Chapter 1 - THE DOORS HE ORDERED CLOSED
The locks clicked like gunshots.
Posie's fingers tightened around mine. Across the showroom, the two men in black suits moved toward the glass entrance, and the elegant little bell above the door gave one last cheerful jingle before the bolt slid home. Outside, freezing rain made the city look as though somebody had rubbed a wet thumb across a watercolor painting.
I stepped between my daughter and Hayden Crane.
"Open those doors," I said.
Hayden didn't look at me. His eyes were fixed on the street, where a dark sedan had slowed beside the curb. Its headlights remained on even though the driver had stopped. In the reflection of the glass, I saw a pale face turn toward our piano.
"Hayden." My voice shook. "I am not doing this again. You don't get to lock me in a room and call it protection."
At that, he finally turned. Sixteen years had carved sharp lines beside his mouth, and the silver thread in his hair belonged to a stranger. But the hurt in his eyes was painfully familiar.
"I'm not keeping you here," he said. "I'm keeping them out."
The sedan accelerated suddenly, spraying the sidewalk with slush. One of the guards spoke quietly into his cuff. Another lowered a security shade over the front window.
"Who are they?" I demanded.
"I was hoping you could tell me."
"Mom?" Posie whispered.
She was fifteen, too old to believe everything adults told her and still young enough that fear could make her voice sound like the little girl who once slept with a night-light. She stood beside the piano, her library book pressed against her coat. It was a collection of poems with a cracked blue spine. I had checked it out for her last week because it was free, which lately had become our favorite kind of luxury.
Hayden stared at her. "What's your name?"
"You don't need to answer him," I said.
Posie raised her chin, a gesture so like his that my stomach dropped. "Posie Ror. And you're scaring my mother."
The words hit him harder than any threat could have. He looked down, then took two deliberate steps backward, leaving a clear path between us and the door.
"You're right," he said. "I apologize."
Neither of us had expected those words.
The manager, Brent Ogle, appeared from behind a display of polished uprights. He had been smug when he rejected my job application twenty minutes earlier. Now his complexion was the color of candle wax.
"Mr. Crane, we had no idea these people were—"
"Stop talking, Brent."
Brent closed his mouth.
Hayden crouched a little, not enough to be patronizing, just enough to meet Posie's eyes. "There's a service exit behind the workshop. My people can take you and your mother home. But someone outside followed your streetcar route here, and I need to know why."
"Maybe because we're waiting for the streetcar," Posie said.
A faint smile crossed his face and vanished. "That's a reasonable theory."
I hated how easily she drew a human expression out of him. I hated even more that I remembered being the person who once did the same.
A guard approached, holding a phone. "Boss, this came to the store account three minutes ago."
Hayden read the screen. Something inside him went still. He rotated the phone toward me.
It showed a photograph taken through the rain-streaked window of our apartment building that morning. Posie was standing on the sidewalk, carrying a violin case borrowed from school. I stood behind her with a grocery bag and an umbrella that had two broken spokes.
Beneath the photograph were eight words.
THE GIRL KNOWS THE END OF THE SONG.
My throat tightened. "Who sent that?"
"An address that doesn't exist anymore," the guard said. "They routed it through a dead account."
"We have to leave," I whispered.
Hayden looked at the picture again, and I saw an emotion I had never seen on his face during the old days, not even when his father had punished him for refusing the family business. It was naked terror.
"Not until we're sure the street is clear."
"You promised once that your world would never touch me."
"I know."
"You broke that promise."
"I know that, too."
His acceptance made me angrier. I wanted him to deny it so I could tell him what those sixteen years had cost. I wanted to throw the unpaid utility bills, the hospital receipts, and every Christmas morning without a father onto that shining marble floor.
Instead, Posie walked to the piano.
"Can somebody explain the song?" she asked.
Nobody spoke.
She touched the D key without pressing it. "Mom always stops in the same place. She says the rest got lost. I tried to give it an ending when I was little. Three notes. D, A, D. Like a word."
Hayden's face changed. "I wrote those first measures when I was twenty-two," he told her. "There wasn't supposed to be an ending yet."
Posie looked at him, then me. Her eyes narrowed in the quick, terrible way of intelligent children putting pieces together.
"Mom," she asked, "is he the somebody?"
My silence answered her.
Brent chose that moment to rush forward. "Mr. Crane, the security contractor is asking whether we should contact the police."
"Yes," I said.
"No," Brent said instantly.
Hayden looked at him. "Why not?"
"I just meant that a police response might upset our customers."
"There aren't any customers," Posie said.
