I like the name Astaire. In this world, it is the one thing that belongs to me and me alone.

Being born the second son of a distinguished old family meant learning to be comfortable with second place. To people, Werner meant my father or my brother as a matter of course, and for that reason, I had to learn from the very start of my life how to stand behind someone else.

The person who taught me that fact more harshly than anyone was the mother who bore me. She was a noblewoman in every classic sense, and like most women of elegance, she was someone who loved peace.

Stability is the easiest way to preserve peace. My mother tried to keep the peace by assigning everything its own proper order and following it. Even something as small as greeting her children in the morning had a sequence. First my brother, then me. When I cried as a young child, hurt by it, my mother told me that was simply the way things ought to be. The right path one must walk. To her, peace was a duty that demanded obedience.

What ultimately shaped me was resignation. The things I hoped for never came to pass, and the things I wanted never found their way into my hands. I learned that truth through experience. Handling the scraps left behind after the firstborn had taken his share. That was about right for a second son.

Letting go of desire brings comfort. Once I stopped wanting, there was nothing left to be disappointed by, nothing left to wound me. Was this the peace my mother had always spoken of? I found that kind of adequate life quite agreeable.

I took up the piano around the age of nine, when I had grown old enough to have some sense. Children from noble families generally regarded learning the language of the divine as a natural part of their upbringing, so it was nothing out of the ordinary. Not too early, not too far behind. I began playing the piano at a perfectly adequate pace.

After a few lessons, my tutor told me with great excitement that I had talent. It was not a compliment I found particularly pleasing. He had praised me and then added that I still fell short of that Sio Lieselotte. Not only within the small estate of Werner, but in the wider world called Seydel, I was standing behind someone else. It was a deeply disheartening thing.

Still, my mother, who had been fretting over the possibility that her numerically gifted younger son might take an interest in the family business, was thoroughly delighted to learn that her second boy had a talent for the piano. When I went on to say I wanted to become a pianist, she pulled me into a tight embrace right in front of my brother and showered me with praise. It was the first and only praise I ever received from her.

I played the piano, and my mother smiled. It was a kind of transaction. I gave her the peace she wanted, and in return I received her love. A few small pieces of affection for the son who kept the peace. Even those were far fewer than the pieces held by my father or brother, but I decided to be satisfied with that.

People often said they could never quite read me. I thought so myself, honestly, though at the same time I wondered how many people truly laid their inner selves bare. The moment you reveal what is inside you, this peaceful world crumbles. No fool would knowingly leap into that kind of gamble.

That certainty broke in the summer of my twenty-fourth year. Fifteen-year-old Danyu Astrid, crouched outside a door with music spilling through it, wearing a face on the verge of tears, had something called a heart. It was sincerity. Or what some might call passion. Something I had lost long ago and believed no one could possess.

The moment I saw those lips, throwing everything she had into crying out her love.

I became genuinely curious about this woman.