“Daddy.”
He didn’t look at her.
The executive connected to the affair had stopped trying to leave.
His face was rigid.
“This is a private matter,” he said.
Grace’s father answered without raising his voice.
“It stopped being purely private when there was a potential conflict involving an employee beneath you.”
Jack put both hands against the back of an empty chair.
For a few seconds, I forgot everyone else in the room.
He was still my little brother.
Not the successful graduate.
Not the man in an expensive suit.
Just Jack, trying to stay upright while his idea of the future collapsed around him.
I walked toward him.
Grace blocked my path.
“This is what you wanted, isn’t it?”
I looked at her.
“What?”
“To prove you’re better than me.” She gestured toward the piano.
“The performance.
That recording.
You couldn’t stand watching me have the life you never got.”
The cruelty in her voice sounded familiar now.
It was the same cruelty I had first heard in the restaurant hallway when she looked at my clothes and murmured that a high school graduate was attending the family meeting.
I finally understood something I should have noticed months earlier.
“This was never about my education, was it?” I asked.
Grace went still.
Her father looked between us.
I continued.
“At dinner, your father talked about the girl who kept beating you in competitions.
You changed the subject immediately.
Then you followed me into the hallway and insulted me for not going to college.”
Grace said nothing.
Her father frowned.
Then he looked at me again.
“Johnson,” he murmured.
The same recognition that had crossed his face beside the piano returned.
He took one slow step closer.
“Elina Johnson.”
I nodded.
He stared at Grace.
“That was her.”
Jack looked confused.
“What are you talking about?”
Grace’s father answered him.
“When Grace was younger, there was another pianist on the competition circuit.
She kept placing ahead of Grace.”
He looked embarrassed now, as though remembering how often he had complained about it years ago.
“Your sister.”
Jack turned toward me.
I had never told him much about those competitions.
Back then, he had been a child dragged from school event to school event while Mom tried to keep our family functioning.
After she died, music became something I packed away with everything else I had no time to grieve.
“You were that good?” Jack asked.
Grace laughed bitterly.
“She was good before she quit.”
