Chapter 1 - The Manuscript on the Floor and the Ghost of New EnglandThe crisp, heavy bond paper of the fallen sheet music fluttered down like a wounded bird against the polished marble floor of the Hawthorne Grand Hotel’s private wing, resting directly beside the toe of my evening pump. At the top of the page, written in sharp, unmistakable strokes of black ink, was a title that had been burned into the deepest recesses of my memory: Letters Beneath the Snow.
My breath caught in my throat. The ambient hum of the ballroom—the clinking of crystal champagne flutes, the low murmur of Boston’s cultural elite, and the smooth, jazz-infused strains of the prelude music—seemed to recede into a hollow, distant echo.
My eyes dropped down to the first system of the solo violin passage.
There they were. Measure one. Measure two. Measure three. Measure four.
The same deliberate rests. The same unresolved dissonance. And there, hovering right above the third beat of the second bar, was the distinct, three-pronged scratch of an erasure mark where I had stubbornly rubbed out a B-flat in graphite fourteen years ago, replacing it three times before settling on the aching suspension of an A-natural.
Those four bars had never been published. They had never been printed in an anthology, never aired on public radio, never registered with ASCAP, and never shown to a single living soul outside of a locked, soundproof practice room at the New England Conservatory. They had existed only inside a single, hand-bound manuscript book—and inside my head.
A manicured hand darted down, snatching the page off the floor with a swift, defensive motion.
Vivienne Cross pulled the sheet music against her sleek black bodice, her breath coming in shallow, ragged hitches. Her perfectly sculpted eyebrows drew together, and the polished veneer of national television stardom slipped for a fraction of a second, revealing a naked, shivering panic.
“Give me that,” I said softly, though the words felt like iron breaking through ice.
Vivienne straightened up, clutching the manuscript page like a weapon. A forced, fragile smile stretched across her red lips, though her fingers trembled visibly against the paper. “Your wife seems a bit confused, Nathan. The acoustics in these old hotels always do strange things to people’s equilibrium.”
Nathan Prescott stepped between us, his tall, tailored frame acting as a physical barrier. His expression was a masterclass in controlled annoyance—the face of a wealthy corporate CEO dealing with an unpredictable employee at a high-stakes gala.
“Isabelle,” Nathan said, lowering his voice into a sharp, reprimanding hiss. “What is wrong with you tonight? First you make a scene at the youth ensemble rehearsal, then you interrogate Vivienne about her original composition, and now you’re lunging at her scores. Have you lost your mind?”
I looked up at my husband—the man I had married four years ago, the man who believed I was a sweet, docile small-town girl from Vermont who played nice homemaker and smiled politely at his charity functions.
“Lunging?” I repeated, a cold, humorless sound slipping past my lips. “I simply picked up a page that slipped from her folder, Nathan. A page containing four bars of music that I wrote fourteen years ago.”
Nathan’s jaw tightened. The skin around his eyes pulled taut. “Stop it. Just stop right now. Do you have any idea how many people are watching us? My mother is three tables away, half the corporate board of Prescott Industries is staring at this corner, and you’re standing here spinning some bizarre fairy tale about stealing music from a nationally acclaimed soloist.”
“It’s not a fairy tale,” I whispered, staring past his shoulder at Vivienne, who was hurriedly sliding the page back into her leather portfolio. “Ask her. Ask Vivienne where she was in November of 2012. Ask her whose practice room she used to sit outside of with a yellow legal pad and a tape recorder when everyone else had gone home for Thanksgiving break.”
Vivienne’s face drained of color, bleaching her skin to the tone of parchment under the crystal chandelier lights. For a second, she looked like she might drop her violin case right there on the marble.
“That’s enough,” Nathan snapped, grabbing my elbow with a grip that was entirely too tight, his fingers biting into my flesh through the fabric of my gray dress. He pulled me half an inch closer, his voice dropping into a harsh, venomous whisper. “If you ruin this gala tonight—if you embarrass me or my family in front of the press—don't bother coming back to the Beacon Hill house. I mean it, Isabelle. I’ve tolerated your quiet little quirks for years, but I will not be made a laughingstock by a woman who doesn't even belong in this room.”
The threat hung in the air between us, heavy and absolute. Five years of emotional starvation, of being treated like a decorative accessory, of watching him build a life that excluded my true identity—it all crystallized into a single, piercing realization.
He didn't love me. He had never loved me. He had married a quiet, broken girl because she was safe, because she asked for nothing, and because she conveniently kept her past locked away in a dark box.
“You’re right, Nathan,” I said, my voice eerily calm as I pulled my arm firmly out of his grasp.
He blinked, taken aback by my lack of resistance. “What?”
May you like
“I don't belong in this room,” I said, turning my gaze slowly back to the massive ballroom doors where Maestro Harold Mercer—the legendary conductor who had stopped dead in his tracks earlier that evening—was currently speaking with a reporter from the Boston Globe. “And very soon, neither will you.”
Without waiting for his response, I turned on my heel and walked away, leaving Nathan standing frozen beside a terrified concert violinist in the center of the glittering hall.
