“Your family,” I said. “They’ve been gone a long time.”

“It feels that way,” he admitted. “But . . . only when it doesn’t.”

Those words resonated with me in a way no one else’s had.

Mom had been gone for six years now. Most of the time I remained acutely aware of the years that had passed. Sometimes, though, like lately, things got raw. Other times, in brief nanosecond moments of extreme excitement or disappointment, those instances when your first gut instinct was to run to the most important person in your life, I even still forgot she was gone.

“It’s like he said, then?” I asked. “The curse killed them and . . . you as well?”

“The curse is mine alone to bear,” he said with conviction. “And duly so. Though . . . it is true their deaths were a consequence.”

I tilted my head at him, reading him true for maybe the first time.

“But then . . . that would mean you’ve been here for over a century. You can’t have spent that whole time blaming yourself.”

He flinched, his expression pinching. Almost as if, just as he had done with me, I’d glimpsed—or rather, prodded—some hidden and too-tender facet of his pain.

“Yes,” he said after several long beats of silence, his words strained, his collected demeanor threatening to crack, “well . . . it was my fault.”

At this response, my heart issued for him an almost debilitating ache. Immediately, I fought the urge to apologize—right along with the impulse to keep prying.

Because now more than ever, I wanted to know what had happened to him—what had really happened.

Instead, I gave him the same moment to recover that he had granted me. Then, taking my cue from Lucas, I jumped to a new topic—or, at least, a previous one.

“Could . . . couldn’t you play it?”

“I beg your pardon?” he asked, taken aback.

“ ‘Für Elise,’ ” I said. “Why don’t you play it for me?”

“I can’t,” he said, even more devastation underscoring his tone than before.

“Oh,” I muttered. “I guess he got that part wrong, too . . .”

“Which part?” Erik asked, distracted, a scowl touching his brow as he divided his attention between me and the piano, as if trying to figure out which of us was to blame for his confusion.

“Lucas. He said you could play.”

“I can play.” His hand curled into a fist. “I just cannot . . . play.”

“That’s not contradictory.”

He turned away from me to face the piano. “I could have played it. Once.”

“So, you were a musician?”

“I am a musician. I just . . .”

“Just what?”

“I just . . . Could you try again?” he said to the instrument. But, of course, he had been talking to me. “ ‘Für Elise.’ ”

“I told you, I don’t know—”

“Play what you know.”

“But I—”

“Please.”

He turned those eyes on me again. But, once more, it was his voice that pierced me.