Sweet Romance18 min read
The Violin, the Broken Strings, and the Man Who Wouldn't Leave
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I remember the rain like a curtain the day the old man in the family photos stopped breathing.
"I don't understand why everyone came dressed like it's a coronation," I said, though no one was listening to me.
Flynn Buchanan stood very still by the grave, pale as the marble tablet, and even the rain seemed to avoid him. He looked at the photograph—an old man who had been a fortress in my life—and his face held no grief I could read. I had married Flynn half a year before in a marriage of arrangement. I had not expected our first real exchange after the wedding to be at a funeral.
"My grandfather wanted you kept safe," he said quietly later, when we sat in the silent house that had once belonged to a man who kept the family to a tidy, if lonely, order.
"Is that why you came?" I asked.
He didn't answer the direct way I wanted. He never did.
"Do you want a divorce?" I blurted out, because the thought had been with me like a sharp stone since the funeral started.
Flynn looked up from the cigarette between his fingers. "Is that what you're worried about?"
"No," I lied. "I'm only worried about my father. He's ill. If I left now—"
He laughed, cold and sudden. "You think I married you for love, Iliana? You think the old man forced me to bring you home and then—then what? Promise you the world?"
"You married because of him?" I said. The words felt thin.
"You married me for your family," Flynn said. "You traded your life for the company. You plotted. You schemed. You convinced my grandfather you were the right bride. Tell me—what tricks did you use?"
My cheeks burned. The night my father had spat blood into a towel while on a phone call about depleted funds came back to me like a nightmare. I had done what I had to do. I had signed the papers, folded my life into the shape the world expected. Flynn's question stabbed at that very place.
"I kept my father alive," I said at last. "That wasn't a trick."
He crushed the cigarette out in an ashtray that had seen better days. "So you married for his money."
"Yes."
"Then don't expect me not to treat this like a business," he said. "My grandfather told me to keep you. For now, I won't divorce you."
That should have been relief, but I felt something else—grief, sharp and private—because the only person who had ever liked me without a balance sheet was gone.
The house waited, quiet, and then the normal small cruelties of cohabitation began: Flynn reclaimed my bedroom and told me to move into the guest room. He did it like a man rearranging furniture.
"You'll be next door," he said when he saw me standing at the doorway watching the movers throw my things into boxes.
"You're coming to live here?" I repeated.
"I always did," he said with a half-smile. "Did you think you were the only one in the family with a name?"
At night, I lay in that new guest bed and listened to the house breathe. I was supposed to be the lady of a house whose halls smelled of cigars and old money, but I felt like an intruder in my own life.
The next days became a string of small wars. Flynn forbade me from going to my orchestra. He said my being a "public figure" would embarrass the family name now that we were married into his. He didn't know that very few people outside the house knew I was his wife. I played the violin at the "Allegra" Symphony because the music pulled me out of myself.
"You won't be going," he said over breakfast one morning in a way that wasn't a question.
"Why not?" I asked.
"Because," he said, and that was where he stopped explaining.
"You think I'm bringing shame?" I asked.
"It isn't about shame, Iliana," he said. "It's about the family."
"Fine," I said. "Then it's settled." I had never been one to plea-bargain over my life. I made my own bargains.
The orchestra needed all hands; our conductor Alec Ferrari paced back and forth the week I returned. "Iliana, is everything handled at home?" he asked.
"Yes," I said, but his eyes told me he did not fully believe me.
"Good. We need you for the concert," Alec said. "The board—someone—is offering us an opportunity."
"Who's the patron?" I asked.
Alec didn't know. That was what unnerved me more than anything: a private invitation, a private car, a private offer. It should have been business, but there was always the smell of something else underneath.
Kiko Matthews bounded into the room like a small sun, chattering about shopping and the ridiculousness of life. "You have to be careful, I told you. You should never have married into the Buchanans without at least a twenty-page manual."
"Stop," I said and smiled. I liked Kiko like a sister even when she teased me badly.
Irving Day—our pianist—kept his eyes on me with something that wasn't entirely professional. "We'll work on the duet later," he said, and his tone carried that soft, patient devotion that had been there since high school. I liked Irving in that soft way one likes a memory.
