The Piano That Changed Everything
My name is Annabelle Thompson, and I’m twenty-eight years old. Four weeks ago, my parents sold my grandmother’s antique piano—the one she promised would be mine—and used all ninety-five thousand dollars to buy my sister a brand-new Mercedes-Benz. They thought Grandma Eleanor was too sick in hospice to ever find out.
They thought I was too weak, too accommodating, too desperate for their approval to tell her the truth. They were catastrophically wrong. When I finally told Grandma what they’d done, she didn’t cry.
She didn’t scream. She didn’t collapse in the kind of dramatic despair I’d been bracing myself to witness. Instead, she simply reached for her phone with those papery, trembling hands, dialed one number, and said seven words that would destroy everything my parents thought they owned.
Before I tell you what those seven words were, and what happened next at my mother’s sixtieth birthday party, you need to understand how we got here—how a family that looked perfect from the outside had been rotting from within for longer than I’d been alive. Part One: The Assignment
The call came on a Tuesday afternoon in early November, right after my last piano lesson of the day. I was still wiping down the keys of my studio’s upright Yamaha, humming the melody my student Emma had butchered so enthusiastically just minutes before, when my phone buzzed against the music stand.
My father’s name appeared on the screen. Richard Thompson. Not “Dad.” Not even “Father.” Just his full name in my contacts, clinical and distant, exactly like our relationship had always been.
“Eleanor’s had another heart attack,” he said the moment I answered. No greeting. No warmth in his voice.
Just information delivered like a weather report. “She’s stable, but they’re moving her to hospice. Family meeting at the hospital in an hour.”
The line went dead before I could respond.
I stood there in my small teaching studio, staring at my reflection in the darkened window. Outside, November rain drummed against the glass, turning the Philadelphia street into a watercolor blur of headlights and umbrellas. My hands were shaking.
Grandma Eleanor. The woman who’d taught me my first scales on that magnificent 1892 Steinway grand piano. The woman who’d sat beside me through endless practice sessions, her elegant fingers demonstrating phrases I couldn’t quite capture, her patient voice reminding me that music was about feeling, not just precision.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
Tap READ MORE to discover the rest 🔎👇
