Page 87 of The Princess and the Fraud

The kitchen was right off the living room, and I hesitated as I stepped into the entryway. Much like the living area, dust dirtied every surface, but the brown cabinets were intact, and the marble countertops was whole and unchipped. There were no bar stools at the island, and no kitchen table, but there was a semblance of that homey atmosphere in the kitchen. Slight, barely there, and it might’ve had something to do with the light coming through the stained-glass window above the sink. I could imagine a little old lady standing there while doing dishes.

I could imagine my mother there.

My mother had only known the small kitchen of our apartment. Whenever she wanted to cook a larger meal, she’d have to use the dining table as counter space. There’d been no window above the sink; in fact, there’d been no windows in the kitchen at all. It’d been closed off, tiny, and suffocating.

1442 Everview has such a beautiful kitchen, she’d used to tell me.I could look out at the bay every day while I washed up the dishes.

“I asked him to give us some time,” Aaron said softly from behind me, carefully breaking into the bubble of building sadness. “He was more than happy to wait in the heat of his car.”

I reached up and patted my cheek, relieved to find it dry. “I told you it wasn’t anything special,” I muttered, looking over my shoulder and finding where he stood in the doorway, his hands in his jacket pockets.

“Itisspecial, Lovisa.” Aaron frowned. “The word you really mean isluxurious. But it is special, because it was special to your mother.”

I turned around then, giving him my back, because there was a sudden prick behind my eyes.

“Tell me the lore about this place,” he said, and I could hear his footsteps as they creaked over the wood floors, venturing further into the kitchen. “If you’d like. Why was this so special to her?”

“She came inside once. As a little girl.” I tucked my fingers into my jacket sleeves, cold. “Her dad was working on wiring for the couple that lived here—the elderly couple the realtor talked about. She said that he brought her because he thought the house was so nice. She fell in love with it then. Especially the view of the bay. I never… asked if there was another reason other than that.” I looked around at the grime, quieting. “I think she’d be a bit less enchanted with it now.”

“I don’t know.” Aaron went over to the sink and pried apart the stiff curtain that’d yellowed with age. He peeked out the stained glass. “It seems quite magical to me.”

I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic. “Really?”

“Underneath the dust? Absolutely.” Aaron turned around to face me from across the island, and he leaned forward to rest his forearms along the surface of the counter. The dust latched onto his jacket sleeves, but it was like he didn’t even notice as he peered into my eyes. “But it… it does need a lot of work.”

The truth of that statement made my next inhale hurt. “Yeah.”

“A lot of work to belivable, Lovisa. No water, no electric, no heating, broken roof.”

“But the foundation’s good.”

A corner of his lip curled up briefly, catching my attempt to lighten the mood, before falling back into his serious mask. “Why do you want this house?” he asked me.

It was obvious. “Because my mother wanted it.”

“It’ll make you happy to have this house?” He tilted his head. “It won’t make you sad that you have to live in her dream house without her?”

“I have to do this.” I glared at him through the growing mist in my eyes. “Ineedto do this for her. Just like—just like youneedto get married. We’re the same. You don’t have to understand it, but I?—”

“A posthumous completion.”

Everything inside me stilled. I had the strongest sense of déjà vu standing before him. A phrase no one in my life would even know to say, let alone what it meant. He knew.I’ve heard the spiccato’s tough, he’d said once upon a time. Aaron had always been able to speak to a side of me no one else in this world could, the two of us sharing the same language. I’d never considered what I was doing as a posthumous completion, but he was right. It was.

“When a composer dies, sometimes someone takes it upon themselves to finish the piece for them,” he went on, as if he wasn’t in the current process of reading my mind. “That’s kind of what you’re doing. Finishing her dream for her.”

My mother went downhill fast after her diagnosis. She’d been fine up until she’d been diagnosed—had a hard time swallowing, felt a lump in her throat, put off getting it checked out—but once she’d started treatment, her body turned on her fast. Suddenly, her bucket list was full of things she didn’t have the energy to do, and one of them had been touring her dream house, the house she’d worked hard and saved up for, one final time.

And then she died, and it was like a concerto cut off mid-piece—cello bow frozen in the air, leaving a silence that echoed with the aching reminder of what was left unfinished.

Aaron straightened from the counter, taking the dust with him. “Some people would debate that the unfinished piece is what makes the composition so significant. That leaving the composer’s piece the waytheyleft it is the best way to honor them.”

My eyes couldn’t move from the smudges he’d left on the counter. “This is different.”

“You’re not taking a trip to honor her. You’re buying a house that…” He gave a small sigh. “That you can’t live in. You’ll buy it, and then what?”

I scowled to stop the tears from tipping over. “Stop.”

“You’ll pour all your money into it? Spend decades fixing it up—and working to afford it all in the meantime? Would your mother want you to make a poor financial decision?” His voice was incredibly gentle. “To buy a house that’s unlivable without the means to repair it?”

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