Chapter 9
CHAPTER NINE
T he grand clock on the wall chimed with five minutes to nine that night, and the ballroom was a shell of the event it’d been earlier, a blank canvas for the next party. There were two bags of trash gathered and sitting at the doorway, waiting to be taken to the dumpster, but otherwise, I was finished. Finally .
I was the last one standing from the tear-down, mostly because when only collecting the trash was left, Mrs. Pine had declared, “ Lovisa can handle it .”
All by myself. It was retaliation. I knew Mrs. Pine didn’t like me, but she was being too obvious about it now.
She was probably the one who complained to Mr. Roberts about my mingling . Whatever.
I rolled my head to one side, and then the other. I’d told Caroline I’d be done at nine, so she was most likely already coming to find me. In my head, I repeated over and over what I would say, practicing my tone. I’m not mad that you didn’t tell me about Grant. I just felt a little left out. With Caroline, it was all about assurances, not accusations.
While I coached myself, my gaze drifted toward the black piano in the corner of the room. Aaron’s music, though long gone, still hummed underneath my skin, each note tickling like a ghost touch. It’d pervaded my thoughts while I’d cleaned, its loop causing time to slip by unnoticed.
I bit the corner of my lip, and though I knew nothing about the piano, my feet carried me forward.
Lifting the lid, I exposed the white keys to the chandelier light, their ivory surface begging to be touched. I pressed down on one, listening to the note as it filled the air. And then I pressed another, and then another, until there —the first note in the swell, after the breath. Just one of the keys in the chord—and Aaron had used almost every finger when he’d played it. I hummed it again to find the next key. It reverberated through the air and up my arm, almost like a shot of electricity.
It was nothing like sliding my bow across the cello strings, of course. Only a cruel tease. Close, but not quite enough. I still closed my eyes anyway, pressing down on the key again, the melody finishing in my head.
“You play by ear?”
A soft gasp ripped from me, and my eyes flew open as I whirled around. It wasn’t Caroline, whom I’d been expecting, but Aaron. He stood in the doorway of the event hall, hands in his pockets, watching me.
For some reason, I jerked my hand off the piano. “No.”
“You picked those notes out.” Aaron almost sounded accusatory. He wasn’t looking at me, but at the piano. “You hummed to find them. I heard you.”
Definitely accusatory.
“You play by ear,” he repeated, striding over to where I stood, “but you quit ?”
I studied his expression. “Why does that make you angry?”
“Because you’re good . And you just gave it up.” He leaned down to lay his right hand on the keys. In the same flowing succession as he had earlier, his four fingers coaxed out the melody I’d meagerly attempted a moment ago. “You heard it once and replicated it.”
“I know Rachmaninoff,” I told him, almost irritated. “It wasn’t my first time hearing that concerto.”
“But have you ever played it on the piano before?”
No, I had not. I bit down on the inside of my cheek. “What are you doing back down here?”
“I wanted to play again. Annalise said it would be okay.” He spoke while focusing on the piano’s glossy surface. “You’re still working?”
“I’m almost done. I’m waiting for Caroline.”
Aaron made a noise in his throat and pulled the piano stool back, rolling up his shirt sleeves to expose his tanned forearms. I hated that I even paused to watch him and his stupid bare skin. I hated that I anticipated his fingers once more returning to those keys, getting the chance to listen to what sound they’d make this time.
“Sit,” he said.
“Me? Why?”
“Because if I was forced to play tonight, so shall you be.”
“Forced.” I almost scoffed. “You wanted to play. I saw you.”
There’d been no mistaking that longing look he’d cast the piano’s way earlier. And even now, hours after the party, here he was, gravitating toward the music yet again.
“Sit so we can pass the time while you wait for Caroline, then.” I opened my mouth to object when Aaron followed up with, “Goodness, my dear, stop fighting me on every little thing, and just sit down.”
