When their eyes meet, something flickers in Alisa’s expression that has no place in a concert hall.
Fear.
Isla bows one final time, turns, and walks offstage with the same poise she’d practiced since childhood.The curtain falls behind her, muffling the roar of applause.Backstage is dimmer, cooler, smelling of nervous sweat and the faint metallic tang of stage lights.
“Brilliant,” a volunteer murmurs as Isla passes, eyes shining.
“Thank you,” Isla says automatically, voice smooth as a practiced scale.
She keeps moving toward the greenroom, her mind already beginning the mental catalog she always does after a performance, tempo held, pedaling clean, voicing balanced, when Alisa appears in front of her like a barrier.
Her mother grabs her arm.
Hard.
“Isla,” Alisa says, voice low and urgent.“We need to leave.Now.”
The pressure of Alisa’s fingers bites through the fabric of Isla’s sleeve.Isla blinks once, startled less by the grip than by the look in Alisa’s eyes, wide, frantic, unmoored.
“The judges haven’t announced the winner yet,” Isla says, steadying her voice.“I’m still in the final.”
Alisa shakes her head sharply.“It doesn’t matter.”
“Of course, it matters.”Isla eases her arm free, careful not to make a scene even here.“This is the final round, Mother.”
Alisa’s breath comes out unevenly.She glances down the corridor, toward the stage door, toward the bustling staff, then back to Isla as if she doesn’t know where to place her fear.
Something cold slides into Isla’s gut.
“What happened?”Isla asks.
Alisa opens her mouth.Closes it.Then places both hands on Isla’s shoulders, as if bracing her against a blow.
“Your father is dead.”
The words don’t explode.
They arrive oddly flat, like a statement from a news anchor.
Isla waits for grief.For shock.For the sudden collapse of a daughter’s world.
Nothing happens.
No image flashes in her mind.No warm memory rises.No ache unfurls.
Instead, her mind supplies the only facts it has ever been given about Keir MacLaren: famous, brilliant, absent.
Dead.
After all these years.
Alisa’s fingers tighten on her shoulders.“We have to go,” she says.“Immediately.”
“No,” Isla replies.
The word comes out calm and certain, surprising even her.
Alisa’s brows knit.“Isla?—”
