Symphony of Lies

Silas Vance loved me for three years.

He's spent the last five making sure everyone knows he doesn't.

I used to be the prodigy. Conservatory track, a maestro's name behind me, the whole lit-up map of a life. Then a car came around a blind corner and took my left hand with it. No plates. No apology. Just gone.

Five years I spent teaching that hand to move again. One key at a time. I played my way back onto a stage the doctors swore I'd never touch.

Here's the part Silas still doesn't know.

The car that erased me, and the family I fell in love with, were the same people.

Chapter 1

Coming back to campus, the air went stiff the second I walked in.

Nobody thought I'd show. Nobody wanted me to.

I stood in the classroom doorway and let the whispers land.

"She's got nerve, showing up. After what she did to him."

"Bet she saw he blew up and came crawling back."

"Pathological liar back then. Guess the face just got thicker."

I kept my spine straight and my face empty.

Today was a reunion with a purpose. The whole class, called back to shoot a school promo built around the one of us worth bragging about.

Silas Vance. Signed the day after graduation. Five years later, one of the biggest names in the country.

To help him "find the old high-school feeling," the class president had rounded up every last one of us.

Except me.

"Sloane." The class president stopped in front of me, voice low. "Silas is about to get here. Could you step out for a bit?"

I said nothing.

He read the silence as me digging in. "It's not me kicking you out. Honestly? The invite list came from Silas. He sent it to me himself."

I looked at him then. Slow.

"You're not on it."

Quiet. Clean. No cushion.

"He doesn't want to see you."

Fair enough.

I'd loved him, and then I'd broken him. Broke every proud line of him, and he didn't get back up for years.

Of course he didn't want to see me.

I stepped into the hall to wait.

A few minutes later, he came in.

The camera crew swallowed him whole, so he didn't see me.

Five years, and he'd only gotten worse to look at. Which is to say better, unfairly so. A face that was already too much, buffed by a team of professionals into something you couldn't hold your eyes on.

The second he crossed the threshold, the room went silent.

He went straight for his old seat.

He slowed as he passed the desk in the front row.

Mine. Empty now.

"Move this one out," he said.

His assistant blinked. "Move it? Why?"

"Empty desk. It'll photograph badly."

"Oh. Right, sure."

They hauled the desk I used to sit at into the hallway and set it down anywhere. Nobody cared.

I watched the corner of it go by. A small S scratched into the wood, years deep.

Everyone always assumed the S was for Sloane.

Before the cameras rolled, there was an interview.

Some kid reporter leaned in. "We heard you were a top student, but there was half a semester you were dead last. Can you tell us why?"

"Was there?"

"There was. Second half of junior year."

"Don't remember." He smiled, faint and easy.

And the thing is, he really didn't.

I remembered all of it.

I remembered exactly why he did it.

Chapter 2

Back then, it went differently.

He'd come out of that meeting with the teacher and jabbed his pen into my spine.

"Sloane. You heard all that, right? Getting chewed out?"

"Mm."

"Pretty humiliating. You owe me now. Tutor me?"

He grinned when he said it. That teenage grin, all nerve, no apology.

It set my whole adolescence on fire.

He told me later he'd tanked those exams on purpose. That he'd had a plan for me the entire time.

And now, in front of a camera, he said he didn't remember.

I stared at the desk they'd dumped in the hall and drifted.

Inside, the room was still humming.

"Last question. This one's a little gossipy." The reporter again. "Back in school, was there ever someone you loved so badly it tore you apart?"

The room went quiet a second time.

It stayed quiet a long time.

Silas pulled one corner of his mouth up. Almost a sneer.

"Never."

Silas had money and a face and the kind of manners teachers fell for. The golden boy. Even his confession came with a marching band.

That June, at graduation.

He'd been picked to give the student speech.

Halfway through, he threw the pages off the podium.

"Sloane Li. The day we graduate, be my girlfriend."

The field detonated. Screaming. A whole senior class that had been holding its breath let go at once, like the confession cracked a dam.

In the middle of the roar, he jumped off the stage and ran for me.

Five years later, I still can't unsee it. How much light came off him that day.

Someone asked him once why me.

Half the school wanted him. The golden girl included.

I had no friends. I ate alone.

