The Maestro She Betrayed

Chapter ten: The Name On The Invoice

The musicians' union medical board convened eleven days after the attack. Nathaniel noted the number the moment someone said the date out loud. The same eleven days that used to count down to something else entirely. Counting down had started to mean something different now.

He'd been told to arrive early, and had spent forty minutes in a waiting room with two other people he assumed were there for entirely different reasons, neither of whom made eye contact with him or with each other. He wondered if that was a rule somewhere, an unspoken etiquette for waiting rooms built around bad news, or simply what happened naturally to people bracing for their own version of this particular morning.

The hearing room was small and beige, built for exactly this kind of meeting and nothing else. There was a water pitcher on the table nobody touched, and a clock on the wall that ran a few minutes fast, the kind of detail Nathaniel found himself fixating on because it was easier than fixating on anything else in the room. Five people sat behind a long table, none of whom Nathaniel had met before and none of whom he expected to meet again. They used language clearly built for the purpose in front of them. Permanent. Non-recoverable. Does not meet functional threshold. He listened to them read it off prepared statements. Their tone was flat and practiced, the tone of people who had done this many times already and would do it many more times, to other musicians, in other rooms very much like this one. Nathaniel wondered, distantly, how many of those other musicians had sat in this exact chair, heard this exact language, and felt the specific vertigo of watching a career get filed away like a completed form. He thought about asking, and didn't. It seemed like exactly the kind of question that would only earn him a kind, useless answer.

He signed where a woman at the end of the table indicated, in three places. Someone had to hand him the pen. His own hand still wasn't steady enough to dig one out of his jacket pocket on its own. Nobody in the room remarked on that. He supposed they'd watched worse hands sign worse verdicts than this one.

Afterward, alone in the hallway, he sat down on a bench outside the room. He rested his hands on his knees, the way he used to rest them on the keys in the seconds before a piece began. For one second, involuntary and completely unbidden, his fingers moved. They found the opening bars of the recital program, the piece he'd spent eleven days learning to reach, and landed on nothing. Found nothing. There was nothing there to land on anymore. Muscle memory had simply outlived the ability by exactly that much. Close enough to feel the shape of what used to exist, and not one measure further. He didn't move his hand again after that. He wasn't sure he could survive doing it twice.

It was, he realized, the most honest grief he had allowed himself since the garage. Not the shock of that first night, and not the slow, grinding anger of the days since. Not the particular numbness of trying to hold a marriage and a mystery and a body together, all at the same time. Just grief, plain and complete, for a version of his hands that no longer existed anywhere, except in that one involuntary motion.

He sat with it longer than he meant to. Nobody came to hurry him along. The building went on around him regardless, phones ringing somewhere down the hall, a cart rattling past with one wheel slightly out of true, indifferent to whatever had just been decided about him in that small beige room.

He didn't tell Vivienne what the board had decided. He didn't call her at all. It was Greer waiting for him in the hallway when he was finally ready to leave, exactly where she'd said she'd be. It was Greer who walked him out of the building and into the parking lot afterward.

In the car, before she started the engine, she handed him a single sheet of paper. She didn't say anything while he read it, just watched him the way she'd watched him in the conference room, waiting to see what would land and what wouldn't.

It was the last thing Bellamy's team had dug up that morning, she told him. The full, itemized invoice from Renwick's security contractor, every line on it accounted for except one.

A consulting f*e, paid out the same week as the attack, to a name that appeared nowhere else in any of it. Not in Renwick's records. Not in Vivienne's. Not anywhere in Felix's file either, which Bellamy had apparently checked as a matter of thoroughness rather than expectation. It was, Greer said, the kind of detail most investigators wouldn't have bothered chasing this early. Bellamy had chased it anyway, out of habit more than instinct, and come back with a single unexplained line that refused to connect to anything they already had.

Fenn.

Nathaniel read it twice. Greer read it over his shoulder a third time, as if a third look might change what was actually printed there. Neither of them recognized it.

Nathaniel asked if Bellamy had any theories at all. Greer said he had exactly one, and that it wasn't worth repeating until there was something underneath it besides a hunch. She didn't tell him what the hunch was. He didn't push.

Greer folded the invoice back along its original crease, set it on the console between them, and started the engine anyway. There would be time to find out who O. Fenn was. There was, as of today, nothing left on Nathaniel's calendar to interrupt it.

Whatever came next, Nathaniel thought, watching the hospital shrink in the side mirror as they pulled away. It was finally going to happen on his terms.