The Heart Principle (The Kiss Quotient #3)(49)

“She has superhuman hearing now, like moms do. My dad is basically her baby,” Anna says, and her voice and demeanor are completely returned to normal. She’s the Anna I know again as she takes cartons out of the boxes and lines them up on the table with geometrical precision.

I give her a questioning look, and her expression turns confused.

“What? Do I have something on my face?” she asks, touching her cheek.

“No, I was just—did you …” I’m not sure what I’d achieve by pointing things out—she’s got enough on her plate—so I ask, “Should we heat up something for your sister and bring it in to her? Also, should I say hi to your dad?”

Anna shakes her head. “We don’t eat in there. That would be wrong, you know? Because he can’t. But if we get a bowl ready for her, she’ll come out and eat it real fast. That’s why we have that baby monitor.” She points to a small screen on one of the counters. The volume is off, but a grainy video feed shows Priscilla hovering over their dad, adjusting his pillows and things while he sleeps.

“I guess I shouldn’t say hi while he’s sleeping.”

“Yeah, when he’s awake is better,” she agrees. “But don’t be offended when he doesn’t respond. I’m not sure he’s aware of what’s happening most of the time. I’ve tried talking to him, showing him movies on YouTube, playing music. Nothing reaches him. Nothing that I do, anyway.” She lifts a shoulder and touches the bent corner of a foam container.

For a long moment, she seems lost in her thoughts, but she eventually blinks out of it, focuses on me, and smiles. “Let’s eat. I’m hungry, and this smells so good.”

I show her how to reheat things for maximal deliciousness. My mom gave me specific instructions: broil the fried chicken in the oven for five minutes so it stays crispy, reboil soup broth in a pot over the gas range, and microwave the egg noodles, wontons, and barbecue pork. When everything is hot, I put it together, fried chicken on top, and sprinkle chives and pickled jalape?os over each bowl. Anna runs to get her sister, and the three of us seat ourselves on the leather barstools at the outer granite island and eat while the baby monitor crackles, the volume now turned up to the max.

“This might be the best wonton noodle soup I’ve ever had,” Priscilla says as she somehow, astonishingly, empties her entire bowl. Even her chicken bones are picked clean.

“Thanks. I’ll tell my mom you said so,” I say. “She loves to cook and is constantly working on improving her recipes. You should see when she tries out a new restaurant. She orders one of everything and analyzes each bite.”

“An artist, then, like Anna,” Priscilla says, elbowing Anna in the side teasingly.

“I guess you could say that, but she doesn’t make anything fancy. If my mom’s cooking was music, it would be … folk music or, I don’t know, country music. Not like the stuff Anna plays. I could be wrong, though. I’ve never heard Anna play. I just assumed it was classical music.”

Instead of commenting, Anna shrugs and stuffs more noodles into her mouth. Little wisps of hair are hanging in front of her face, but I don’t tuck them behind her ear. She doesn’t like that.

“Really? Never?” Priscilla asks in disbelief. When I shake my head, she continues, “Not even her YouTube video?”

“There’s a YouTube video?” That’s the first I’ve heard of it, and now I’m kicking myself that I never searched her name on the Internet.

“You didn’t show him?” Priscilla asks Anna.

“No, it’s not like that’s an accurate representation of how I play,” Anna says in that same careful soft voice from before. I didn’t make it up. She changes into someone else around her sister. “It’s just a trick of clever editing and—”

“Oh my God, we have to show him.” Priscilla pulls her phone from the pocket of her tight jeans and opens YouTube, where she searches for “anna sun vivaldi” before saying, “You can’t just search her name because this pop song comes up.”

“Your name is a song?” I ask.

Anna grins at me, and in a voice that’s closer to regular—but not quite there—she says, “That sounds like a line from a poem. You must like me a lot.”

Priscilla rolls her eyes. “You guys are too cute. Okay, here it is.” She holds her phone out for me to take.

As I accept it, I see a thumbnail picture of Anna on a stage with her violin. It has more than a hundred million views.

“Holy shit,” I say.

Priscilla smiles at me. “Impressive, right?” She elbows Anna again, affectionately this time.

Anna makes a point of stuffing her mouth with the biggest wonton in her bowl, but even as she acts like she’s ignoring us, I can tell she’s paying close attention.

I start the video and watch as a woman in a black dress, unmistakably Anna, carries her violin across the stage. And trips on a cellist’s music stand, almost falling over. Flustered, she rights the music stand, picks up all the sheet music that fell to the floor, and stuffs it back where it was.

“So, so sorry, Mr. Music Stand. I didn’t mean to hurt you,” Video Anna says, patting the music stand while the offended cello player stares at her with his mouth hanging open and the crowd breaks into laughter.