After Midnight by Sarah Grimm, Sarah Grimm Page B

him, I bet he feels differently. Otherwise, he never would have fought so hard to keep you.”
    She went still for a long moment, her eyes closed, wishing he hadn’t just said that. There was only one way he knew of Thomas’s fight to win custody of her. “You’ve been on the Internet.”
    “Only after you made your accusations that day in the bar. At the time, I had no idea what you were talking about. How much of what’s there is true?”
    She hated this part. Telling people about her past.
    Who was she kidding? She didn’t share her past with anyone. Ever.
    “They got the major points right. There was an accident—my mother died, I nearly died. My biological father took Thomas to court to get custody of me and won.”
    “Yet quite a bit is incorrect. You’re not horribly disfigured, or dead. And having met Thomas for myself, I do not believe he had anything but the truest of paternal love for you.”
    “God, what the press made him out to be.” She dragged the heel of her palm across her forehead as tears welled in her eyes.
    Noah rose off the couch, stepped around the coffee table and sank down next to her. He laid a hand over hers. “The press can be brutal.”
    The touch of his hand atop hers warmed her blood. The understanding in his voice soothed the sharp edges of her memory.
    “How did Thomas and Nicole meet?” he asked, surprising her by remembering her mother’s name.
    “Through a mutual friend.”
    “You were two?”
    “Yes. They had two years together before that day at the symphony hall.”
    “The day you first played the piano?”
    “Yes.” The day she walked onstage after her mother’s rehearsal and sat at the piano. Pressed her fingers to the keys and turned the music world on its ear by playing the last number the guest soloist had practiced. Perfectly.
    It was the first time she’d ever touched a piano, but far from the last.
    “After that day, things got pretty out of hand. Instantly, I was an international sensation. A child with an ear for music; a raw talent that rivaled the masters of the time.” Her breath became shallow. She lowered her voice. “A child who’d only been doing what she loved and didn’t understand the fascination.”
    “I can’t imagine,” he admitted. “How did you handle it?”
    “At first, I was too young to realize how different I was. It was only after the fallout of my first television interview, the one where with the innocence of youth I told the reporter, ‘There’s music all around us. Only certain people hear it and even fewer take the time to listen,’ that I learned to keep my mouth shut about exactly how I played music after hearing it only once.”
    “I never saw that interview.”
    “Lucky you.” Nerves humming, she pushed off the couch and walked a few paces away. She never talked about it, never gave so much of her soul away. Noah needed to understand. He needed to know why she was not what he wanted.
    “As I got older I began performing as a guest soloist throughout the world with well-known symphony orchestras. Between the tours, the appearances and the interviews, Mom and I were on the road more than we were home with Thomas. I always felt bad about that, that because of me, their time together was cut short.”
    “Cut short? She was your mother, she wasn’t forced to tour with you, she chose to. She could have taken you back home after that first day, never to let the world find out about you.”
    Isabeau closed her eyes and shook her head.
    “Certainly you don’t believe you are the reason for her death?”
    Her chest ached. It was her fault. The injury to her hand. Her mother’s death. All of it.
    “Isabeau?” His warm hand settled on her shoulder and she startled, snapped her eyes open and came face to face with him. “You can’t hold yourself responsible for her death.”
    “We had been on the road for ten weeks,” she explained, her voice barely above a whisper. “It was the last performance before