So why her.

Silas said, "Caught Sloane playing piano once. 'Long Time No See.' Been stuck on her three years."

The golden girl shot back, "She hasn't touched a piano in a year."

"She doesn't feel like it. My Sloane plays when she wants and quits when she wants."

"Or," the golden girl said, sugar poured over the blade, "she couldn't cut it. Talked a huge game, then didn't even make it past the first round at Curtis"

He lost his temper that day. Badly.

After that, nobody said a word against me in front of him again.

But Silas didn't know.

I didn't stop playing because I didn't want to.

I stopped because I couldn't.

Started at five. Aced the highest grade they had by nine. At sixteen, after a recital, a maestro sought me out himself. Audition for the top conservatory in the country, study under him, be his star student.

I thought my whole future was lit up.

Then, weeks before the audition, a car found me on a blind corner.

Left hand, wrecked.

The surgeons did what they could. It wasn't enough.

I couldn't play anymore. Push it even a little and the hand shakes like it isn't mine.

Mom told me to take a year. Reapply.

I didn't listen.

You're only young once. You get exactly one shot at refusing to bow to your own bad luck.

So I walked into that audition anyway.

And I was awful.

The judge frowned and cut me off mid-phrase. "Next."

I heard it too, under the applause for the kid after me.

"That's the prodigy? Thought she'd be something."

When the list posted, my name wasn't on it.

It went through me like ice water. All the way down.

After that I went quiet. Stopped talking much.

A classmate asked me, "Sloane, how come you quit piano?"

I kept it light. "Didn't feel like it anymore."

That was the last of my pride.

Because I would not let them file me under useless.

And I would not take their pity.

Pity is the most arrogant thing a person can hand you.

Chapter 3

Word that I'd bombed the audition went through the whole school fast.

"She really is a liar. Didn't even pass round one, then said she just didn't feel like playing. Hilarious."

The lie made me a punchline.

But I'd take being laughed at. I'd take being hated.

I would not become something people pitied out loud.

So I never explained.

And the tragedy wasn't done with me yet.

My family tried to find the driver. They hit a wall everywhere they turned.

No footage. Descriptions that never matched. A thousand reasons, all of them dead ends.

Whoever it was had money and reach, and vanished clean.

My mother wore herself down chasing it. Aged years in months.

I went numb inside the quiet the class built around me.

That's when Silas showed up.

He transferred in junior year. Dragged a desk right up behind mine.

"Nobody's sitting here, right?"

He'd poke my back. "Lend me an eraser."

When I fell asleep at lunch, he'd drape his uniform jacket over my shoulders.

Silas got along with everyone.

But the first time he ever lost it was over me.

I'd stepped out. The class was picking me apart.

"Sloane's so vain. All that prodigy talk and she couldn't even pass round one."

"Bet she paid off the reporters who used to gush about her. Vain to the bone. Makes me sick."

"She doesn't play anymore, so what does she even do all day?"

"Saw her get into some older guy's car once. Please. That age and she's already selling it"

I stood in the doorway and couldn't make myself walk in.

Then Silas came through it.

He kicked the desk out from under the guy.

"Keep her damn name out of your mouth."

It was the first time I'd ever heard him swear.

It should have landed like something ugly.

Instead something in my chest tripped and skipped.

That was the day I started carrying a secret of my own. Its name was Silas.

I pulled back to now and walked to the desk they'd thrown in the hall.

An S carved into the corner.

Everyone always thought it stood for Sloane.

It was his.

Both of us running full speed at each other.

So how did it end in a wreck?

Oh. Right.

Late that August, Silas took me home.

I met his mother.

The one he talked about like she was gentle and tireless and could do anything.

It was her.

Hit and run. Money in the right hands. Never answered for a second of it.

The person who ended my future was the person Silas loved most in the world.

And she didn't recognize a thing. She'd run too fast that night to ever catch my face.

I know now what I only felt then. Every stage he would ever stand on, every light that would ever find him, I'd already paid for with my hand.

She smiled at me, all warmth. "Silas has never brought a girl home before."

He rubbed the back of his neck and leaned in to my ear.

"Told you. My mom was always going to love you."

He didn't know.

The cold went into me like I'd been dropped through ice.

"What are you doing here