For a beat, I stared into his dark eyes, waiting for who would blink first. Aaron didn’t. His gaze was steady, unyielding, challenging.
Begrudgingly, I eased down on the bench. “I don’t play music,” I told him.
“No, you don’t play the cello .” Aaron moved to stand behind me. “I know; you told me you aren’t a cellist. Today, though, you will be a pianist .”
I quirked my lips to the side. A pianist . I waited for him to sit beside me.
Except he didn’t. “Do you know the keys on the piano? A, B, C?—”
“Nope.”
Aaron let out a little breath through his nose, something that sounded suspiciously like a laugh. His presence tickled the back of my neck; close, but not too close.
Until, without warning or hesitation, Aaron slipped his arms around me.
Using his left hand, he picked up my right wrist and laid it across the back of his own, so that my hand perfectly covered his right. I almost jerked away, and would’ve if he hadn’t tightened his grip on my arm.
“Trust me,” he murmured, and his voice was directly in my right ear, a murmur of breath that caused me to hold mine. He released my hand to lay both of his on the keys, fanning out each individual finger as wide as he could. My left hand rested in my lap, but my other almost trembled where it sat atop his. “You liked the crescendo, right?”
I cleared my throat, beginning to grow way too warm. “Yeah.”
Aaron shifted forward even further, his chest brushing against my spine. Before I had the chance to pull away, to tell him never mind , to shake off the weirdness of the entire situation, he began to play.
As before, Aaron didn’t have to move his right hand dramatically to elicit the strong notes. Watching him play from afar earlier had been a terrible injustice to watching the movements now, up close. His left hand did the work, tracing its way up and down the keys as if riding a wave of music. The tendons underneath his skin flexed with each measure, my own fingers journeying with his right. Feeling him physically making the music caused something to stir and swell in my chest, and it was only then that I became aware of my frantic pulse in my throat.
Who said anything about hearts fluttering? My words to Caroline had been a cruel foreshadowing.
The strength and quickness of the crescendo began to slow into a calmer finishing of the second movement. For a few measures, only his left hand touched the notes, until he spread his right fingers as wide as they could, to hold the final keys.
When the piano fell silent, he let out a small breath that slipped along the skin of my throat. “It sounded a bit off without the pedal,” Aaron said, still poised over the keys. “Less impactful. It would’ve been stronger with it.”
“I thought it sounded good,” I murmured, but my voice wasn’t as steady as I meant for it to be. I fought the urge to lean into him. “That’s the perfectionist in you speaking.”
“Indeed. It comes out frequently in your presence.” Aaron chuckled, the velvet sound almost as soft as his skin. “Shall we go again?”
Hesitantly, I nodded.
Aaron started the crescendo of the second movement over from the beginning, and this time I allowed my own fingertips to press firmer against his. My palm became more of a weight on his hand, and he held it steady, not dipping under the pressure. His chin brushed the top of my shoulder, a tickling touch.
And, admittedly, goosebumps began prickling up my arms.
I could’ve shut my eyes again as we played. I was an imposter, riding the coattails as Aaron led the way, but it was still the first time in five years I made music. It wasn’t the cello, and it wasn’t nearly enough, but my soul drank it up, desperate and dehydrated.
And it felt so… intimate.
The movement ended with the same finality as it held before, leaving the two of us in the quiet ballroom, our hands still connected. “You have good hands for piano,” Aaron said after a moment. “I don’t. I, ah—I have small hands.”
I hadn’t noticed until that moment that his hand underneath mine was ever so slightly smaller—fingers slender, but if we were to align the base of our palms, mine would be longer. “If it’s any consolation, I do have big hands for someone so short. And chubby fingers.”
“They’re perfect.”
I swallowed, locking down on the swell in my chest.
Aaron slid his hand out from underneath mine and came around the piano bench, settling in beside me. He was careful to keep an inch between us, to not allow our shoulders to brush. “Want to try on your own?”