There were people who wanted me nothing but quiet. Corinne George smiled with scissors in her eyes. She was pretty and small-boned and big-teethed and had a way of making the room feel like a blade. "You should be glad no one knows you belong to the Buchanans," she said once, "or you'd be on display for the animals."
"Don't be jealous," Kiko hissed. "You can't parse that much grace even if you tried."
At a high-end club Flynn used as a bargaining table—"OneTrue"—Todd Bell and other wealthy men lounged with fresh money and older appetites. "You really fled the limelight, Flynn," Todd said when he saw him.
"Grandfather's wishes," Flynn said carefully.
"You never used to listen to orders," Todd said. "Strange you're following them now."
Flynn's jaw didn't flex. He rarely let anything show.
Then there was the night I was asked to perform for a contract—a performance that smelled more of negotiation than music.
"You're requested," Alec told me. "Be ready."
I arrived at the private room of a club that smelled of leather and perfume, and there, sitting in the center, was Flynn with his friend Guillermo Hussein—someone who could buy and sell most of the people I had ever loved.
"Flynn?" I said, stunned to find him there. "You came."
He didn't smile. "Play for Mr. Hussein," he said.
For a man who had barely noticed my existence, Flynn had a way of pulling strings that looked like kindness. Or control. I still couldn't tell.
Mr. Hussein—a big man with an easy laugh—lifted his glass. "Play for us," he said. "Show us how beautiful the music is."
I opened my case and found, to my horror, the strings on my violin had been cut. Two of them snapped, like deadlines.
"What happened?" I asked, breath caught.
Someone had satanic efficiency: blade work in the dark. My hands shook. Alec's face swelled with a color I had only seen when a child loses a tooth. "We need a replacement," he said.
Flynn's assistant—Tariq Jung—moved like a shadow. "There are rare violins in the car," he said. "We can borrow one."
"Borrow?" I said.
Flynn stood and drew an old violin from around his shoulders, the like of which I had only ever seen in cabinets. "Use this," he said.
He forced me into a place I didn't want to go—one of those bargains between people who had power and those who had none. I bit the wine in my mouth and nodded. I played. I drew notes that floated like breath over a room that expected something else. I played a children's tune—a mocking, gentle thing, because I decided I would not perform for the purposes of humiliation.
"What are you doing?" Flynn snapped after a minute.
"It's music," I said.
He laughed; it sounded like disappointment. "I'm not paying for a children's song." Then he poured me a glass and—because I didn't know how to refuse when a man makes a choice for you—I drank. One drink, then another. They kept pouring.
I remember the way the world loosened then—how confessions slip out when someone's head is full of wine. I remember the way I said words into the wrong ears, how I wrapped my tongue around things I would later regret.
"You're a bastard," I said at some point, though my mouth was thick. "You keep me like a thing. You never—"
I don't remember all of it. The room blurred. Later that night I would remember only how it felt to be carried like an object with weight, to feel Flynn's arms steady and hard as any wall.
He took me home.
When I woke up the next day on a couch that wasn't mine, in a house that suddenly felt like a stranger's, Flynn stood by the window. He had been there—he'd stayed. He'd fed me soup, he'd smoothed wet towels on my forehead, he'd sat very close until the world stopped hurting.
"You've been drinking," he said when I answered the phone for my worried colleague. He sounded like an accusation that didn't fit into any frame.
Then life settled into a rhythm that arranged us like two people who used the same bed sometimes and avoided each other other times. He came to dinners and left early. He watched me rehearse and then told me not to perform. I pretended not to notice when he would suddenly show up in the audience, and I would pretend to be surprised. It was a private theater we were both acting in.
The orchestra had its own small ecosystem of devils and angels. Kiko cheered me on. Irving watched me with a hush you can feel like weather. Corinne faded into the back corners, a watching thing. There was also Gloria Cisneros—a woman who had climbed the ladder of visibility by rungs of scandal and a talent for creating storms.
One day, in the hum of preparations for a major concert at the South City Grand Music Hall, Alec called us together.
"We've been commissioned to play at a fundraiser," he said. "A big one. A patron wants Iliana specifically."
