Chapter 6 Homewrecker

Dinner was pleasant for everyone except Eleanor.

Regina talked about Paris, the galleries, the collectors who had competed for her last canvas, and Victoria supplied whatever she modestly left out. Emma hung on every word. Nobody asked Eleanor anything.

She kept her eyes on her plate. The food was Mrs. Henderson's best, and it tasted like wax.

Halfway through the meal Asher glanced at her, then glanced again. He picked up a slice of the rosemary lamb with the serving fork and turned toward her plate.

Before it got there, Regina held out her own plate and caught it.

"You haven't changed at all," she said, smiling at him. "You still remember this is my favorite."

"Daddy is so nice to Mommy!" Emma said.

Asher's hand stayed where it was for a second. Then he set the serving fork back on the platter and said nothing.

Eleanor looked at the empty place on her plate. The room had gone airless, and she could not have said when. She folded her napkin and set it down. "I'm full. Enjoy your dinner." She pushed back her chair and went upstairs, and nobody called her back.

The Sterlings did not leave until almost eleven. Eleanor sat on the edge of the bed in the dark and listened to the laughter drifting up the stairs, Regina's voice, Victoria's, Emma's high and happy, and every so often, low beneath all of it, Asher's.

After the front door finally closed, her phone lit up on the nightstand. [Emma wants me to stay with her tonight. You've had a long day too. Get some rest and don't wait up for me. Good night, sleep well.]

He was a few doors down the hall, and he had texted her.

Eleanor lay back and looked at the ceiling. A few hours ago she had stood in her own living room and called herself the lady of this house, and for the length of one sentence it had felt true. Nobody under this roof had believed it. Not even the man whose name made it so.

In the dark, the tears slid quietly into the hollow of her ear, then down her cheek into the pillow. She didn't wipe them away. She only felt that sourness rise slowly in her chest, too bitter to swallow, too bitter to let go.

The next morning Eleanor picked up her sheet music, got into the car and drove north to her first lesson of the day.

Her student was Leo, seven years old. An accident when he was small had left him with forty percent of the hearing in his left ear. He hadn't come to the piano for an exam certificate. He had told her once that he wanted to find another way to hear the world.

Leo opened the door himself and his whole face lit up. "Ms. Eleanor!"

"Good morning." She ruffled his hair. "Play me what you practiced this week?"

He nodded hard, trotted over to the piano, sat up very straight, put both hands on the keys, took a breath and began.

It was Einaudi's Experience. He played it slowly and his rhythm wobbled in two places, but his concentration was absolute. He closed his eyes and sank into it, as though he were using every scrap of hearing he had left to hold on to each note.

Eleanor sat beside him and didn't interrupt once.

"Leo," she said when he finished. "That was really good."

He opened his eyes. "Really?"

"Really." She pointed at the third bar. "Just ease off the pressure here. Not because it's wrong. The feeling in this part pulls inward. It isn't about getting softer, it's about going deeper."

Leo frowned, thought about it, played it again, and this time his wrist dropped naturally at exactly the right moment.

"There." Eleanor smiled. "Just like that."

He turned around on the bench, his eyes bright. "Ms. Eleanor, were you actually famous? My grandma says you won first place in a national competition once."

Eleanor paused, and then she smiled. "That was a long time ago."

"Why did you stop?"

She looked down at her right hand.

After her parents died she had taken every job anyone would give her, three at a time, to keep Daisy in that hospital bed. One rainy night, while carrying a sideboard up four flights of stairs for a moving company, she tore a ligament in her wrist. After the injury, she locked the letter from Vienna in a drawer along with her dream and never opened either again.

"Sometimes life changes the way you can play," she told Leo gently. "That doesn't mean the music is over. You find another way to make it heard." She touched his shoulder. "One more time. All the way through."

He straightened his back and played it again, and this time he gave even more of himself to it.

When he finished he looked around at her. "Do you actually like this piece, Ms. Eleanor?"

"Very much." She said it simply. "The first time I heard it, I cried."

Leo was quiet for a moment. Then, very seriously: "Then I'll play it for you. Every lesson."

Something complicated moved through Eleanor's chest. He was a year younger than Emma, and he had already learned what the world can take from a person, and had made his peace with it.

Eleanor watched him from the end of the bench, his small back very straight, his eyes shut, every scrap of attention he had going into the keys. She reached over and smoothed down the hair at the back of his head. Such a good boy, she thought, and far more grown up inside than a child his age should have had to be.

At a quarter to eleven she packed up her sheet music, said goodbye to Leo and opened the front door.

And stopped.

Regina was standing on the step in sunglasses and a cream wool coat. She slid the sunglasses off and looked past Eleanor into the house, then back at her. "Well. I always had you pegged as the self-righteous type, Eleanor. But cheating on Asher? I didn't see that one coming."

"Don't invent things." Eleanor looked at her coldly. "This is my job. I teach piano here."

"Your job." Regina gave a small laugh and stepped past her into the house without being asked. Her gaze passed over the worn rug and the old furniture and did not stay on any of it. "If you were going to cheat on Asher, I would have thought you could aim higher than this. But I suppose secondhand goods attract what they attract."

"Don't you talk to my teacher like that!"

Leo had appeared behind Eleanor. He planted himself in front of her with his arms spread wide and glared up at Regina with everything his small body had in it. "You're a horrible person. Get out of my house."

Regina looked down at him for half a second, the way she might look at something she had nearly stepped in. Then she moved him aside with one hand, not gently. "Mind your manners. With that thing on your ear, I'm surprised you heard a word I said."

Leo stumbled. Eleanor caught him, and the anger that went through her was white and total.

"Regina Sterling. He is seven years old. Touch him again, and you will answer to me."

Regina glanced around the house, registered that there was no man anywhere in it, and understood that she had gotten it wrong. There was no embarrassment anywhere on her face.

"Fine. You're not cheating. Congratulations." She straightened her coat. "But I'm doing you a favor here, Eleanor. Look at yourself. Giving lessons to a deaf child in a house like this, with the Grayson name on you. Do the smart thing. Take whatever he's given you and go. You were the homewrecker from the very beginning. You were never going to belong next to him."