“I just played my final program.”Isla’s voice stays steady as she speaks, as if she is discussing the weather.“I’m in first place.”
“This is bigger than a competition,” Alisa snaps.
A short laugh escapes Isla before she can stop it, sharp, almost humorless.“Is it?”
Alisa’s jaw sets.“Don’t do this.”
“Do what?”Isla asks, and she feels the blade of anger sharpening inside her.“Pretend I’m devastated?Pretend he was a father?”
Alisa’s eyes flash.“Hewasyour father.”
The word scrapes, ugly with expectation.
Father.
Heat blooms behind her ribs.Not grief, never grief, but something old and jagged.
“He was a sperm donor,” Isla says evenly.“Nothing more.”
Alisa’s face tightens.“You don’t mean that.”
“I do.”Isla holds her ground.“He didn’t raise me.He didn’t call.He didn’t write.He didn’t come to recitals or competitions.He didn’t come to Juilliard.He didn’t show up once, not even when I won my first international at sixteen.”
Alisa flinches, and for a second, Isla sees it: not just panic, but something else, something like dread.
“He sent money,” Alisa hisses, as if that should end the argument.“Every month.Without fail.”
Isla saw the checks without meaning to, numbers on paper, large enough that her childhood had been cushioned, protected, polished.Lessons, masterclasses, travel, the best teachers money could buy.Alisa never let Isla forget what those things cost.
Isla has never been foolish.She understands wealth was a tool.
But it isn’t love.It isn’t a father’s hug or his approval when she won her first competition.
“Money isn’t parenting,” Isla says.“Money is money.”
“It paid foreverything,” Alisa shoots back.“It paid for your teachers.Your competitions.Your instrument.Your apartment.Your?—”
“My life?”Isla cuts in, and the words come out sharper than she intends.“Is that what you want to say?That he bought the right to be called my father because he mailed checks from somewhere he didn’t want to come back from?”
Alisa’s nostrils flare.Her eyes shine with something too close to tears, but Alisa doesn’t cry.Her mother has never allowed herself that kind of softness.
“This isn’t about your pride,” Alisa says.“This is about what happens next.”
“What happens next,” Isla repeats, and something in her mother’s tone makes the hair rise along Isla’s arms.
Alisa’s gaze flicks again toward the corridor, the stage door, the staff moving past.“They’re going to come for you,” she says tightly.“The press.Everyone.If they know you’re here?—”
“Why would they know?”Isla demands, then remembers the phones in the audience, the glowing screens, the murmurs.“They already know something.”
Alisa’s mouth flattens.“Exactly.”
A door opens down the corridor.A stagehand peeks his head out, polite but harried.“Ms.MacLaren?We’ll be ready to announce shortly.”
“We’ll be there,” Isla says without hesitation.
The door closes.
Alisa stares at her daughter as if she doesn’t recognize her.As if the obedient, polished girl she had shaped into a weapon of excellence had just stepped out of her mother’s grasp.
