Chapter 3 - The Secret in the Strings
I spent the next three days confined to the master suite on the second floor.
Graham had removed the landline from the bedside table and locked the balcony doors from the outside. Every meal was brought up by the housekeeper—a stern, quiet woman named Mrs. Gable, whom Graham had hired two years ago to slowly replace any domestic duties I still held. She placed the trays on the table near the door without looking me in the eye.
"Mrs. Gable," I pleaded on the second night, catching her arm as she turned to leave. "Please. Just let me speak to Gabrielle for five minutes. Is she okay?"
Mrs. Gable pulled her arm back coldly. "Mr. Stafford said you are experiencing an emotional episode, ma'am. He asked me to ensure you rest. The young lady is practicing for her recital."
The recital.
From my window, I could hear the faint, repetitive strains of piano music coming from the ground floor. Hours upon hours of scales, sonatas, and arpeggios, starting at six in the morning and continuing past midnight. Whenever the music stopped for more than two minutes, I would hear the sharp, muffled bark of Graham's voice, followed instantly by the frantic resumption of the keys.
They were breaking her. Just as Graham had broken me eleven years ago, eroding my confidence piece by piece until I believed I was incompetent, he was now using Michelle Tillman to strip Gabrielle of her identity, turning her into a trophy for their social climbing.
By the fourth night, I couldn't take it anymore.
I waited until two in the morning, when the house finally fell completely silent. The heavy oak door of my bedroom was locked from the outside, but Graham had forgotten one thing: the old laundry chute built into the master closet, a leftover feature from the mansion's original 1920s construction.
It was narrow, dark, and dropped two stories down into the basement service pantry.
I stripped off my heavy dress, wearing only a black cotton shirt and leggings. I squeezed my body into the wooden opening, bracing my knees and elbows against the smooth pine walls. Slowly, inch by inch, I slid down the dark shaft, my heart in my throat, praying the floorboards wouldn't creak.
With a soft thud, I landed on a pile of dirty linens in the basement pantry.
I held my breath for two full minutes, listening for footsteps. Nothing. The house was dead quiet.
I slipped out of the pantry and crept up the service stairs toward the family wing. My goal wasn't Graham's office this time; it was Gabrielle's bedroom.
I pushed her door open slowly. The room was dark, smelled faintly of lavender and floor polish, and was stripped of almost every personal touch a child should have. There were no stuffed animals, no drawings on the walls, no toys. Only a sleek, polished digital piano in the corner and a strict practice schedule taped to her mirror.
Gabrielle was lying under a thin duvet on her twin bed. She wasn't sleeping. Her eyes were wide open, staring at the ceiling.
"Gabrielle," I whispered, rushing to the side of her bed.
She flinched violently, pulling the blanket up to her chin, before recognizing me in the dim moonlight. "Mom?" she breathed, her voice trembling. "How did you get out? Dad said you were sick. He said you went away."
"I'm not sick, baby," I whispered, sitting on the edge of the mattress and pulling her small, cold body into my arms. She hesitated for a second, then buried her face in my shoulder, sobbing silently so her chest heaved against mine. "I'm not going anywhere. I promise you."
"She hit my hands, Mom," Gabrielle sobbed, her small fingers clutching the back of my shirt. "Miss Tillman. When I played a wrong note in the Chopin prelude, she hit my knuckles with her silver pen. Dad watched her do it. He said if I didn't get it right by Friday, they were going to send me away to the snow school."
A white-hot rage flared through my veins, so intense it burned away every lingering trace of fear I had ever felt toward Graham Stafford.
"Look at me, Gabrielle," I said, holding her face in my hands. "Look at me."
She looked up, her cheeks wet with tears.
"We are going to leave," I told her, keeping my voice utterly steady. "We are going to leave this house, and they are never going to touch you again. But I need you to be very brave for me. Can you do that?"
She nodded rapidly. "Yes."
"Did Miss Tillman give you anything? A notebook, a phone, anything she keeps in the music room?"
Gabrielle wiped her nose with her sleeve. "She keeps a black leather binder in the bench of the Steinway downstairs. She told Dad it has the registration papers for the Juilliard competition. But... but I saw her hide something else inside it yesterday."
"What did she hide?"
"A small flash drive. She told Dad it had the 'trust transfers' from the school's account."
My pulse spiked. The school's endowment fund—the money Graham had stolen from my grandfather's trust to build St. Jude Academy. Michelle wasn't just his accomplice in hiding me; she was helping him launder the trust money through the school's music conservatory.
"Stay here," I whispered, kissing her forehead. "Don't make a sound. I'll be right back."
I slipped out of her room and descended the main staircase like a ghost. The grand piano stood in the center of the double-height drawing room, its polished black surface catching the moonlight from the floor-to-ceiling windows.
I approached the piano, lifted the heavy velvet-lined bench seat, and reached inside.
My fingers brushed past stacks of sheet music until they hit a thick, black leather binder. I pulled it out and opened it. Taped inside the back cover was a small, silver USB drive marked with a red label: STJ_ENDOWMENT_2024.
Just as my hand closed around the drive, the grand chandelier above the room flashed to life, blinding me with a burst of crystalline light.
"I expected better from you, Nora," a woman's voice purred from the balcony above.
I looked up.
May you like
Michelle Tillman stood at the top of the stairs, wearing an elegant silk robe, holding a glass of white wine in one hand and Graham's secondary phone in the other.
"You really don't know when to play your part, do you?" Michelle said softly, walking down the curved marble stairs with effortless grace. "Graham built an entire life for that girl. And you... you're just the ghost lingering in the attic."
