Notes of a forgotten past

Moretti Gala

CHAPTER 2

Liora's POV

"Liora you look beautiful."

"Mama you haven't even seen the dress properly."

"I don't need to see the dress. I can see your face." She reached up from her wheelchair and touched my cheek with her trembling hand. "That's enough for me."

I covered her hand with mine for a second before pulling away because if I stood there any longer I was going to cry and I had already spent twenty minutes on my face and I was not about to undo that.

The dress was the third one I had tried. The first was too casual, the kind you wear to a friend's birthday, not a gala full of people whose watches cost more than your rent. The second one made me look like I was trying too hard. The third one was simple. Black. Long enough to be decent, fitted enough to look intentional. I borrowed the small gold earrings from her jewelry box without asking and she saw me put them in and said nothing, which meant yes.

"You're nervous," she said.

"I'm fine."

"Liora."

"Mama, I'm fine."

She gave me the look. The one that meant she knew exactly what was happening inside me and was choosing to be gentle about it. "Play the way you always play," she said. "Like the room is empty and the music is just for you." Your grandmother used to say, 'the moment you start playing for the audience you lose the song.' Remember that."

I remembered. I have always remembered.

The cab took twenty minutes. I spent most of it with my hands flat on my thighs, watching the city move past the window, telling myself to breathe. I had performed in front of people before. I knew how to sit at a piano and make a room go quiet. That part didn't scare me. What scared me was everything around the performance. The people. The world I was about to walk into that had never had anything to do with mine.

The Moretti estate arrived before I felt ready for it.

I stepped out of the cab and stood still for a moment because I couldn't help it. The building was enormous in a way that didn't feel entirely real, all stone and glass and warm light spilling from every window. There were cars parked along the curved driveway in a defined way. People moved up the front steps in gowns and suits, laughing, touching each other's arms, completely at ease in a world I was only visiting.

I straightened my back and walked in.

The foyer smelled like fresh flowers and expensive. A string quartet played somewhere nearby and the sound floated through the high ceilinged space like it had always lived there. Guests moved around me in quiet conversation, crystal glasses in hand. Nobody looked at me directly but I felt looked at anyway, the way you do when you are the only person in a room who knows she doesn't belong there.

A young man in a dark uniform appeared at my elbow. "Miss Vale?"

"Yes."

"Right this way please."

He led me through the main hall and I tried not to look too obviously impressed by everything around me. The high ceilings. The chandelier hanging above the centre of the room like something from a different century. He stopped near a grand piano positioned under the light, gestured toward it with a small nod, and disappeared before I could ask any of the questions.

I approached the piano slowly and sat down, adjusting the bench slightly the way I always did. My grandmother used to say, "always make the instrument yours before you begin, even if it's only for a moment." I placed my hands on the keys. Cool and perfectly smooth beneath my fingers. A much better piano than anything I had ever played on.

I took one breath.

And looked up.

That was when I saw him.

He stood near the far end of the room and I didn't know how I noticed him before anyone else because the room was full of people, but I did. He was tall, dark suited, with the kind of stillness that powerful people carry, that quality of not needing to move much because the room already organises itself around them. His jaw was sharp. His eyes were darker than they had any right to be from that distance. He was speaking to someone beside him but even as I watched he stopped, mid sentence it seemed, and turned his head.

And looked directly at me.

I looked away immediately and began to play.

The first notes came out softer than I intended but then something settled and the music found its footing and the room responded the way rooms do when the sound is real. Conversations quietened one by one. I didn't look up again. I just played, letting the melody carry everything I had brought in with me that night. The fear. The hope. My mother's face when she held mine in her hands. The note my father left on the stove. The eleven days of medication left in the orange bottle on the bathroom shelf.

I played like it mattered.

Because it did.

When the last note faded there was a moment of silence before the applause came, light and polite the way gala applause always is but genuine enough. I stood, smoothed my dress, and walked as calmly as I could toward the hallway at the side of the room. My heart was going very fast but nobody needed to know that.

An assistant appeared and handed me a cream envelope.

I opened it gently and immediately, a small gasp escaped my mouth. I stopped breathing for a moment.

The cheque inside was more money than I had seen in one place in my entire life. More than enough for the medication. More than enough for the rent envelope under the fruit bowl. I stood there holding it and felt something loosen in my chest that had been pulled tight for so long I had forgotten it wasn't supposed to feel that way.

"You play beautifully."

I looked up.

Dante Moretti stood a few steps away, close enough that I could see his eyes properly now. They were very dark and very direct and there was something in them I couldn't name. Not quite curiosity. Something older than that. Something that felt like the beginning of a question he hadn't figured out how to ask yet.

"Thank you," I said. My voice came out steady. I was proud of that.

"I feel like I have heard you somewhere before," he said slowly, like he was thinking it through as the words came out, like it surprised even him to say it.

Something shifted in my chest. A small uncomfortable movement, the way you feel when someone says something that lands closer to the truth than they intended.

"I don't think so," I said. "I would remember."

He looked at me for a moment longer than was comfortable. Not threatening. Just searching. Like he was trying to place something that kept moving just out of reach.

"Perhaps," he said finally.

I bid him goodbye and walked to the waiting cab without looking back. I sat at the back seat with the envelope in my lap and the city moving past the window and told myself that the feeling in my chest was just relief. Just adrenaline. Nothing else.

I told myself that all the way home.

I almost believed it.