My stomach dropped. "Flynn?" I asked.
"No," Alec said. "A private patron. The contract is signed. Someone who prefers discretion."
When the day came, my violin case sat like a hollow promise. I opened it and then I saw: two strings gone cleanly, careful cuts, not snaps. Someone had planned for this.
"Who had access?" Alec demanded.
"Only a few people," said Kiko. "But the instrument room doesn't have cameras."
"Of course not," I said, and a cold pebble dropped into my chest.
"You'll not be onstage," Corinne muttered in a voice like silk over steel. Her gaze slid off me. She had wanted the stage in more ways than one, and for some months she had been acting strange around me.
I did what I had to. I told Alec I would play. I took the new instrument Flynn had provided that night at the club—a rare, expensive violin. Tariq handed it to me with hands that trembled.
We went on. The concert was a whirl of lights and a wave of notes. I lost myself for a time in the music—because music is a place where you can be clean, even if the world outside is mud.
After the concert, Allison of the press and a hundred curious faces circled, then parted as Flynn rose and walked to the center of the room with a contempt like a blade.
"Ladies and gentlemen," he said, and then his voice cut across the chatter.
He did something I did not expect.
"I owe the Allegra a debt," he said. "Tonight could have gone bad. Someone in our employ—someone here—tried to sabotage the instrument."
Phones lifted on little sticks, the blue glare of screens like a field of watchful eyes.
He turned and looked straight at Corinne. "Corinne," he said. "Step forward."
She smiled like she was playing a role. "This is absurd," she said. "You can't accuse me—"
"You were seen leaving the instrument room," Flynn said. The words landed like hammers. "We have a witness."
"Kiko?" she spat, but Kiko shook her head.
"No." Kiko's gaze was glass-cold. "It wasn't me. But cameras elsewhere caught you entering the room as you were fetching something. You didn't have permission."
Corinne's expression shifted from arrogance to a quick, panicked calculation. "That's impossible," she said.
"It isn't," Flynn said. "We have receipts. We have time stamps. We have testimony."
People murmured. I looked at Corinne and saw her face crack like old lacquer.
"Do you deny tampering with Iliana's instrument?" Flynn asked.
Corinne's voice lost its silk. She opened her mouth and closed it. "I didn't—" she began.
He held up a second thing, a slip of paper that had been slipped into Flynn's assistant's hands earlier: messages—threats, payments. A record of a deal. Corinne's mouth made shapes that did not form defense. She had been desperate for the lead, desperate the way someone who cannot be small anymore is desperate to get big.
"No one does this in private," Flynn said. "If you sabotage the music of others to climb, then the world will see what you are."
Phones clicked. Someone in the first row said, "Film it." It was already being filmed. A hundred people watched at once as Corinne's world frayed. Her denial became choked. She had a mouthful of excuses, but excuses don't make string repairs. Corinne's hands trembled, and she looked like a child who had been found digging a grave.
"You—" she started, then broke into tears. "I was desperate. I needed the solo. I thought—"
"Thought you'd get away with it," Flynn said. "You thought no one would look."
The witnesses in the hall murmured louder. They peeled away from her like a tide. Some reached for their phones; some leaned back in disgust.
"You should be ashamed," Alec said quietly. "The Allegra is not a stage for lies."
"No!" Corinne clutched at Flynn's sleeve. "Please. I—I'll give you anything."
"Anything?" Flynn's face was quiet. For a moment I saw nothing but a man who had been taught to make people suffer in public. "Then start with the truth. Name names."
Corinne collapsed.
"She said it was Gloria," Kiko whispered to me. "Gloria bribed her to damage the instrument and then play the victim."
It was the kind of thing that slid into a family of gossip and multiplied. Flynn had the proof: messages, a transfer. Corinne's face drained like a vase emptied in one motion.
"And you, Gloria Cisneros," Flynn said, and his voice had the hardness of ice, "you tried to buy a performance with favors."
Gloria, who had spent years crafting a career out of scandal like a tailor cutting a perfect suit, went white. Her first reaction was outrage.
"How dare you!" she said, flinging a hand. "I did nothing!"
