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Somehow, I knew it wasn’t him.
“You’re not Forrest.”
He breathed out a sharp sigh. “You’re the neighbor.” No, his voice wasn’t the same. It wasn’t my shadow from the other side of the wall. He cleared his throat, then shook his head. “I’m his brother.”
“I need to speak to him.”
“He’s not home,” the guy said. I could tell he was lying.
“I just…I know what he did.”
The man looked defeated. “The radiator?”
My eyes opened wide. “What?”
He took a step back, shaking his head. “Shit. The food?”
“The cello,” I blurted as my world rearranged. “Jesus Christ, he was the one who—how did he get in?”
“He didn’t do it himself,” the guy said, tone a little surly. “He paid someone to fix the damn thing because your brother—”
“Uncle,” I corrected without thinking.
He rolled his eyes. “Right. Youruncleis a piece of shit who should have done more for his family. But that’s beside the point. Forrest isn’t home.”
“Yes, he is,” I argued, and I took a step closer to him. “Please—”
“He needs to be available in his own time,” his brother stressed. He was pleading with his eyes, and I knew now there was a novel of Forrest’s past that he hadn’t come close to telling me.
I licked my lips, then dropped my arms. “Fine. Just…let me say something. Then I promise I’ll go.”
He eyed me carefully, then without another word, he brushed past me and headed for the stairs. I moved toward the door to the rhythm of his feet, and when there was only silence, I laid my hand against the wood.
“Forrest, I won’t ask you to open the door, but I need you to know that I got your gift. I…Oh, hell. I got all your gifts. I don’t know what to say other than I would give anything to be able to tell you to your face how much it means. So I’m going to go home, and I’m going to play for you, and then I’m going to my audition. Even if I don’t make it, you’re the reason I have the courage to show up. And that’s everything.”
There was nothing left to say. All that remained was the promise I’d just made, so I turned on my heel and hurried back home to where my future waited.
Chapter11
The chair in the middle of my bedroom looked wrong enough that I wanted to throw it out, but I made myself sit. My cello was resting heavily between my thighs, the endpin tucked securely in its little holder, and the strings under my fingers felt warm now that my apartment had heat.
And my apartment had heat because of him.
The weight of what I now knew was almost too much to bear. Not because I wasn’t grateful or that I felt violated. Not because I was ashamed of my circumstances, which were so poor my strange, anonymous neighbor had to feed me and fix my radiator.
It was because he had done this thing that might have seemed so small to someone else, but it meant the world to me, and I still hadn’t been able to look him in the eye to say thanks. He had been behind the door—even without his brother’s lack of confirmation, I’d felt his presence there. I knew he had listened to me.
I knew he was waiting even now on his bed that was pushed right alongside mine.
It was the strangest sensation, but somehow, I was even more nervous to play for him. Forrest had gone out of his way to take care of me and to make me feel like I was deserving of kindness, but he also would never lie.
If there was no way forward for me—if Nicolai truly had robbed me of this piece of my soul that had once been so bright and brilliant—Forrest would tell me.
And then he’d help me grieve.
I just wasn’t ready to face that reality yet.
Bowing my head, I took a breath and conjured the image of Forrest in my mind. He’d been the person—the spark of life—that had been on my mind every time I’d put my pen to the sheet music and started to compose. It hadn’t meant to be that way, and it hadn’t started out that way.
