Chapter 8 Don't play innocent with me

"Leo," she said quietly. "Give this to your grandmother." She crouched and gathered the fragments carefully into her handkerchief and set the bundle down beside it. "I'll find a restorer. Some of it may be saved."

"Thank you, Ms. Eleanor," Leo said.

After they left, the house went quiet again. Leo stayed on the hallway floor for a while, looking at the empty stand where the vase had been. Then he took a breath, picked up the phone, and called his brother.

In the top floor boardroom of the Montgomery Financial Group's Manhattan headquarters, Damien Montgomery sat at the head of a conference table.

At thirty-two, he possessed the kind of refined handsomeness—sharp jawline, perfectly styled dark hair, and a commanding presence that could silence a room with a single glance.

The Montgomery name carried weight in old money and new. What his great-grandfather had built out of railroads a century ago, Damien had turned into an empire spanning technology, real estate and venture capital, doubling the family fortune in five years.

When his phone buzzed with Leo's call, Damien raised a hand, immediately pausing the international conference. "Gentlemen, we'll resume in ten minutes."

The executives nodded respectfully as he stepped away.

He took the call out in the corridor. "Leo."

Leo was crying before he got three words out. "A woman came here. Regina. She broke Grandma's vase and she pushed me over, and she said Ms. Eleanor was a liar and a fraud. Ms. Eleanor was only trying to protect me. They said terrible things to her. And then a man came and wrote out a check like it was nothing at all."

Damien's expression cooled by degrees. "Leo. Start at the beginning and tell me all of it."

He listened without interrupting once. When it was over, his grip on the phone had tightened. "All right. Go and sit with Grandma and Grandpa. I'll take care of it."

He had investigated Asher Grayson and knew that Eleanor was his wife, while Regina was his former lover.

It was none of his business how Regina dealt with Eleanor, but she shouldn't have messed with Leo.

Damien’s expression darkened, and then he made two phone calls.

By the following afternoon every sponsor attached to Regina Sterling's exhibition had withdrawn, and the venue had cancelled her booking.

Eleanor was at the piano in the living room when the front door banged open without a knock.

Regina came in with her sunglasses in her fist and her eyes fixed on Eleanor.

"Was this you?"

Eleanor didn't stand up. "Was what me?"

"My exhibition is dead." Her voice climbed as she came across the room. "The venue pulled out this morning. Every sponsor dropped me inside two hours. Three years of work, gone overnight. Was that you?"

"No."

"Don't play innocent with me." Regina stopped in front of the piano. "One of my sponsors called me himself and told me to stay away from you. You think I don't know what that means?"

Eleanor stood up. "I came straight home yesterday. I didn't make a single call."

"Liar—"

"Asher!"

The study door opened and Asher came out.

Regina turned on him, her voice raw with fury. "She destroyed my exhibition. Three years, Asher. The venue, every sponsor, all of it overnight."

Asher's eyes moved to Eleanor, and his brow creased.

"Eleanor." Something heavy came into his voice. "You know what that exhibition meant to her. You shouldn't have done this."

Eleanor went completely still.

He believed it. That fast. He hadn't even asked her.

"I didn't—"

"Who else would it be?" Regina cut straight through her. "Yesterday she tried to squeeze thirty million out of me over a broken vase, and today this. It was a vase. A worthless, dusty—"

"Leo is seven years old." Eleanor's voice was cold. "You took the most precious thing his grandmother owned and put your heel through it. You did that. Whatever came afterward, you brought on yourself."

"So you admit it!" Regina's face tightened.

She picked up the vase on the side table and, without another word, threw it at the piano.

"No—"

The word tore out of Eleanor before she could stop it.

The lid came down hard across the keys. Several strings rang at once in a broken chord. The carved wooden trim at the corner split away, bounced once across the floor and came to rest near Eleanor's feet.

She didn't move. She couldn't.

Her mother had given her that piano on her tenth birthday. It had survived three moves and one bankruptcy. When her parents died and everything else in that house was sold or seized, it was one of the only things she carried out with her. Twenty-three years.

She looked at the broken piece of trim on the floor, at the small rose her mother had carved into the wood by hand, split cleanly in two now, lying face down in the dust.

Near the end, her mother had run her palm along the side of this piano and said: play for me one day.

She never had.

Eleanor went down onto her knees among the pieces, and she didn't realize she was crying until a tear hit the back of her hand.

Asher stared at her. Something moved across his face. In eight years of marriage he had almost never seen her cry.

He crossed the room and pulled her up by the hands. A shard caught her palm on the way up and opened a cut across it, and blood welled between her fingers. His grip tightened. His voice came out quieter than before.

"Eleanor. It's a piano. I'll have the best one on the market in this room by tonight."

It's a piano.

She did not answer him or look at him. For the first time, Eleanor understood that an invisible distance had always stood between them: she spoke in grief, and Asher answered in prices.

She crouched beside what was left of the old piano and picked up the splinters one at a time. A shard caught her fingertip and drew blood again. She did not stop.

The piece with her mother's carved rose she set aside in a small box. Its two halves would never fit cleanly together again, any more than the faith cracking inside her.

Eleanor put the box at the back of the corner cabinet and closed the door. Half an hour later, two men carried in a black-lacquer Steinway concert grand worth twenty times what the old piano had cost.

Asher spoke gently, certain he had made everything right. Eleanor looked at the flawless new instrument and felt only the loss of the one thing no amount of money could replace. The distance between them had never felt wider.