Flynn did not smile. "You paid Corinne twenty thousand," he said. "You offered to make a video 'go viral' if she did as you wanted. You promised exposure in return for a ruined instrument."
She started to laugh, a brittle, forced bark. "This is ridiculous. I have—"
Phones rose.
"Show us," someone said. "Show us the proof."
Flynn did.
He had a file. He moved with the ease of a man who knew the stage was his. He placed the messages, the transfers, the call logs on a small table and then, as if choreographed, the staff of the hall wheeled over the old projector.
"Everyone can decide for themselves," Flynn said quietly.
The projector hummed. Faces in the room watched a loop: messages from Gloria to Corinne; an electronic receipt; Corinne's text that admitted the plan. We heard voices in the recording—the clipped, smooth tone of someone used to getting what she wants.
Gloria's face fell. In a matter of seconds, the room's mood changed. Laughter died. Phones stopped only to record. The room filled with that sharp, modern hunger to see power toppled by proof.
"You're a disgrace," a woman murmured.
"I can't believe it," someone else said.
"She bought a sabotage," another whispered.
Gloria's expression ran through every stage of denial: she blinked, then scoffed, then tried to smile. "This is a rumor. A setup," she insisted. "Someone's planted evidence."
A man near the door shook his head. "No one's that clever," he said.
Her denial turned to fury, and fury to pleading. "You don't understand. I had nobody—"
"Not my concern," Flynn said. "Tuition at the Conservatory doesn't get bought with blackmail."
People in the room began to close in. The sound of cameras clicking became a percussion. Corinne mumbled apologies that sounded like puppet strings. Gloria's veneer cracked. Her laugh became a sob. She tried to bargain: "I'll pay back. I'll do anything."
"Do anything?" Flynn's voice was low. "You will stand in front of the press and tell the truth."
The press had arrived, drawn by a rumor and then the spectacle. A hundred small, hungry outlets circled like birds.
"Onstage," Flynn said. "Right now."
She staggered to her feet, a puppet who had been pulled by a cruel hand. "You can't make me," she said, but she went.
The manager of the hall, sensing the moment, opened a microphone and offered it. "Tell them what you did," he said. "Tell them why."
Gloria couldn't. She crumpled her face into a mask of rage and then fear. Everyone held their breath. For a time, she was performed into a corner.
Finally, her voice—small, ice-cold—came. "I was desperate," she said. "I thought a scandal could make me relevant again. I didn't plan the harm. I tried to control the narrative. I'm sorry."
Phones recorded. The room exhaled like a hundred lungs.
It wasn't over. The board of the Allegra suspended Corinne and announced an inquiry. Gloria's manager—who had watched his client's stock plummet—left in a hurry. The hashtag had already been born: #StringsAndLies. It blew up the next morning. Corinne, who had so wanted to be seen, was suddenly invisible. Gloria's invitations were rescinded. Sponsors distanced themselves. Both women had different types of ruin: Corinne's career was cut off at its roots; Gloria's brand imploded under the weight of evidence.
I watched all this with a hollow kind of distance. I had been the target. I had been the one whose strings were cut. Yet the punishment felt like a public beheading in slow motion, and I did not exult as much as stare at the way people's faces looked when they saw truth naked.
"Are you all right?" Flynn asked that night when it was just the two of us in the car, the city's lights streaming like a river of gold.
"I am," I said. "Because it was you who stood up."
He didn't answer for a long time. Then he said quietly, "I didn't expect to feel like this."
"Like what?" I asked, cautious.
"Like I cared," he said. "Like I was afraid."
A softness came over him I hadn't seen before.
But the punishment did not end with Corinne and Gloria. There were other people who had used their proximity to me as a map for their desires: Todd Bell, who had once joked about "sampling" the bride, found his trusting allies murmuring afar when a list of his private offers leaked. Guillermo Hussein, who had treated the evening as a negotiation of commodities, found himself delayed by partners who suddenly had "scheduling conflicts." Each man met a different consequence tailored by the public's appetite for justice. Some lost contracts; some had to issue contrite statements, but none emerged untouched.
We walked through the aftermath together, like two people who had been publicly folded into others' stories and had to extract themselves.
