“You don’t perform. You don’t dance. You don’t publish under your name. You believe in love with a capital L but you’ve given up on suitors and having a family of your own. The buttoned-up wallflower is only a shell you’ve developed to move through the world overlooked and unnoticed. The real you emerges when you play. Passionately alive, ablaze with talent. Don’t squander your life like I have. Don’t hide your brilliant light from the world. Be adored. Be worshipped.”

“That’s just it. I don’t want to be adored, placed on a pedestal, by the public. I’ve seen what that did to my father. What fame wrought on him. The toll it’s taken. It nearly killed him. Mine was a childhood filled with the requirement for survival in the eye of a storm. My father was always unpredictable, but fame made him a dictator, ruling the lives of all around him by his whims. I learned to navigate carefully. To expose myself as Mr. Beam would be to expose myself to the possibility of a new storm. The publicity that would occur around the daughter of a famous composer attempting to establish her own opus.”

“It’s still a shame. Judging by what I heard you play the other evening and what I heard tonight, your works are worthy of standing on their own.”

“The critics wouldn’t make that distinction. I would become famous only by association with my father. Fame is dangerous. The power to move audiences, to make people weep openly, to bring them joy . . . sometimes it comes with a heavy price. I witnessed how this power changed my father, how it warped him. He thought he was above the rules of society. Until he was sued in a court of law and lost everything, including his so-called friends.”

“I understand about the fear of becoming one’s parent. You think that fame might change you in the same ways it changed your father. But you’re not your father. You are sensible, strong, and manage those around you with sensitivity and caring.”

She placed her hand over his and tilted her neck, leaning into him. “I gather from your sisters that you’ve lived your entire life in opposition to your father. But you can learn to forgive him. What did he do to you, West?”

His face closed, eyes dark in the shadows. “That’s a long story. We should be joining my sisters.”

“Humph. So you can ask me questions about my past and give me advice about my future but the moment I ask you something about yourself you change the subject and try to leave?”

“I don’t talk about my father.”

“You should. It might loosen some of the hold he still has over you.”