The Maestro She Betrayed

Chapter eight: The One Who Got Out

Nathaniel found out the recital had happened without him from a nurse changing his dressing, who mentioned the date in passing the way people mention dates that don't mean anything to them personally. He did the math without meaning to. Halcyon Hall had gone on that night, exactly as scheduled. Someone else had walked out under those lights and played something. The program with his name still printed on it existed now only as a piece of paper somewhere, already out of date, already replaced.

He wondered, distantly, who had played his piece, and immediately decided he didn't actually want to know. Some losses were better left unspecific.

He thought about the eleven days he'd spent counting toward that stage, the particular ache of having wanted something so badly and so specifically. The wanting hadn't actually gone anywhere, he realized. It had just lost anywhere to go.

Vivienne hadn't told him. She'd left after dinner the evening before, distracted in a way he'd stopped bothering to ask about, and hadn't said where she was going or when she planned to be back. He didn't know if she even remembered what night it had been. He hadn't asked. There didn't seem to be much point.

He was alone with the loss of it in the particular quiet the room got after visiting hours ended, the hallway lights dimmed, the machines down the corridor beeping at their own private intervals. He turned his hands over on top of the blanket, slowly, the way you'd turn over something you weren't sure still belonged to you. In a way, he supposed, they didn't. Not anymore. Not for what they used to be capable of.

That was when he heard a voice in the hallway, calm and absolutely certain of itself, informing someone at the nurses' station that she would in fact be seeing Nathaniel Marlow tonight, and that they were welcome to call security if they thought that was going to change anything about the outcome. A moment later she was in the doorway.

Greer Donovan. He hadn't seen her in eleven years.

She looked, if anything, more herself than he remembered, as if the years in between had sanded away whatever uncertainty she used to carry at the edges. She'd cut her hair shorter. She stood like someone who expected doors to open before she reached them, which, he was quickly realizing, they generally did.

She told him, without much preamble, that she'd found out about the attack four days ago and had spent every one of those days fighting Vivienne's assistant for something as simple as a room number. Tonight, she said, she'd stopped asking. She didn't apologize for whatever scene she'd made getting past the desk. He got the sense apologizing for that kind of thing wasn't something she did anymore, if it ever had been. There was a version of Greer he remembered who might have hesitated at a nurses' station, who might have waited to be invited in. That version of her, he understood now, had not survived whatever the last eleven years had asked of her.

She didn't perform sympathy the way most visitors had. She didn't ask how he was feeling, or tell him how sorry she was, or hover near the door working up the nerve to look at him properly. She pulled a chair up beside the bed, sat down, and simply looked at him, taking in all of it at once, the wrapped hands, the hollows under his eyes, without flinching and without pretending not to notice.

Then she reminded him of the only thing that had ever really mattered between them.

They'd been seventeen. There had been exactly one scholarship on offer that year, the kind that changed which life a person got to have afterward, and only one of them could take it. Nathaniel had given it to her. He hadn't explained why at the time. He hadn't explained it for years afterward, not until it no longer mattered to either of them the way it once had. At seventeen, giving it away had felt, to him, like the only decent thing available. He'd never regretted it, exactly, though there had been years, plenty of them, when regret would have been an easier thing to carry than watching someone else's life open up on the strength of a door he'd closed for himself.

He had spent the following decade rebuilding himself from essentially nothing, one lesson and one competition and one favor at a time. Greer had taken what he'd handed her and built something formidable out of it. She was the kind of person now who had three attorneys and a private investigator on retainer, the kind who talked her way past nurses' stations without ever raising her voice. He didn't know all of what had happened in between, the eleven years he'd missed, but he could see the shape of it well enough sitting across from him now. It suited her, whatever it was. He found he wasn't surprised by that, only by how long it had taken someone to actually walk into this room and refuse to be turned away.

She wasn't here to be thanked for any of that, she told him, and she wasn't here to relitigate it either. She was here to collect. Nathaniel almost laughed at that, or would have, if laughing hadn't still pulled at muscles he hadn't realized were sore until he tried.

Whatever you're protecting by staying quiet, she said, let it go. Vivienne isn't going to give you the truth. I will find it. You just have to let me.

There was something underneath the words, something older than four days of fighting an assistant for a room number, that she didn't let him hear in full. Not tonight. Not while he was lying there like this, hands wrapped and useless, in no condition to carry the weight of whatever it actually was.

For now, she just reached over and took his hand, the ruined one, careful of the bandages, and held it like it was still worth something to hold.

It was.