I teetered on the edge of saying yes, but it was too much—that was a line I could not cross. Feeling him play had been an indulgence, and that was enough. It needed to be, or else there’d be no locking away the desire. So, instead of nodding, I said, “It seemed like it went well with Fiona today.”
Aaron blinked at the sudden subject change. “Did it?”
“Did it not?”
“Sometimes I can’t tell,” he admitted. He began playing a low, quiet melody with his left hand, allowing his right to rest on his knee. “Annalise says it’s because I’m bad at reading social cues. I knew Fiona seemed happy, but I can’t tell if it’s genuine. Around people like this, around here… it’s harder for me to tell when someone means something and when they don’t.”
I looked at his profile. Despite not touching, we were close enough on the bench that he filled my view, his smooth skin showing no signs of a lie. “You do a good job hiding it.”
“I’ve had twenty-five years to learn.” Aaron turned his head toward me, the dark brown depth of his eyes bright. “I… say things a lot that come out wrong. Too harsh, or too rude. I’ll try to make a joke, but it sounds like I’m being serious. It happened a lot with Margot. And I think it’s happened a lot with you.”
My voice was dubious. “You’re saying it was a misunderstanding, asking Margot to marry you to inherit her company?”
“I thought she and I had been on the same page with that.” Aaron sighed a little. “It was a misunderstanding, though, when I told her that people like us aren’t made for love.”
“You said that to her? Sheesh, no wonder she got upset.” If anyone had ever said that to me… “Wait, you don’t think you’re made for love?”
“I didn’t mean it as an insult. I was trying to be comforting. I just… I thought she was like me, but she wasn’t.”
I frowned. “Like you?”
Aaron looked away. “Like me.”
He didn’t elaborate. Silence stretched between us, but after a moment, I realized it was only me who thought it was awkward—Aaron seemed quite comfortable tracing the outline of the keys. “Would you have married Margot if she hadn’t fallen in love with someone else?”
“Yes.”
“Even though she didn’t want to marry you?”
Aaron didn’t hesitate. “I still would’ve.”
I turned back to the keys, pressing my lips together. I didn’t really know what I’d been expecting—a glimmer of remorse? But it proved what Annalise had said earlier wrong. He’d known Margot didn’t want to marry him, and yet he hadn’t cared.
“How much did you hear?” he asked after a beat, awkwardness filling his tone. “The night of… Annalise’s wedding?”
It took a second for his meaning to click. He meant that night with his parents outside, hidden in between the rosebushes. I’d gone outside to find the Masseys, to tell them what Margot had done, but accidentally stumbled upon Aaron with his parents instead. Aaron kneeling in front of his parents. Begging them.
Please. I’ll do better. I promise.
You’ve done this to yourself.
The echo of Aaron’s desperation in my ear, paired with the uncomfortable tone he had on now, was a weird juxtaposition. “Not a lot,” I said. “I didn’t stay long.”
Aaron nodded slowly, absorbing my words. “I disappointed them. I won’t do it again.”
“Aren’t you doing exactly what upset them last time?”
He shook his head. “I know how to do it right this time. I’ll genuinely win Fiona over. I’ll make it real.”
“You mean fake it better?”
“No,” he said, sharper now. “That was my problem last time—I was trying to take the easy way out. And involving my parents, trying to build a partnership within the businesses… I let them get too close to my plan. This time is different. I’ll win Fiona over. For real. I’ll impress her parents. My parents will see that I’m not some reckless screwup—they’ll see I belong again.”
The fervor to his voice had me hesitating, the intensity coming all of a sudden. “But you’ll still be lying.”
He looked away. “I’ll dedicate my life to her. I won’t let it be a lie.”
“You have three weeks left until your birthday to propose to her,” I reminded him, brow furrowing. Did he not feel the pressure? “Until… the house’s auction.”
Aaron paused, glancing over. “Are you worried someone will buy the house before then?”
