully managed with no input from me.”
“That doesn’t sound like much of a childhood.”
He presses down on the piano.
F sharp.
“It was better than what others might have. I had a roof over my head and never went to bed hungry. My life could have been worse, but I won’t pretend it wasn’t lonely.”
When he turns his head toward me, I look away, focusing on the keys instead of him.
It’s an addiction.
Nash once asked me how I learned to play the music I loved without being able to read music.
I hear the pieces that feel real to me, and I repeat them over and over until they sound real to my ears.
But it’s an addiction. Unhealthy and a more compulsive habit than I should let myself give in to, but if I didn’t have music, I wouldn’t have had anything except Mom. And sometimes, I didn’t have Mom at all.
“My dad left my mom when I was still a baby. She loved him a lot.”
I press down on three keys.
