"Freezing," she said, and laughed, because it was true in every way except the one that mattered. "Take me somewhere warm, Vincent. And drive slowly. I want to look at everything."
Chapter 27: Her Father's Bar Again
The order came through on a Tuesday, in a plain envelope that Tony Barrett delivered by hand because, he said, some papers a person should not have to open alone in a kitchen.
Maya opened it standing in the doorway of the upstairs flat at The Velvet Note, with Tony on one side of the threshold and Lucia hovering on the other, and read it twice before the words would stay still. In the matter of the property known as Sullivan's, the court, having reviewed the recorded admission, the forensic examination of the signatures, and the complete fraud file, reversed the deed transfer in full. The transfer was void. It had, in the eyes of the law, never happened. The building was hers. It had always been hers.
"There's no appeal window that matters," Tony said, in his dry, careful way. "Cole could file paper from his cell until the ink runs out. The recording kills it. The handwriting expert kills it. It's finished, Maya. It's yours."
Lucia made a sound that was half laugh and half sob and hugged her so hard the envelope crumpled. Maya thought of her father — Seamus Sullivan, who had signed his name on that bar's first liquor license in handwriting like a fence rail, strong and slanted and utterly his — and how Ryan had practiced her signature until he could steal with it. He had never once understood what he was holding.
She waited three days before she went to see it. Not from fear. From a wish to arrive as an owner and not as a ghost.
On Friday morning, she went alone. That, too, was a choice, and Vincent, who offered the car, and Lucia, who offered company, both accepted her no without arguing. She took the train with the keys — her keys, returned by the court clerk in a tagged envelope — heavy in her coat pocket, and let herself in through the front door of Sullivan's for the first time in over a year.
The bar exhaled dust when the door swung open. Shuttered light fell in bars through the slats. Everything was under sheets or exactly where it had been left the day the locks were changed by men Ryan had hired: the long oak counter her father had refinished himself, summer by summer; the brass rail, gone dull; the shelves behind the bar standing empty; the small stage in the corner, its curtain half fallen. The air smelled of old wood, cold plaster, and faintly, underneath everything, of lemon oil and stout.
Maya walked the rooms slowly, trailing one hand along the counter the way she had as a girl doing her homework at the end of it while her father worked. The office, where the safe stood open and empty. The kitchen, stripped. The corridor with the framed photographs still hanging crooked — Seamus with his arm around a much younger Ellen, both laughing; Seamus behind the bar on opening night, 1989, proud as a king.
And at the end of the corridor, the back room.
Her father had kept it for the music and for nothing else: a storeroom for joy, he used to call it. It held mismatched chairs, a fiddle case, a shelf of songbooks — and the upright piano, under a canvas cover gone grey with dust, that Seamus had bought secondhand the year Maya was born because, he said, a bar without a piano in reach was just a room that sold drinks.
She pulled the cover off. The dust rose and turned gold where the shuttered light found it, and the piano stood there — scarred, one leg shimmed with a folded beer mat, its fallboard carved with the initials of three generations of bored children — entirely, unmistakably itself.
Maya sat down on the stool. It creaked in the exact old way. She opened the fallboard, found the middle keys yellowed but true, and pressed one. The note that came out was flat by a quarter tone and she laughed out loud in the empty room, because so was everything, so was she, and flat could be tuned, given time and patience and somebody who knew what they were doing.
She played, then — not well, not a performance, just the old songs her hands remembered from sitting beside her father while he played. In the dusty back room, with her coat still on, Maya Sullivan played her father's piano for twenty minutes, and somewhere in the middle of it she understood precisely what the building was going to be.
Not a shrine. Seamus would have hated a shrine; he had kept a business, not a church. And not a gift to be handed to Vincent Corso to run, however kindly, however capably.
A school, by day. The back rooms for lessons: neighbourhood kids, the ones whose schools had cut music first, learning piano and fiddle and whatever walked in the door, for whatever their families could pay, including nothing. Her father had given half the street's children their first chords at that upright and never sent a bill. She would simply be putting his habit on the lease.
And in the evening, a listening bar. Not loud, not a club. A room where people came to hear music the way her father believed it should be heard — close, and with their glasses quiet. The trio stage back in use. Her own piano, tuned at last, where the whole room could see her hands.
That evening she told Vincent at The Velvet Note, after her set, in the office with two cups of tea going cold between them. She told it to him as news. The school. The lessons. The listening bar, the name kept — Sullivan's, always Sullivan's. This is what I have decided, this is what I am building.
Vincent listened the whole way through without interrupting, which she had come to learn was his most deliberate discipline. When she finished, he was quiet a moment.
"You don't need anything from me for this," he said. It was not quite a question.
"I need a good piano tuner," she said. "And you're invited to opening night. As a guest."
Something moved in his face — amusement, and underneath it something warmer and more careful. "A guest," he repeated.
"A guest," Maya said. "Front table, if you behave."
"Then I'll behave impeccably," Vincent Corso said, "and I'll send you the tuner. He's the best in the city. He also argues with everyone. You'll like him."
She smiled into her cold tea, in the office of his club, in the life she was no longer hiding inside — and felt the future arrange itself, for once, in the shape she had chosen.
Chapter 28: Her Own Front Door