“No.” And that was honest enough. It’d been on the market for over a decade—if it hadn’t sold at that price, no one would be crazy enough to buy it in full before it would go to auction. In fact, the idea that I was still a few weeks out from owning it was oddly comforting. “It’s just not a lot of time to propose to someone and get married. Fiona doesn’t seem like the type who’d want to elope.”
“People will do a lot of things if the right someone asks.”
The idea made me squirm on the bench seat. “So, you’re waiting until she’s softened enough to say yes to anything?”
“Lovisa—”
“You’re trying to win her over enough that she’ll blindly go along with anything you ask for? Right?”
“I’m doing what I have to do.” Aaron spoke in a flat voice. “Besides, she’s equally as eager to get married. Her parents gave her their own ultimatum, if you didn’t know. Either to marry or be kicked out. So if this works, everyone gets what they want—including you. Before you judge me for it, remember that you’re benefitting from this arrangement as well.”
I turned back to the piano, fingers curling into fists in my lap. Likeable and unlikeable. Like going from a major to a minor key—jarring. He bounced too frequently in between. He wasn’t wrong, though. And that irked me even more.
A beat passed. Then, cautiously: “You mentioned it was your mother’s dream home.” His voice was softer now, but unsure—like he didn’t know if he had permission to ask. “How expensive of a house are we talking?”
I looked over to find his alarmed expression, a crumpled brow accompanied by wide eyes. “It’s nothing grand,” I said, sharper than I meant to. “Just sentimental.” I exhaled, trying again. “My mother… she always dreamed of living there.”
“You want to realize her dream for her?”
I nodded. “I’ve been working my butt off for the last five years to save up, and then they announced the auction.” The next part tasted bitter, but I bit them out. “Without you stepping in, it would’ve been for nothing.”
Aaron’s fingers faltered as he stretched for the next notes, hesitating. “That’s why you gave up the cello?” he asked. “To pursue your mother’s dream instead of your own?”
“You sound like you disapprove.”
He turned on the bench to face me. “In June, you said you were at some metaphorical bridge thinking of jumping. You said it was to buy the house or to pick up the cello again. You want to play. You want to go back to it. You?—”
“My mom gave up her life for me.” My words were sharp, silencing whatever protest he had been ready to launch next. “She was a young, single mom with no family to help her out, and she gave me everything. Once I went to college, she was going to start living for herself again. But then she—” The one word nearly caused me to stop entirely, “— died .”
I didn’t talk about my mom often. She got pregnant with me from a one-night stand at nineteen, moved to Addison from her small, judgmental Rhode Island hometown. When she was my age now, her life had been a rocky boat of unknowns, and she’d been all alone. Her life had become dedicated to a little girl who needed to be driven to practices, cheered for at recitals.
We’d been two partners in crime, but while I’d lived for myself during my teenage years, she’d lived for me . Any dream she’d had from when she was young had been put on pause, like a song waiting for its next note—a note that never came.
I swallowed hard, trying to stifle the emotion that pricked at my eyes and squeezed at my throat. “Besides, the cello isn’t something you can easily just pick back up . My calluses are gone. My friends in the industry have moved on. My opportunities went to others. But it’s okay, because I already experienced by dream. Now, the least I can do is realize hers.”
“Why can’t you play now anyway?” he asked. “Just for fun?”
I pressed my lips together. “Because.” It’ll open a door that I’m afraid I won’t be able to close .
A part of me thought Aaron would push back, that the music lover in him would insist I still follow my own path. I waited for it. He drew in a breath, and as he did, our shoulders finally brushed. It was a whisper of contact, but the connection reminded me so much of that night in June. We hadn’t even touched then, but it was his presence itself that lent this feeling. Finally , someone was in my bubble with me.
