Page 59

It’s Mum’s birthday. She would have been fifty today—the big five-oh. It’s a staggering number, and a painful reminder of exactly how much time has passed since I last heard her laugh or saw her hands on the keys. Ten years of her being gone feels like an eternity. Some days it feels like yesterday. Today, it feels like both at once, which is somehow the worst version of all.

I close my eyes, and I can see her so clearly that it aches. She’s smiling at me from the piano bench, her voice light and steady as she sings, while I watch her with wide, mesmerised eyes. She played like music was the most natural thing in the world. Like breathing. I have spent ten years trying to replicate it, and I am still not sure I have come close.

She was, she always will be, my true inspiration.

Every hour of practice, every callous on my fingertips, every late night in an empty practice room when I could have been anywhere else is all for her. I just hope, somewhere out there in the quiet, that she is watching me. That I am making her proud. That I haven’t turned into the calculated machine my father always wanted me to be. That I still carry some of her softness, some of her spirit. Some of the versions of myself that only ever existed when she was in the room.

I open my eyes, and they burn with a particular sadness today.

My fingers find the opening bars without thinking. The simplistic introduction that I have played a thousand times. Roseanna’s Theme.

I don’t just play them. The notes consume me.

Tears track silently down my face, blurring the ivories until there’s nothing left but the sound. Ten years of grief, carefully managed and meticulously hidden, crashing down at once.

It is the loneliness I carry like a second skin, and the love I still feel for a woman who only exists in my memory and my music now.

The final chord rings out, leaving me completely empty.

“Happy Birthday, Mum,” I whisper into the quiet room. The words ring in my throat and dissolve into nothing.

The grief doesn’t leave. It never will. It comes in waves, and something that settles into a constant bitterness that I carry around with me every single day. A stray tear runs down my cheek. I wipe it with the back of my hand before it can reach my jaw, a reflex so practiced by now it barely registers as a conscious thought.

For a long time, I don’t move. I sit in the dim light and listen to the heavy silence of the house. I’ve gotten far too used to sitting on my own in this type of silence over the years. I’ve carried it since I was a kid, long after Mum died, and I overcompensate for it the minute I step out in public. Everyone knows when I walk into a room.

My father will be back home in a few hours. The last thing I need is for him to see any crack in my armour. To him, emotion is a weakness. A liability. Proof that his son is not the controlled, flawless extension of the Thorne brand that he has spent years trying to build.

I swallow the lump in my throat, force my posture back into position, and the coldness back into my veins.

Snap out of it, Julian.

I keep her memory locked away, drawing it out only when I am alone. It’s the only way to keep her safe from this hellhole. From him. If he knew how much I still thought about her, how much I still needed her, it would become another weakness that he could use against me.

I run a hand through my hair and look over at the clock.

With a heavy exhale, I realise I’d better start on this Debussy.

The gala is only a couple of weeks away, and the thought of it makes me feel sick. All of those people in one room, smiling with their practiced, pretentious smiles, sipping expensive champagne. My father will spend the entire evening working the room, schmoozing every useful contact within a ten-foot radius, and I will stand exactly where he puts me and play exactly what he tells me to play.

The Thorne brand. Always the Thorne brand.

The obvious choice is Clair De Lune. Safe. Predictable. The kind of piece that has been played by every moderately talented pianist at every formal event for the past hundred years, until the notes almost feel like autopilot. The audience would sip their champagne and nod politely, feeling cultured without having to feel anything real.

It is exactly what my father wants.

Which is precisely why I won’t be playing it.

La Fille aux cheveux de Lin. The Girl with the Flaxen Hair.

It came to me this morning and it hasn’t left. It is simplistic yet deeply expressive—innocent and sweet, entirely without pretension. It’s everything that this house is not and everything that my father would never in a thousand years understand. There is no power in it. No dominance. No statement. Only pure feeling.

He will think it is a safe choice. He won’t hear what I am actually saying with it because he has never once listened to music properly. He has just given his assessment of it.

I stand up from the piano bench and cross to the music shelves, my fingers trailing over the leather-bound spines until I find the Debussy score. I prop the music up onto the piano stand, the cream-colored pages falling apart at the spine from years of use, and sit back down.

My hands find the opening bars.

They are a golden line of melody, delicate and unhurried. It is supposed to be a musical sketch of a girl in a field of flax on a quiet morning. My father would hear exactly that and nothing more.