My Husband Left Me Twenty Minutes After Our Wedding, and I Returned Fifteen Years Later With the Sons He Never Knew Existed. His Mother Recognized Their Faces, but the Secret Hidden Inside a Grand Piano Terrified Her More.
“Get what?”
“The violin case.”
Elias looked at me before answering.
“It arrived three weeks ago.”
Vivienne’s expression changed.
Only slightly.
But I had survived fifteen years by noticing small things.
And what I saw on her face was not surprise.
It was fear.
Samuel noticed too.
“There wasn’t a return address,” he said. “Just a key and sheet music.”
Elias opened the case.
Beneath his violin was a yellowed page filled with handwritten musical notation.
Grayson stared.
“My father wrote that.”
Vivienne snapped, “Arthur has been dead for eleven years.”
Grayson ignored her.
“I’d know his handwriting anywhere.”
I looked at the page.
The first eight measures were familiar.
My breath caught.
Grayson had written those eight measures on a napkin the night before our wedding.
We had been sitting in a little Italian restaurant in Brooklyn, hiding from his mother and laughing because the waiter kept pretending not to recognize Grayson Vale.
He had tapped the melody against his wineglass.
“Our song,” he had called it.
But there were another twenty measures on the page.
Music I had never seen.
Elias raised his violin.
“Should I?”
Grayson nodded.
The first notes floated through the room.
Soft.
Fragile.
Familiar.
Then the melody changed.
It grew darker.
More complicated.
Grayson closed his eyes.
Vivienne wrapped both hands around the edge of the table.
At the end came three repeated notes.
A pause.
Then the same three notes again.
Grayson’s eyes opened.
He crossed to the piano, knelt, and ran his fingers beneath the keyboard.
Click.
A narrow wooden panel opened.
Inside was a black envelope.
Dust coated the edges.
Grayson removed it slowly.
Written across the front were four words.
**FOR GRAYSON’S LEGAL WIFE.**
Vivienne moved faster than I thought a seventy-year-old woman could.
“Don’t open that.”
Everyone froze.
Grayson stood.
He looked at his mother differently now.
Not angrily.
