The LED dash display broadcast the song title and artist in little green letters. She recognized neither and turned up the volume. She’d drown out her thoughts. And if she ever found a song she knew, she’d scream the words at the top of her lungs and pretend that she was singing along.
* * *
THREE HOURS INTO Friday evening, Chris was on his third drink. He wasn’t drunk, but even the ageless hag at the bar was beginning to look a little better.
Awaiting his turn on the piano, he listened to his competitors pounding the keys of the baby grand on the raised carpeted dais that was the restaurant’s centerpiece. The dais turned; the tables surrounding it did not.
The gleaming black instrument shone under professional spotlights and was the only furniture on the stage.
Chris’s number in the single elimination competition was up soon. He’d won the last draw of the night, which meant that he’d be up against the pianist voted by preselected judges as the best of the bunch. Chris liked the spot because he could stay onstage after he’d finished his set and play for as many hours as it took to wipe away the tension from the past week.
He didn’t need another win. He needed relaxation. He needed peace.
He needed to forget the grieving faces of those who’d loved—and lost—a man of the sea.
* * *
THE PLACE SMELLED as heavenly as she’d remembered—a mixture of spices, freshly baked rolls and prime cuts of steak marinated in Citadel’s secret sauce. Locals didn’t usually patronize the glitzy establishments on the tourist strip in downtown Comfort Cove, but a son of one of the teachers at school had played in a piano competition there a couple of times and Emma had accompanied the divorced mother on both occasions.
Now, sitting alone at the bar—something she’d never have considered doing before—she sipped a glass of white wine and concentrated on convincing herself that she could stay right where she was at least until she finished her drink.
Making deals with herself.
If she stayed fifteen minutes, she could make a trip to the ladies’ room to reassess.
If she stayed half an hour, she could think about getting a table. Maybe even order something to eat. If she made it an hour, she’d have to call someone—her divorced teacher friend, probably—and let her know where she was.
If she had more than two glasses of wine she’d call a cab.…
To take her…where?
Raising the heavy crystal glass to her lips, she gulped. She’d figure that out later. There were plenty of hotels downtown.
And because she paid her credit card off every single month, she had plenty of limit to cover whatever exorbitant fee they’d charge.
She’d show Rob.…
No. She was there to show herself something. To save her life.
She sipped again, raised her gaze and took in the people around her. A couple of men sitting alone at the bar, both dressed in suits with their ties loosened at the collar. A woman who was also alone and probably there on business. Just not the white-collar kind.
There were couples—both at the bar and filling the tables around the center stage—but those she ignored. And there were families, healthy groups of people who laughed and talked and fought and took one another for granted. She’d spent a lot of her youth wondering what it felt like to be one of them.
And then she’d grown up and realized she could make a family of her own. That’s where Rob had come in. They had plans to make a family.
And she’d kicked him out.
She had to phone him. To apologize for her hastiness. He’d be expecting the call. So maybe she should text him instead.
“And I did it my…” She suddenly heard the famous melody and it caught her attention.
Reaching beneath her jacket to make sure that her red silk blouse was still tucked into her black slacks, Emma sat up straighter. The words continued to play in her mind.
But they’d been placed there by the pianist up onstage. The timing seemed odd. Fortuitous. As though this song had been chosen for her. A song about facing the end of one’s life with absolutely no regrets.
And the way to do that?
Live by the dictates of your own heart. And only your heart.
Have I ever done that?
Emma sipped her wine.
She watched the pianist’s strong masculine fingers fly over the keys. She’d seen him play before. He’d won the competition on both the nights she’d been there.
Forgoing her fifteen-minute-mark trip to the ladies’ room, she ordered a second glass of wine and let the music envelop her. The man played with more passion than Emma had ever dared feel in her entire life.
And he did so as though completely unaware of all of the people watching him from the tables below.
If there’d been a competition that evening, it was over.
The man with the weathered face and longish hair had the stage all to himself.
* * *
HE’D WON AGAIN. If Chris were the sort to care about what other people thought, he’d probably be embarrassed. He didn’t care. So he wasn’t.
He also wasn’t stone-cold sober, not that anyone was paying his state of inebriation any mind. His room at the inn across the street would be waiting for him. He rarely used it, but every Friday night he had a free room at his disposal—paid for by Citadel’s owner as part of their business agreement.
Tonight he was going to use that room.
Breaking into one of his own compositions, a piece that flew from his fingers without any conscious thought, he let the music take him on his own private journey. He was a little boy, scared of the waves that crashed against his father’s boat. And he was the waves, with the strength and the will to steal men from their lives, their loved ones. He was the source of all power. Others were afraid; he was invigorated.
He played until he trembled from the inside out, until emotion rose in his chest, and threatened to choke him. And still he played.
With the demons of hell at his back, with the determination to go to his own grave with no regrets, he ran as fast and as far as he could from the sight of a mother’s face who’d buried her son that day, from the memories of the faces of the other women there—those who, except for a fate he’d never understand, could have been the ones grieving. He ran from the expressions on the faces of the men left behind who would not—could not—spare their loved ones the risk of a similar fate.
And maybe, just maybe, he ran from the fact that he was all alone.
* * *
EMMA WASN’T PARTICULARLY hungry. But she ordered food, anyway, so that she had an excuse to stay in her seat at the bar and continue to lose herself in the music emanating from the fingers of a man she’d never met but knew she’d never forget.
He’d changed her life that night. He’d shared his music with her, wrapped her in its graces, holding her there so that she didn’t run back home.
She ordered more wine, too. A third glass.
The pianist pulled things from her raw and gaping heart that were unfamiliar to her. Parts of herself she hadn’t had to face. He held her fast in life’s grip, keeping her rooted in that seat.
She ate a little bit. Pushed the plate away and sipped her wine and listened.