It’s a lie he doesn’t bother to believe.
A chord lands wrong, dissonant and sharp enough that Callum winces.
She doesn’t correct it.
She stays there, fingers pressing down as if daring the sound to exist.
Keir used to do that.It drove him crazy, but it was the man’s way of expressing his discontent.
Late at night, when the world stopped asking him to be charming, those nights, the music didn’t swagger.It wandered.It faltered.It circled wounds Keir never named aloud.
Callum stands in the corridor outside the music room and lets the sound sink into him, cold and unavoidable.
Once again, knowing he shouldn’t go in, but unable to stop himself, Callum slips inside the room.Like the great pianist she is, she’s practicing.
He counts the beats the way Keir taught him, one, two, three, four, trying to turn music into math, emotion into something manageable.It doesn’t work.The rhythm keeps changing, slipping out from under him.Isla isn’t counting for anyone.She isn’t trying to stay neat.
Her left hand drops into a low, repeating pattern that feels like footsteps on stone.Not running.Not approaching.Just pacing.The right hand answers with a thin, high line that sounds like a voice calling into a room that won’t answer back.
Callum feels it in his teeth.
The music isn’t pretty.It isn’t meant to be.It is brutally honest in a way that makes him want to look away.
He remembers Keir once saying, “If it sounds too beautiful, you’re lying.”Then Keir had laughed like it was a joke, but he’d played the next chord hard enough to make the keys protest.
Isla plays like she has the same rule carved into her bones.
A pause opens, wide and dangerous, and Callum thinks she’s done.Then she comes back with a phrase so simple it almost hurts: three notes, repeated, each time slightly altered, as if she’s changing the question because the answer refuses to appear.
Here, there had been this castle, this music room, and a man who played like he was trying to outrun his own ghosts.Now the ghost he was trying to outrun sat at the piano, expressing her emotions in ways her father would have applauded.
The man who came for him is the same man who never came for Isla.
It doesn’t make sense.
The music shifts again, and Callum’s chest tightens with sudden, unfair anger at Keir, at Isla, at himself.Because the sound proves something Callum doesn’t want to admit: Isla didn’t inherit money.She inherited the part of Keir that hurts.
How does a man leave this?
How does a father walk away from a child capable of this kind of truth and never look back?Never sit in the back of a hall and listen.Never stand in a doorway and let her playing wreck him.
That isn’t the man Callum knew.
Keir was many things: reckless, selfish, addicted to chaos, but he wasn’t indifferent.Indifference made him cruel.It made him restless.It made him drink.
So why?
The question digs in deep, sharp as a splinter.
Callum takes one step inside the music room, then stops.If he doesn’t stop, he’ll do something stupid.
He’ll say something that can’t be unsaid.
He’ll touch her again.
He’ll forget she’s here to take the castle from him.
The music shifts, lower now, stripped down to a handful of notes, spaced wide.It sounds like waiting.Like standing at a door that never opens and telling yourself you’re not waiting at all.