"Why did you help?" I asked Flynn once, when the air between us had thinned in a way that folded back toward honesty.
He looked at me, a slow storm running across his features. "Because someone tried to break you," he said. "And because when you cried, I hated the idea anyone had hurt you."
"You don't have to do that," I said. "I never asked you to be my avenger."
He shook his head. "I wasn't thinking about what you asked me," he said. "I was thinking about what I'm supposed to be."
We spent the months that followed building a kind of truce.
"Do you hate me?" I asked one evening as the notes of Irving's piano trembled in the room where we had gathered for a small, private rehearsal.
Flynn took his cigarette and tossed it into an ashtray. "I thought I did," he said. "But I don't know what I feel now."
"That's a cop-out," I said.
"Maybe," he said. "Maybe it's the first step to something that isn't business."
Things changed in unimaginably small ways. He began to do the things the absent husband does when he is not quite absent any longer. He asked what I needed. He stayed in the room when I practiced. He told the staff—quietly, without fanfare—to prepare porridge when my ankle sprained.
"You make the strangest faces when you don't want something," I teased him once. He had tried to make me noodles and failed.
"You say you want dinner," he said. "So you cooked. Badly, but you tried."
We learned, clumsily, the rituals of wanting—how to stand under someone else's shadow and not feel vanished.
At a rehearsal in the Grand Music Hall, Irving slid the sheet music across to me and smiled. "Do you realize you sing when you play?" he said.
"That's poetic," I said, because the truth is that music puts phrases into your mouth that words never could.
We went on stage the night of a charity, and the first bowed note came like a secret between friends. Flynn watched from the audience, and for once I knew his watching was not the same as his management of people. It was personal.
Afterward, in a quieter doorway, he said, "You belong on stages."
"I belong wherever I choose," I said.
His gaze changed. "Then choose me."
The world had rid itself—at least publicly—of some of its predators. The women who had tried to tug me down had been stripped to the ridicule of their reputations. Corinne's face, once crisp with ambition, was now a lesson. Gloria's laughter, once like spilled coins, had been ejected from the salons. Public punishment had a taste that people swallowed: it was sweet and brutal, a necessary expansion of the justice we had been denied. Their collapse had been long and public; I could not be happy for it entirely, but the satisfaction of safety in our corner of life was undeniable.
We grew closer not because we suddenly became overtly intimate every moment, but because the line between our private and public lives blurred. Flynn stopped telling the staff to cover me like a fragile object; he began to ask me about the exact notes I had been struggling with, and then sit in the back seat and listen. He enacted compromise in ways I had never expected.
"You looked exhausted today," he said once, in a voice that sounded like the thrum of a harp. "Why aren't you sitting?"
"Because you paid for the tickets," I said.
"Then you must stay."
One night, when I had rehearsed until my fingers prickled, when the house smelled of lemon oil and violin varnish, I put my instrument away and found Flynn waiting on the other side of the living room. He looked tired in all the places men look tired after being awake for the wrong reasons, but his eyes were bright with a softness I had not earned.
"Would you like tea?" he asked.
"No," I said. "Would you like to come downstairs?"
He did. We sat, misaligned chairs, and he told me about the small things—paper contracts and meetings, men who wore expressions that never reached their hands. I told him about the way I practiced a passage overnight until it became mine.
"You defended me," I said, finally.
"You were being attacked," he said. "And there are things you don't fight well in this world. Music is one of your defenses, but not the only one. You used to think the world needed you quiet. Now you have a choice."
I placed my hand on the violin case that had been replaced and thought of the small cat that had once followed me home and enriched my life by its presence. I thought of my father in his study, propped up and smiling when I came home. I thought of Corinne and Gloria and their falling worlds. I thought of Flynn's hands shaping a plan that had saved more than a contract.
"Thank you," I said.
He reached and took my hand. It was the ordinariness of it that laced me with a feeling I could not name.
"Trust me," he said. "Not because I deserve it, but because I'd rather be the one who watches your back than the one who sleeps beside your shadow."
We had storms and adjustments afterward, moments where old habits clawed at the new tenderness. Corinne's calling cards and Gloria's denials returned like ghosts, but the pressure of the public eye made them brittle.
