Page 34 of Stolen Harmony
“Will you teach us that one?” Mark asked.
“Maybe someday,” I said, handing the guitar back to Sofia. “Keep practicing those chords first.”
The kids were gathering their things now, parents arriving to pick them up. Elias moved around the room saying goodbye to each of them, reminding them to practice, promising to see them next week. I stayed by the doorway, suddenly feeling like an intruder in this warm, easy world he'd created.
When the last kid was gone, we were alone in the multipurpose room. The silence felt loaded, expectant in a way that made my skin feel too tight.
“That was beautiful,” he said, looking at me with that same gentle expression he'd given the kids. “The song.”
And there it was again—that patient kindness that I didn't know how to handle. It made me want to say something cutting, to restore the safe distance between us.
“It wasn't much of a song. Just noise, really.”
“I don't think that's true.”
“Yeah, well, you don't know me well enough to judge.” The words came out sharper than I'd intended, but I didn't take them back.
He absorbed the hit without flinching, just nodded and started packing up his guitar. Those careful, gentle movements that I was starting to recognize as his way of giving space when I got defensive.
Which only made me more defensive.
“I should get back to my workout,” I said, backing toward the door. “Thanks for... letting me watch.”
“Rowan—“
“See you around.”
I was out the door before he could finish whatever he'd been about to say, walking fast down the hallway like I was being chased. Which maybe I was, just not by him.
Back in the gym, I threw myself into my routine with desperate focus. Chest press, shoulder flies, deadlifts that made my back scream. Physical pain I could understand, could work through. It was the other kind—the weird flutter in my chest when Elias had smiled at me, the way my pulse had jumped when he'd said my name—that I didn't know what to do with.
Because watching him with those kids had done something to me. Cracked open something I'd been trying to keep locked down since I'd walked into his living room and seen my mother's ghost in every careful gesture he made.
He wasn't just the man who'd married her. He was kind and patient and genuinely gifted, and he'd looked at me like I mattered. Not because of whose son I was, but because of the music I'd made in that moment.
And that scared the hell out of me.
I finished my sets and headed home, sweat cooling on my skin as I walked through Harbor's End's quiet streets. But I couldn't shake the image of Elias crouched next to that littlegirl, adjusting her fingers on the fretboard with infinite patience. Or the way he'd looked when I'd played that fragment of a song—like he'd heard something worth listening to.
I was in trouble. The kind that had nothing to do with grief or guilt or any of the things I'd come here to figure out.
I was starting to want something I had no business wanting. And I didn't have the first clue what to do about that.
Chapter 10
What We Leave Behind
Elias
Victor's house always made me feel like I was contaminating something just by breathing in it.
I sat on the edge of his pristine leather armchair, afraid to lean back, afraid to make myself comfortable in a space that was designed to intimidate rather than welcome. Every surface gleamed under the carefully positioned lighting, every book on the floor-to-ceiling shelves perfectly aligned by height and color. Even the air smelled expensive: lemon polish and leather conditioner and the particular scent of money that had been sitting still long enough to grow roots.
The coffee in my hands was perfect too, served in a china cup that probably cost more than I made in a week. But it tasted like obligation, like the bitter medicine you swallow because someone with more power than you insists it's good for you.
Victor sat across from me in his matching chair, a small, controlled smile playing at the corners of his mouth. It was the expression he'd worn since we were kids, the one that said heknew things you didn't and was deciding whether to share them or use them against you later.
“How's work been treating you?” he asked, his voice smooth as the leather beneath him.
