Chapter 2

Eleanor

The next two days passed quietly.

I went to rehearsal, came back, practiced until the light faded. On the third day, I came home to find the housekeeper waiting in the entrance hall.

"Mr. Fitzgerald would like to see you in the study, Miss Eleanor."

I went.

The study smelled like leather and wood polish. Robert sat behind the desk, the wall safe hanging open behind him. Margaret was on the small sofa with her hands folded in her lap, staring at nothing. Isabella stood behind her, red-eyed—she'd been crying, or wanted us to think she had.

I set my case down by the door and waited.

"Do you have anything you'd like to tell me?" Robert's voice was calm, measured. The tone he used in board meetings when the decision was already made.

"About what?"

"About the Patek Philippe."

The watch.

His father's watch—a 1920s limited-edition Patek Philippe that lived in the safe and never came out. Not for galas, not for portraits, not even when the Aldrich family came for dinner. I'd held it once when I was nine. Robert had shown it to me himself, let me turn it over in my hands while he told me about the watchmaker in Geneva, the year it was made, how something this well-built could last a hundred years.

I remembered thinking it felt like a small, stopped heart.

"I don't know anything about it," I said.

Robert looked at me. Then he looked at Isabella.

That was all it took.

Isabella pressed her fingers to her mouth and said nothing. She'd already said plenty before I got here.

"Why?" I asked.

The real question was: why were her tears already enough?

"Because you're the only person in this house who's been alone in this corridor in the past forty-eight hours," Robert said. "Because Isabella has a black card with a credit limit she's never touched. Because you've been living on an orchestra salary for three years, and we both know what that covers."

He paused. His voice had that careful quality of a man who'd spent the morning building his argument and was now presenting it as fact.

"A violin bow, Eleanor. Your monthly salary barely covers a decent bow. Is that enough to get you through the month?"

I didn't answer.

There was no answer he wanted to hear.

Margaret shifted on the sofa. "We gave you everything." Her voice was tired, genuine, and completely beside the point. "Twenty years. We raised you, educated you, gave you the instrument, the lessons, the connections. And you—a dog shows more gratitude than—"

"Don't."

The word came out before I could stop it. Not loud. Just there.

Margaret stopped. The room went still.

She started talking again, and somewhere in the middle I heard the word steal—buried in a longer sentence about the Van Cleef necklace in high school, about rumors from other parents, about how I never came home on weekends in college. She mentioned a name I didn't recognize, but the implication was clear enough.

The Van Cleef necklace.

I was sixteen. It had turned up on top of my violin case—not hidden, just placed there—in the forty minutes I'd left it in the locker room. My parents said they believed me.

I learned what that meant eventually.

The housekeeper knocked and came in with the watch.

He told Robert it had been found in my wardrobe—in the exterior pocket of my violin case, he said, when Robert asked him to be specific. Robert took it without a word, turned it over once, and set it on the desk between us.

The room went quiet.

Robert set down his glass. He didn't raise his voice. He never did when he was furious. He just got quieter, more controlled, and I'd learned early that the quiet was worse than shouting. The quiet meant he'd stopped arguing and started deciding.

He said several things.

I stood there and heard them—disgrace, ungrateful, not fit to carry the Fitzgerald name—and I felt them the way you feel cold air: as information, not as something that could break through. I kept my weight even. I kept my hands still.

I didn't look at Isabella. That's what she was waiting for, and I wasn't going to give her the satisfaction.

The silence stretched.

Robert was waiting for something—an apology, a denial, a breakdown into one of the two options he'd laid out for me.

I could feel Margaret watching from the sofa with that half-formed expression she'd been wearing for six months now, the one that said she wanted to speak but had already decided not to.

I looked at my hands. At the callus on the inside of my left index finger. At the faint indentation on my second knuckle where the string had pressed for twenty years.

Then I looked up.

"I'm not a Fitzgerald." My voice came out quieter than I expected. Steadier, too. "I've known that for a while. So tell me what it costs. Twenty years. Put a number on it and tell me how you want it repaid."

Robert's expression didn't change.

If anything, it settled. The slight relaxation of a man who'd been waiting patiently and finally got what he wanted.

"Victor Sterling."

I'd heard the name from Isabella yesterday. I'd told myself it wasn't real, that Robert would never, that Margaret would never.

I'd been wrong.

"The arrangement has already been discussed," Robert said. "Your name is still on the family trust, which makes the match appropriate. You'll attend the Sterling reception on Friday."

Margaret made a small sound.

Not a word. Something between surprise and the start of an objection, cut off in the space where she decided—again—to stay seated.

I caught Isabella's reflection in the glass of the bookcase behind Robert's chair. She was watching me, waiting for a reaction, her eyes red and bright. The timing, the placement, the tears dried to just the right degree. She'd done this well.

I picked up my violin case.

"Friday," I said.

It wasn't agreement. It was acknowledgment. The only currency I had left in this room.

I went upstairs. I didn't hurry.

That night I lay on my bed with the lights off and the curtains open. The grounds of Rosewood stretched out below—the rose garden, the carriage house, the long drive I used to run every summer until I was fourteen.

I pressed my thumb into the callus on my index finger and held it there.

The watch had been in my case. I hadn't put it there. Only one of those facts mattered to anyone in this house.

They'd raised me. They'd loved me once, in whatever way they were capable of. And when Isabella came home, they'd handed me to a man everyone feared to settle a debt I didn't know I owed.

I pressed harder into the callus. The pain was something I could name.

Victor Sterling.

I already knew enough. I didn't need to look him up again to know what kind of man got discussed in that tone, in that room, by Robert Fitzgerald.

Friday was three days away.

Three days to finish the Mendelssohn, to get through rehearsal without Alexander asking questions I couldn't answer, to figure out what you're supposed to wear when you meet the man you're being sold to.

I picked up my phone. For a second I thought about calling Rachel. But what would I even say?

I opened the score photograph instead—Sebastian's handwriting still visible in the margins, breathe as one, let the phrase carry itself.

I read until my eyes burned and the notes started to make sense again.

Then I set the phone down and stared at the ceiling.

Friday.