“My grandmother’s biggest dream was to see me married,” Aaron murmured, and with his right hand, he stretched it in front of me and began playing the concerto again, but this time slower. It was a fraction of a difference in tempo, but it transformed the tune from romantic into something almost haunting. “I was her golden boy. She was too busy when my siblings were younger, but she stepped down from Astro Agencies by the time I was born. When I wasn’t away at school, I was staying with her. I spent more nights at her house than my own, growing up.” He blinked a few times. “She was my best friend.”
“You’re not trying to say you have other motives than getting married for the inheritance money?” I sounded skeptical. “Right?”
“I’m saying that I know what it’s like, wanting to fulfill the dream of someone you care about.”
In all this, I’d forgotten that an inheritance didn’t just fall into his lap. Someone had to die in order for him to get it—someone close to him. I remembered how his voice had thickened that night in June as he’d spoken about his grandmother, saying she was growing sicker. I didn’t know how soon she passed after that, but it couldn’t have been that long.
Another thing we had in common, losing someone we loved. And, judging by the equally haunting notes in his voice, it was something that bothered him greatly.
When Aaron got to the crescendo, I inexplicably laid my hand over his just as I had before. It was almost as if my hand was magnetized to his, like the piece called to me. Somewhere along the progression, the tempo picked up to the normal speed of the composition, and Aaron carried us to the last notes.
And then we lapsed into silence again, both of us hesitating to pull away. I stared at our hands. If I shifted, my fingers would fall from laying perfectly over his to threading through them. The air still felt thick with something somber, and I thought about it. I really thought about it. His shoulder brushed mine again, this time with more pressure, stirring my thoughts further. Take your hand away , I told myself, but it was lost in the idea of what would it be like if I moved my fingers?
Aaron’s voice was just above a whisper. “I don’t think Caroline is coming.”
He could’ve slammed his hand down on the keys and it might’ve startled me less. I wrenched my hand back, severing the connection, and turned toward the grand clock. Ten after nine. I fished my phone from my pocket, but there were no messages from her. She’d forgotten.
“Were you going to talk about her brother? Grant?” Aaron hesitated, as if waiting for me to immediately shut the subject change down. “You never react well to his name.”
“Anyone ever tell you that you pay too much attention to people?”
“Is that your way of telling me to mind my business?”
“No,” I said quickly, because that hadn’t been what I meant. “But you know why I don’t react well. Fiona told you. He’s my ex.” Surely he hadn’t forgotten.
“And Caroline’s brother.”
“Yeah.”
Aaron nodded slowly, fingers inching their way up the piano in an ascending melody. “How long were you two together?”
“Four years.”
He glanced at me in surprise. “Why did you break up?”
He cheated on me . The words were on the tip of my tongue, begging to be released if only to soak up Aaron’s response to it. But then again, would he be that horrified? Would he see anything wrong with it? Or was he one of those guys that raised an eyebrow and asked so? “He was at college for most of our relationship. We were a long-distance couple. We just weren’t the right fit.”
“So it wasn’t love, then?”
My answer was almost impulsive. “It was.”
“But you broke up.”
“You don’t have to be together forever in order to love someone.” My voice was quiet as I regarded him. He had a freckle just underneath the angle of his jaw, near his earlobe. “It doesn’t have to be some grand, epic thing. You put too many restrictions on the word, I think.”
“Maybe,” he allowed. “Does Caroline know how much talking about her brother bothers you?”
“Caroline is a very driven person. When she gets it in her head what she wants, she misses other things.”
Aaron threaded his fingers back down the keys, toward lower notes that reverberated in my chest. As he moved, his shoulder brushed mine again. I wondered if he noticed. “So, because she’s so focused on what she wants, it’s okay if she doesn’t consider that she might be hurting your feelings?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“I, of all people, know how easy it is to get stuck in the rut of only looking at what you want and not at how it affects those around you.”
“It’s not like I can just ask her to stop talking about her brother.”