Brent didn't acknowledge her. He kept watching the phone in Hayden's hand. His fingers twitched toward his own pocket, then fell away.
I noticed. Hayden noticed me noticing.
"Mason," Hayden said to the larger guard, "make the call yourself. Request patrol units for a suspicious vehicle and a threat against a minor. Keep the message. No one deletes anything."
There was a time when I would have interpreted his calm orders as safety. Experience had taught me they could mean something else. People around Hayden obeyed because disobedience had consequences. I didn't know which of those people were still loyal, or what loyalty to a man like him really bought.
"I won't let Posie become another one of your family secrets," I said quietly.
He took the words without flinching. "Neither will I."
A violent crack sounded from somewhere behind the showroom.
The lights went out.
Posie gasped. For a second the Christmas tree's battery-powered fairy lights were the only stars in the dark. A security alarm began to chirp and stopped abruptly. Mason drew a flashlight. Behind us, a door slammed.
"Electrical room," the second guard said. "I'll check it."
"No one goes alone," Hayden answered. "Mason, stay with them. Ellis, with me."
I reached blindly for Posie. My fingertips found cold leather instead of her hand. She had moved around the bench to retrieve the book she'd dropped. In those two seconds, the distance between us became a canyon.
"Posie!"
"I'm here, Mom."
A flashlight swung toward her, and across the white beam I saw something silver beneath the piano: a small envelope, tucked just under the pedal assembly. The paper was too clean to have been there long.
Posie picked it up before I could stop her.
"It's got your name on it."
She handed it to me. The handwriting was precise, old-fashioned, cruelly familiar.
ABIGAIL LYALL. YOU MISSED THE LAST RECITAL.
Sixteen years ago, the final note of that handwriting had arrived on a different envelope, one shoved beneath my mother's apartment door. Inside had been a photograph of my brother's wrecked car and a warning to disappear before the funeral.
I felt the showroom floor tilt.
"Abby?" Hayden said.
I tore open the envelope. A single strip of sheet music fluttered out. Three measures of our song were marked in red pencil. Beside the final rest, someone had drawn a tiny crown.
On the back was written:
ASK HIM WHAT HAPPENED AT THE NORTH PIER.
I looked up at Hayden. His expression told me that he knew the place.
"You said Nolan died in an accident," I whispered.
"I never said that."
"Your father did. And you stood beside him."
"I stood beside a closed coffin because they told me Nolan was inside. I was twenty-three, Abby, and my father had already told me you were dead."
His words made no sense. The room was dark, Posie was trembling, and every explanation I had built my life around was starting to loosen like knots in a rope.
"Mom, who's Nolan?" she asked.
"Your uncle," I said before I could stop myself. "My brother."
There was a heavy silence. Posie looked down at the music, the crown, and then at Hayden.
"Is this a family problem?" she asked in a small, furious voice. "Because I would really like our family problems to stop trying to kill us."
I put my arms around her. For fifteen years I had promised to keep her safe by never telling her how she came into the world. Now a stranger was using a melody to reach into every part of our lives.
The emergency lights came on, bathing the showroom in dull red. Ellis returned from the back corridor, breathing hard.
"The power wasn't cut from outside," he reported. "Someone opened the electrical cabinet with a staff key."
Hayden's gaze moved immediately toward Brent.
The manager was gone.
A door at the back creaked. On the floor beside it lay a gold name badge, face up.
BRENT OGLE — SHOWROOM MANAGER.
Hayden bent to pick it up. Beneath the badge was a second object: a folded photograph, its corners yellow with age. He opened it carefully, and the last color drained from his face.
I knew the picture without seeing it. It had been taken the afternoon Hayden asked me to marry him, even though he never got the chance to finish the question. We stood beside a lake, wind lifting my hair, his hand resting over mine on the keyboard of a portable piano.
But in this copy, someone had circled my stomach in red ink.
"Hayden," I said, suddenly unable to breathe. "What's written on the back?"
He turned the photograph over. His voice was barely audible.
"I know what she took from you."
Then, from the dark workshop, a phone began to ring. It was not one of ours. Hayden answered the forgotten receiver on the wall while Mason kept his light fixed on the door.
A man's voice, amplified just enough for me to hear, said, "The little pianist has her father's hands. Tell Abigail to bring the missing page before Christmas Eve. Or the next song will be a funeral march."
Hayden closed his eyes.
May you like
I had spent sixteen years running from the Crane family. And now, with my daughter standing beside their piano, I understood something far worse than being found.
Someone had been waiting for us to come home.
