Lily looked down at her palms.
They were clean. She had washed them with rose-scented soap in the downstairs basin less than twenty minutes ago, exactly as her mother had taught her.
"I was just... making it sing," Lily whispered, her lower lip trembling slightly.
"It’s not a toy," Victoria said, taking a sharp step forward. Her porcelain coffee cup clicked against its saucer, a tiny punctuation mark of pure annoyance. She looked around the sunlit parlor as if searching for someone to blame. "Where is the staff? Why is there an unsupervised child wandering through the private wing? This is a Steinway, for heaven's sake. Do you have any idea how much this instrument costs?"
Lily didn't answer. She just slid off the polished wood of the piano bench, her little pink sneakers touching the pale marble floor. She reached down to pick up Button, her stuffed gray rabbit, which had fallen onto the rug.