Chapter 9
Ellie’s first supervised meeting with Victor lasted eleven minutes.
She brought the music box.
It no longer played.
A conservator had stabilized it as evidence, but the mechanism was damaged.
Victor sat across from her in a family-services room with beige walls and a bowl of crayons.
No tuxedo.
No bodyguards inside.
No gold cufflinks.
Just a man too large for the little chair.
Ellie looked at him and asked:
“Did you know my mom?”
“Yes.”
“Did you love her?”
Victor took a breath.
“Yes.”
“Then why didn’t you come?”
The supervisor watched carefully.
Victor answered:
“Because I did not know. And because I built a life where people could stop your mother from reaching me.”
Ellie looked down.
“So it’s your fault?”
He did not rush.
“Some of it is.”
That answer made the supervisor write something down.
Ellie did not cry.
She opened the music box and touched the broken comb inside.
“Mom said it played when she was scared.”
Victor nodded.
“She wrote the melody.”
“You remember it?”
“Yes.”
“Can you hum it?”
Victor closed his eyes.
Then hummed the first line of “Harbor Lights.”
Not perfectly.
Low.
Rough.
But true enough that Ellie’s face changed.
For the first time, she looked at him not as a stranger with proof, but as someone carrying a piece of her mother.
That did not make him her father emotionally.
Not yet.
May you like
It made him real.
That was enough for eleven minutes.
