"Come on up," Damian Blackwood said into the microphone, and now he was laughing, a rich, unbothered laugh, as though he had done this a hundred times and it had always been charming. "Don't be shy. The cameras love a good story."
She moved because her feet had decided to, not her. That was the only explanation she could ever give, later. The distance from the service door to the dais was perhaps forty feet, and it took her a small eternity, threading between tables, the tray still in her hand because no one had told her to put it down and there was no protocol for this. A woman in pearls pulled her chair in with a scrape. A man's hand reached out to take her empty glasses, bless him, whoever he was β she did not look at his face.
The steps to the dais were carpeted in the same red as everything else in the room, and she climbed them into the light. The spotlight on the piano bled a little into the center of the dais, and the heat of it found her skin. Damian Blackwood was taller up close. That was her first thought, stupid and human. Her second was that he smelled of cedar and something expensive, and her third was that he was not looking at her at all, but at the crowd, offering her to them.
"What's your name, sweetheart?" he asked, and the microphone caught it.
"Noelle Carter," she said. The microphone caught that too. Her voice sounded like someone else's β thinner, higher, a stranger's voice being played back at the wrong speed.
"Noelle Carter." He rolled it around. "Pretty name. And what do you do here, Noelle Carter? I don't mean tonight. I mean β who are you, when you're not saving the ballroom from thirst?"
A ripple of laughter moved through the room, the obliging kind. Noelle felt her cheeks burn. She was twenty-six years old and had not been asked that question β who are you β in years, and certainly not with a microphone involved. She thought of the truth, all of it, and how impossible it was to fit it into this man's game. Instead she said the only thing the uniform allowed her to say.
"I'm a waitress," she said. "I work at the hotel."
"A waitress," Damian repeated, and he smiled at the crowd with the satisfaction of a man whose evening had just gotten better. "A waitress. Well β" He turned back to her, and his eyes did something then, a quick flick down and up, the appraisal of someone who had already decided what she was. "Here's what I keep wondering, Noelle. I look at that piano, and I look at you, and I wonder if anybody in this room β waiters, guests, myself included β could sit down and make that thing sing. I mean really play. Not chopsticks. Not a birthday tune. Something worth the room's silence."
The laughter came harder this time, genuine and mean. Noelle stood in the middle of it with her hands folded over her apron, and she understood that she was the punchline. The whole dais tilted, very slightly, like the deck of a ship.
"Tell you what," Damian said. He reached into his jacket and produced a checkbook β an actual checkbook, leather-bound, monogrammed, the kind of artifact Noelle had thought had died with her mother's generation β and a pen. He held them up for the room to see, and the room applauded the theater of it. "Ten thousand dollars. Right here, right now, made out to whoever can sit down at that Steinway and play something worth hearing. Ten thousand dollars to charity, in your name β" he pointed the pen at her, "β if you can do it."
The room loved this. The room roared. Ten thousand dollars was nothing to these people β it was the price of the centerpiece β but the game of it, the spectacle of a waitress at a Steinway while a billionaire watched, was worth more than the check. Someone near the back shouted, "Play it, girl!" and the laughter rolled again.
Noelle could not move. Humiliation had arrived in her body like a fever: her hands were shaking, her throat had closed, and somewhere behind her ribs a door she had bolted seven years ago was rattling on its hinges. She thought of the piano's keys, how they would feel under her fingers β cool, exact, waiting β and the thought was unbearable, like the thought of touching a scar.
From the service door, Marcus was making a small, urgent gesture: play along. She could read it across forty feet of ballroom as clearly as if he had shouted it. Play along, play something, get down from there, don't make him angry, don't lose this job. He mouthed something that looked like please.
Damian was holding out the checkbook. "Come on," he said, softer now, into the microphone, the showman's voice, coaxing. "What have you got to lose?"
She looked at the piano. The lid was up. The bench was empty. The spotlight made a pool of gold on the black lacquer, and in that pool she could see, or thought she could see, her own reflection bent and waiting.
Her hands would not lift from her apron. Her feet would not move. The room's laughter had softened into something expectant, something hungry, and Noelle Carter stood frozen in the center of the dais at The Astoria Grand, twenty-six years old, and could not remember, for the life of her, how to begin.
Chapter 3: Hands That Remember