Tried again.
The notes came out broken and wrong, and the wrongness of them was worse than silence, because it reminded her how much she had lost. Not just the melody. Everything. That sereneparlor. The summer evenings. The woman who had played and the girl she used to be.
She lifted her hands from the keys and pressed them to her face.
The despair, when it came, was not the wild, panicked thing she had felt at Haventon. It was quieter than that. Heavier. It sat on her chest like a stone and she breathed around it, eyes closed, and let the silence of the room hold her for a while.
The creak of a hinge.
Her head lifted. The door had opened, just a crack, and Aaron stood in the gap, one shoulder against the frame, a bottle of wine dangling forgotten from one hand. He was not looking at her. He was looking at the pianoforte, and his face was very pale. There was something in his expression that she had never seen before. Something… helpless.
“I heard you,” he said quietly. His voice sounded scraped raw. “Playing. Just now. I—I heard from the corridor. Why did you…”
He faltered. Swallowed.
“It… it made me terribly sad. But I can’t remember why.”
She turned back to the keys, not trusting her face. “I cannot remember it properly. It keeps slipping from me. Like trying to hold water in my hands…”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he crossed the room and set the bottle on the lid of the pianoforte. He lowered himself onto the bench beside her, close enough that she could feel the warmth of him, and looked at the keys with a furrowed brow.
He lifted one hand. Touched a note. Frowned. Touched another, slightly to the left. Frowned deeper. Then a third, and this time the note that rang out was so achingly familiar that Catherine's breath caught in her throat.
He did not look at her. He was staring at his own fingers on the keys with an expression of genuine bewilderment, as though they were acting without his permission.
He pressed another note.Wrong. Corrected it.
Then another, and another, and the melody began to unfurl beneath his halting, unpracticed hand, note by note, like a flower blooming in languid motion.
It was rough. Graceless. He had no skill at the instrument, and it showed in every hesitation, every correction.
But the notes were right.
Every single one of them was right, and together they filled the space with something so tender and so bittersweet that Catherine felt the tears start again, silently, without warning.
She turned to stare at him.
“You know it,” she whispered. “How… how do you know it?”
Only Aaron and I know this melody. After our mothers passed, we swore an oath to never play it again…
His hand stilled on the keys. He looked at her then, and his eyes were glossy in the lamplight. There was something fragile in them, something that looked almost frightened.
“I think…” he began slowly, as though the words were being drawn out of him against his will, “it reminds me of something. A missing part of my childhood. Homey… butjustout of reach.”
Catherine looked at him. At the bewildered, wondering expression on his face. Her heart twisted. “My mother played it for me.”
He faltered, as though afraid to voice his thoughts.
She reached for him, gently taking the bottle he made to hold and setting it aside. He looked at the empty space where the wine had been, then back at her, one eyebrow raised.
“No more tonight.”
“You presume to tell me when I may drink?”
“Yes, I am your wife.”
He stared at her for a beat. Then he laughed, short and genuine, and Catherine found herself smiling back at him before she could help it.
