For three years, she carried trays past that piano. For three years, she did not play a single note.
And then, on an ordinary Friday night, a millionaire at table twelve decided to make a bet.
His name was Bradford Vance. He was the kind of man who entered a room as though he had purchased it. And on this particular night, he very nearly had: he had reserved the entire back section of Maison Lauron for a dinner with business associates he wanted to impress, and he had been drinking the way men drink when they need everyone to know they can afford the bottle.
Bradford Vance had made his fortune in commercial real estate, which is to say he had made his fortune by being relentless and ruthless and entirely uninterested in the people who got crushed underneath his deals. He was not a cruel man in the way that villains in stories are cruel; he was something more ordinary and more common: a man who had decided somewhere along the way that the world was divided into people who mattered and people who served, and that he would always be in the first group, and that anyone in the second group was fair game for his amusement.
He had noticed the piano earlier in the evening. He had asked the maître d' why no one ever played it, and the maître d' had given the answer the staff always gave: that it was the owner's wish to keep it silent, that the silence was part of the room's character. Bradford Vance did not like silence he hadn't chosen himself.
So, when Nia came to refill the water glasses at his table and one of his associates made an offhand comment about how lovely it would be to have some live music, Bradford leaned back in his chair, swirled the wine in his glass, and looked at the waitress the way a cat looks at something small.
"You," he said. "What's your name?"
"Nia, sir."
"Nia." He said it slowly, tasting it. "Do you know what that piano costs, Nia? That piano costs more than you'll make in three years, maybe four." He smiled at his associates, inviting them into the joke. "I'd bet good money that a girl like you has never touched an instrument like that in her life. Probably wouldn't know which end to sit at."
A few of the men chuckled. One of them, a younger man who looked faintly uncomfortable, stared into his plate.
Nia said nothing. She finished filling the water glass. Her face was perfectly calm.
But Bradford Vance was a man who mistook calm for weakness, and he had an audience, and he could not let it go.
"In fact," he said, raising his voice now so the whole back section could hear, "let's make it interesting. I'll bet you $150,000." And here, he reached into his jacket and pulled out a checkbook—an actual checkbook, the kind of theatrical gesture that men like him keep ready. "That you can't play a single note on that piano. Not a song, not a tune—a single note that sounds like it belongs there."