I ate alone at the kitchen island, not the formal dining room.The lamb was perfect, falling apart at the touch of my fork, the rosemary fragrant and sharp.The Burgundy was smooth and dry, exactly the kind I would have selected for myself, and I wondered who had chosen it.Alice, who somehow knew every preference I hadn’t voiced.Or him.
I poured a second glass and carried it through the ground floor, my stocking feet silent on the hardwood.The manor at dusk was all shadow and amber lamplight, the sconces Alice had turned on before leaving, their light pooling on the Persian runners and the dark-paneled walls.I passed his study.The door was closed, the room behind it dark.The sitting room with its stiff formal furniture that nobody sat in.The corridor lined with oil paintings I hadn’t taken the time to look at properly, mountain landscapes in heavy gilt frames that watched me pass.
The library door was ajar.
I pushed it open before I could stop myself.The room was dim, the last of the daylight falling in pale rectangles across the floor.Floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with leather-bound spines.The Persian rug worn soft in the center from years of footsteps.The fireplace cold and dark, ash from a long-dead fire still gray on the grate.
And there, in the corner by the tall window, the Steinway grand piano, its rosewood surface catching the fading light.
My fingers twitched at my sides.
I hadn’t played since that night during the contract.The night he had led me to the library and told me to play, and I had sat at this bench and given him Chopin’s Ballade No.1 in G minor, the piece Maya had taught me from my mother’s sheet music.I had played it with my eyes closed and my guard down, and when I had finished and looked up, his face had been unrecognizable.Open.Raw.Like I had reached into his chest and touched something he had buried so deep he had forgotten it was there.He had asked me who taught me the piece, and his voice had broken on the question.The music had done something to both of us that words never could, and I had been too foolish to protect myself from what followed.
The bench was pushed in neatly.The fallboard was down, covering the keys.Dust motes drifted in the last light.The room smelled of old paper and leather and, faintly, of him.Sandalwood and a darker note underneath, woodsmoke or leather, that I didn’t want to place.
I should have walked away.
Instead, I crossed the room and pulled out the bench.The leather was cool when I sat, the keys exposed when I lifted the fallboard.My fingers found the opening chords of Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp minor before I made the conscious decision to play.
The first notes rang out like a warning.Heavy.Ominous.Rage turned into something beautiful.Fury given a voice that didn’t require words.
The music built, dark and relentless, my fingers striking the keys harder than necessary.All the anger I couldn’t speak found its way out through the hammers and strings.The betrayal.The manipulation.The way he had made me feel things I didn’t want to feel and then revealed himself to be exactly what I should have expected.The way part of me still wanted him despite everything I knew.
The final chords crashed through the room and faded into silence.
My hands trembled on the keys.My breath came fast, ragged from the exertion.The anger was still there, but muted now, like a storm that had spent its worst fury and left only rain behind.
A floorboard creaked in the hallway.
I went still.Through the gap in the doorway, I caught a flash of movement.A shadow retreating down the corridor.The soft, measured tread of footsteps moving away.
He had been listening.
I didn’t know how long he had stood there, or what he had heard in the music.But I knew one thing, he had not announced himself.Had not interrupted.Had simply listened, and then left me to my rage without demanding an explanation.
I closed the fallboard and pushed in the bench.My hands had stopped shaking.
In my room, I set Michael’s framed register on the bedside table, propped against the lamp base where the old handwriting would be the first thing I saw in the morning.My great-great-grandmother’s careful script.Proof that this family had meant more than debt and manipulation and dead men’s clauses.
The ring caught the lamplight as I washed my face.I dried my hands.The ring caught the lamplight.I twisted it.Pulled it to my first knuckle, the metal catching on the joint.
If I took it off, what changed?Nothing.The marriage was still legal, the will still binding, the year still ticking.Taking off the ring was a protest with no audience.
I pushed it back.
The sheets were cool when I climbed into bed.The manor settled around me with its particular nighttime vocabulary.Pipes ticking in the walls, wood shifting as the temperature dropped, the low hum of the heating system pushing against the mountain cold that seeped through stone and glass.
I was hovering at the edge of sleep when the sound reached me.
A door closing below.Soft.Careful, the way you close a door when you don’t want to wake someone.Then footsteps on the ground floor, slow and measured, crossing the entry hall toward the main staircase.
Every nerve in my body fired at once.I lay rigid, staring at the dark ceiling, tracking his movement through the house by sound alone.The footsteps reached the base of the stairs.Paused.
My pulse beat hard in my throat.I waited for the creak of the first step.The second.The slow, unhurried climb toward the second floor where my room waited behind a locked door.My body couldn’t decide if it was bracing for confrontation or holding its breath for a different reason entirely, one I refused to name.
The footsteps moved away from the stairs.
Down the corridor.The soft fall of his weight on hardwood, moving with that controlled, measured gait.Toward his study.A door opened.Closed.