Aaron didn’t respond to that, but picked up the pace of the composition he played. I watched his fingers fan out across the white and black keys, watched the way his leg moved as he pressed down on the foot pedals to polish out the note. Even with a quicker tempo, the song itself was still soothing, an upbeat tune that I wanted to close my eyes and listen to.
“I didn’t know he was coming home,” I found myself saying, the words tumbling out before I could catch them. “When Fiona brought it up at brunch, I didn’t know… before that. I didn’t know he was coming home, and I didn’t know he was bringing his girlfriend.”
“How long have they been dating?”
This time, I tested the waters. “It’ll be a year in June, I think.”
Aaron’s finger hit a note too hard—it was loud and wrong, causing the song to slam to a halt. He stopped playing altogether and then turned toward me. There was not a trace of emotion on his face, but it was his body language that gave him away, and the way it held him stiff.
“At least, that’s what I heard. I heard they met in June.” I shifted on the bench. “I found out in September, when I flew to surprise him for his birthday. One of his roommates opened the door, and I could see the two of them on the couch. Kissing.”
Even now, that memory was so surreal that I almost wasn’t sure it’d happened. My boyfriend of four years with a beautiful girl draped over him, their lips pressed together as they were oblivious to the entire world around them. Oblivious to the girl and her suitcase who’d arrived at her destination after a flight that’d gotten delayed three times because of fog.
I’d taken a huge chunk from my savings for the plane ticket, took a full week of vacation time, eager to surprise him, only to have it all around me shatter like glass.
Aaron still watched me. “What did he say?”
“Nothing. I left, blocked him on everything, and that was it.”
“He didn’t come home to talk to you?” Aaron’s voice grew progressively more aggravated. “He knows where you are. You were together for four years, and he just left things like that?”
“He probably thought it was a gift from heaven. Just the clean break he’d been hoping for.”
Aaron’s fingers fluttered against the keys but didn’t press down hard enough to elicit a sound. I watched the agitated movement, since it was the only clear outward sign of any emotion. “I don’t understand love,” he announced, something almost like disgust in his tone. “You can be with someone for four years, rip their heart out, and still call it love? If that’s what love is, I don’t want it.”
I opened my mouth, but hesitated. Aaron was right, in a way. That wasn’t love. Toward the end, it hadn’t been love. It’d been sparse texts, quiet nights, phone calls that came few and far between. Grant hadn’t even called me on my mother’s anniversary. But it hadn’t always been that way. We’d dated for four years; it’d been love at some point… right?
I couldn’t remember the first time we’d said I love you . When we started dating, Grant had felt like something solid I could hold onto while everything else was falling apart. I’d clung to him like a raft. It hadn’t started out as love—it had started as relief. A reprieve from the noise of grief and loneliness.
Grant had never made me feel too much, never stirred anything wild or consuming inside me. I’d always thought it’d been because after my mother died, that part of me that burned had been snuffed out. I’d lost the ability to feel anything too intensely. And after a year of being together, and he left for college, I’d been okay. Being with him in person and texting him every night had given me the same quiet calm.
Peace, stillness, safety.
But… had I loved him?
“Even if my story confuses you about love,” I began, trying to shake away the building unease, “it doesn’t really matter.” Since Aaron stopped playing, I lifted my hand to the keys and began the crescendo, remembering how his fingers had moved underneath mine. “It’s not like you want to fall in love, anyway.” And then, when I got to the next part I couldn’t remember, I just dropped my hand back into my lap.
Aaron said nothing. For a moment, we sat in silence side by side on the bench. We were back in likeable territory, and it was comfortable. Something about the moment felt strangely vulnerable, like we both laid a little more out to bare. I didn’t worry about what he thought about, or if he judged me. It was like that night back in June—we were just two people who understood.
“I like listening to you speak,” Aaron murmured. “I feel like I understand you a bit more now.”
“What do you mean?”
“Why you move through this world as you do.” Before I had a chance to ask him what he meant by that, he went on. “Why you’re so invested in the house. The connection you have with it. Why you gave up playing the cello—for your mother.”