When Corinne's punishment turned the conversation and the orchestra's board decided—after a long, painful meeting—to banish her from the Allegra, I felt oddly numb. When her phone numbers lit up in frantic calls and her pleas became public spectacle, I knew our lives would settle into a quieter benefit: safety.
And yet, in the privacy of our small, ridiculous apartment that sat like a jewel inside Flynn's old house, we learned to sit together in a new harmony.
He taught me to let him in not as a keeper but as a guard who had chosen a front. I learned to let him see the rawness behind the music. We discovered the small signposts of something more than mutual toleration.
One afternoon, Irving and I worked at the theatre's new piece, and he paused with a look full of something like jealousy. "She looks good," he said, meaning the way I was when I bowed my head to the notes.
"Who?" Flynn asked from the dark side of the theatre.
"Iliana," Irving said, and there was a warmth in his words I needed.
Flynn nodded as if he had expected that. "She does," he said. "She's mine, if you want to know."
Irving laughed.
"It's still early," I said, and then Gregory—a young manager who had watched the whole Corinne fiasco—came up and said, "Miss Burgess, the music press is asking if you'll tour with us. The patron has requested a season."
Flynn turned to me in the way he sometimes did—careful and surprised. "What do you want?" he asked.
I took the violin case in my lap, the instrument that had survived a night's sabotage and an evening of humiliation. I thought of the cat I had found, the father I was saving, the orchestra that kept me steady.
"I want to play," I said.
Flynn's smile moved like a small crack of sunlight across a window. "Then play," he said.
I did.
Months later, in a small rehearsal room, Irving stopped and said very softly, "Iliana, when you play, sometimes you look like you are keeping a secret."
I smiled. "Maybe it is mine to keep."
Flynn watched from the doorway, a cigarette burned to nothing in the ashtray by his elbow, and he stepped back into the hall with his hands in his pockets. He was no longer a stranger to being at risk for someone he loved.
At the benefit's end, when the applause had come and the patrons had applauded like rain, someone shouted, "Encore!" and I stood, bowed, and met Flynn as he descended the aisle to the stage.
He took my hand in a way that no one in that hall could misinterpret: it was a small claim with a gentleness that matched the music.
"Do you remember the night your grandfather told you to stay?" he asked.
I nodded.
"I didn't understand then what he meant," he said. "But now...I think I do."
"You mean hold on?" I asked.
He looked at me like a man who had read a lifetime into a single chord. "No," he said. "I meant keep her safe."
The hall had seen controversies and battles. The world had reaped its vengeance on those who tried to hurt us. And yet what mattered most was the small, private callouses love left on us: the way he fed me porridge when I was hurt, the way he brought a spare violin at a club because he thought of me, the way he later told a room full of powerful people the truth.
We learned to be each other's witnesses.
When I closed my case that night, I felt the scar on my heart ease a little. Music had always been my refuge. Now it was my language, and Flynn—who had once been a stranger—had become someone who kept one corner of my world safe enough to play.
There was the sound of the strings, still warm from my fingers. The memory of two broken strings that had once tried to silence me remained a small, private scar I held like a talisman. The cat we still fed sometimes purred on the windowsill.
"Play me that piece again," Flynn said, breaking a new quiet in the room.
I smiled. "Which one?"
"The one you play when you think no one is listening," he said.
I took the violin out, drew the bow, and the note arrived like a confession.
He listened.
And for the first time in a long time, I believed a very small thing: people can change, people can be punished, and sometimes, the one you thought would always be a stranger becomes the person who will stand up when the world tries to push you down.
When the last note went, the applause outside felt like blessing, and Flynn's hand found mine with a pressure that kept me steady.
"Do you trust me?" he asked once, months later in the quiet after guests had left.
"Not yet," I said, and smiled.
"Then let's grow old being suspicious together," he said.
I laughed. The sound bounced off the walls like a sudden bright chord.
Outside, the world was still messy. Inside, my violin hummed. The little cat blinked. Flynn wrapped his coat around me like a wrong but tender note.
It was not the grand last line of a romance, but it was ours: imperfect, disputed, and full of melody.
The End
— Thank you for reading —