Page 3 of The Princess and the Fraud

“Which makes you a cellist,” he said. “If you play the cello, you’re a cellist.”

The firmness in his voice left no room for negotiation. “No, Iusedto play.I can’t play now.”

“And why’s that?”

“My mother died.”

I thought the words would feel grander, as calling myself a cellist had. Maybe it was because I was too focused. Just as the stranger watched me closely, I watched him. Meaningless condolences didn’t fall from his lips. He didn’t offer niceties or standard lines. Instead, his eyes simply never left mine, waiting if I wanted to go on.

“Today’s the five-year anniversary of her death, so it wasn’t… recent or anything.” I dropped my gaze to the fire, but the flames became fuzzy, replaced with an image that overlayed it. “But sometimes, it feels recent. Like, if I think back to it, it feels like it was just yesterday.”

Just yesterday I’d spun the ring around her finger while she took her last breath. Both the blink of an eye and not. Five years since I’d last seen her smile, held her hand, heard her laugh. Both the blink of an eye and… not.

“How did she pass?”

“Thyroid cancer. Anaplastic carcinoma. She was gone four months after diagnosis.”

There was no pity in his gaze, butempathy. Pure and bare. “My grandmother’s sick. Pancreatic cancer. She was doing well for a while, despite the diagnosis, but now she… isn’t.” He paused to clear his throat. “So, I know what you mean. How strange time feels as it passes.”

For a long beat, both of us were silent as we regarded each other, the fire hissing between us. Just two people who understood what it was like to experience something so crushing, letting it take our breath away.

“But, anyway—the cello.” He cleared his throat again, sitting up straighter. “What’s your favorite piece to play?”

There were two sides of me. One side rebelled at the question, desperately shaking its head and telling me not to answer. The other side, the side who’d been silent in the dark for so long, begged me to admit it. Even if it was just in a whisper. “Elgar’s Cello Concerto.”

“The first movement?”

I immediately saw the question for what it was worth: an inquiry of skill. Elgar Cello Concerto in E Minor was iconic, with the first movement being one of the more well-known movements to play, but by far the easiest of the four. “Second.”

Admiration glinted in his eyes. “I’ve heard the spiccato is tough.”

“It is a little challenging,” I agreed, and something in me clicked into place—a mechanism stiff from disuse, but still functional. “But it’s rewarding. It’s not a technically hard piece, but the emotional depth and interpretation is why I like it so much. You can really infuse the movement with emotion, you know? The timing, the tone, the articulation—knowing when to give the music space to breathe and when to lean into the sort of out-of-breath pacing. It’s amazing. I love focusing on those interpretive aspects.”

It’d been a long time since my cello geek-speak had come out, so much so that I couldn’t believe half of the words that’d rushed out from my lips. The stranger had unraveled it within me first, mentioningspiccato. A word no one in my life would even have known to say, let alone what it meant.

He knew. That one word alone revived me like a sunbaked plant receiving its first drop of water.

“I’m similar when I play,” he said. “I never cared much about perfect execution. My instructor tried to drill technique into me, but I was always more focused on feeling the music—letting it carry me rather than controlling it.”

“Exactly.” A thrill raced through me. “You play?”

“Piano.” His lips curved, almost self-deprecatingly. “Emotional expression is everything to me when I play. Sometimes it seems like the one time I can fully let my guard down.”

“It’s the best feeling in the world, letting yourself be honest through music.” And suddenly, I was a balloon with no more air, deflated. “But I… I can’t play. Because my mother died.”

When he simply raised his eyebrows inquisitively, I went on.

“My mother knew nothing about the cello.” My lips quirked a little. “She didn’t getmusic. I’d explain interpretations of pieces, and it’d go over her head like I spoke a different language. She hated when I’d turn on classical music in the car. But she… she loved listening to me play.”

I’d been unnaturally gifted with the cello from the beginning, when I’d tried it during fourth-grade band class. The teacher had brought out the string instruments, and something about the celloclicked. Instructors used terms like “prodigy” and “genius,” but I didn’t feel like some virtuoso. I simply was a girl who loved the instrument, and loved the sound it made.

If I closed my eyes and pictured it, the weight of the cello between my knees would appear like a ghost pressure, my mind filling in the blanks of my fingers still curving around the bow. The muscle memory was mocking.

My hands were empty now, and the gap between my legs felt as hollow as my chest.

“She even had me to start a YouTube channel when I was young and record my covers, so she could listen to them whenever she wanted.” A confession that used to make me cringe, now I just smiled. “She was my number one fan.”

His voice was gentle. “And so you stopped playing because she wasn’t here to listen to you anymore?”

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