The way he phrased it sounded wrong. “I didn’t give up the cello for her.”
“No one ever said you couldn’t do both. You could’ve still played in your free time, as a hobby or for side gigs, while working to afford your mother’s dream. But you didn’t. You gave it up entirely, because you were afraid you’d realize it wouldn’t be enough.”
I sat up straighter, skin prickling. “That’s not true?—”
“You were afraid your dreams would distract you from your mother’s.” Aaron tilted his head down at me. “But there’s a reason they are your dreams, Lovisa.”
I sucked in a quick breath, because just like that, we’d begun tipping back toward unlikeable territory. “You’re wrong.”
“Your friends didn’t even know you played the cello.”
“I—I stopped playing before I met them.”
“And what? They never asked you what you did growing up? Never asked if you had any hobbies? Or did you just lie?”
His words burned through me, igniting something raw and defensive in my chest. I wanted to throw accusations back at him; to tell him he had no idea what he was talking about, but Aaron Astor had an infuriating knack for being right. Caroline and Grant and even Annalise hadn’t ever pried deeper into my past. I told them I grew up in Addison, told them my mother died, and that was all they’d needed to befriend me.
“Either way, Lovisa, you don’t feel comfortable being yourself,” he went on, still in the same neutral vein. “That’s why you call yourself the help and make yourself smaller. You never talk about yourself, never speak up, never do what you want. It’s no wonder you asked me back in June if I ever resented my life—because you resent yours.”
Pressure had been building behind my ribs, like a bowstring winding too tight, and at Aaron’s last words, it snapped. A cold shock flooded my chest, followed by an almost overwhelming sense of relief. Like admitting a long-held secret—humiliating and freeing all at once. And though I hadn’t spoken it, the truth hummed through me, coming to light.
That relief only lasted a second, though, quickly replaced by an all-consuming, red-hot anger.
I jerked my legs around the piano bench, slamming one hand on the keys. The notes screamed, and the sound rattled in my bones. “ You understand me ?” My voice was raw, unsteady. I pushed to my feet, clenching my hands into fists so tight that my nails bit into my skin. “How could someone like you understand someone like me in the slightest ?”
Aaron’s shoulders dropped. “I didn’t say it to make you angry?—”
“Then what? To point out just how pitiable my life is?” The words scraped out of me, raw in my throat. “I’ve been busting my back for the last five years to buy a house to honor my dead mother, and what are you doing? Tricking a stranger into marrying you so you won’t be broke—and don’t pretend you’re doing this for your grandmother,” I added with a scoff. “You’re doing this for you . For the five million in your pocket. It’s none of your business if I resent my life or not, and even if I did—” I gasped in a breath. “Even if I did, at least I’m not a fraud.”
A soft exhale escaped Aaron at the impact of my words, as if they’d crashed into him. His jaw clenched, but his eyes—vulnerable and wide—betrayed him. He didn’t hide the hurt; it was there in every inch of his expression, too real to mask, too sharp to ignore.
What I said seemed to echo in the air, far, far uglier than the music we’d made. For a moment, neither of us moved or spoke. With the burst of fire now gone, something cold began creeping in, my heart twisting with something I couldn’t name. I wanted, more than anything, to go back to five minutes ago—back to that euphoric feeling that’d come from his hand playing the piano underneath my own.
But I couldn’t go back. The thick silence stretched between us, until I could no longer bear it. I spun on my heel and stormed out of the room, anger and regret a chaotic symphony reverberating in my chest. Aaron didn’t follow, nor did the sound of the piano. There was nothing but the loud snap of my shoes against the marble floors, the rustle of the trash bags when I snatched them up, and the roar of my pulse in my ears.
As I walked away from the ballroom, I repeated the same sentiment over and over in my head. Aaron Astor didn’t know me.
And I had to stop imagining what it’d be like if he did.