Wedding Eve Goodbye novel · Chapter 14 of 24

Chapter 14: Above the Piano Shop

By evening there were thirty reporters at the gates of the stone house.

Odile watched them from the study window with her cane across her knees.

"Take the girl and my grandson somewhere they cannot find," she said. "You have a place, I believe."

"I have a workshop," I said.

"Nobody has ever printed its address. Go."

We left through the kitchen in the driver's car, with Mina curled in the back seat under a coat.

My workshop was a brick garage behind a church, with a loft over it where I sometimes slept when a job ran late.

Dominic stood inside the door and looked at it for a long time.

A baby grand sat in the middle of the floor with its lid off and its strings bare.

Hammers lay in rows on the bench, and the whole room smelled of felt and old varnish.

"This is where you were," he said. "All those nights I thought you were at your stepmother's."

"This is where I was."

"I never asked what you did here."

"You told me to get lost," I said. "It's hard to ask questions after that."

I put Mina in the loft with a quilt and a glass of water, and she was asleep before I closed the door.

When I came down, Dominic was sitting on the piano bench with one hand flat on the keys, not pressing them.

I stopped three feet from him.

It was the first time in three years that we were alone with nobody to hear us.

"I'm owed an answer this week," I said.

"Ask."

"When did you first want me?"

He looked at the keys.

"The day of your father's funeral," he said. "You stood in the front hall and told the movers not to lay a hand on his piano, and you were right. I thought, I will never be allowed to touch her."

"That was the day we met."

"Yes."

"That was three years ago."

"I've known it for three years," he said.

I crossed the three feet.

I stood between his knees and took his face in my hands, and this time he did not flinch.

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