Marriage Named Hatred Chapter 21
The concert hall was packed.
Backstage, Annelise stood there, looking at the person in the mirror.
A long black gown, her hair pinned up, her ears and neck exposed.
The person in the mirror looked calm and composed, like a true concertmaster, but she knew her palms were slick with sweat.
“Nervous?” Theodore walked over and stood beside her.
She deliberately scrunched her brows in a goofy way. “How could I not be?”
Theodore laughed. “Me too.”
She glanced at him. “You got nervous too?”
“I got nervous every time I went onstage. But later I learned one thing.”
“What?”
“I treated nervousness as a reminder. A reminder that this mattered.”
She looked at him and suddenly remembered that many years ago, she had once thought the same way.
Only in the years that followed, she had forgotten.
“Do you remember?” Theodore bent down to meet her eyes. “You said your dream was to become the official concertmaster.”
“And today was the day your dream came true.”
Annelise took a deep breath, then smiled. “Let’s go.”
The stage lights were bright.
She walked up and stood in the center of the stage, the spotlight falling on her.
Theodore sat at the piano and nodded to her.
She set her violin, closed her eyes, and the piano began.
The first movement was a beginning: a little girl picked up a violin for the first time, the sound filled with curiosity and delight.
The second movement was loss: the girl grew up, fell in love with someone, and then lost that person.
The music shifted from tenderness to struggle, from struggle to shattering, and finally returned to silence.
The third movement was rebirth.
The girl had left, gone to a strange place, and in countless late nights, she pieced herself back together bit by bit.
The music rose slowly out of the silence, like someone clawing up from an abyss, step by step, until at last she saw the light.
When the final note fell, she opened her eyes.
The whole hall was silent for a few seconds, and then the applause thundered.
She stood onstage, looking at those who rose to applaud, at those blurred faces, at the sound that had come for her.
Her eyes reddened, but she did not cry.
She was smiling.
At the awards ceremony, Annelise stood on the stage, waiting to receive the gold prize.
“Ms. Annelise, congratulations—”
A voice exploded from below the stage. “She cheated!”
The whole hall erupted.
Talia rushed onto the stage, snatched the microphone, and held up a thick stack of papers.
“This piece was plagiarized! This was my original work, she had my draft! She stole my stuff!”
The media went mad; every camera and lens swung toward the stage.
Annelise stood where she was, her expression calm, but her clenched hand had turned her knuckles white.
Talia lifted the papers higher. “These were my handwritten scores! The dates were earlier than what she submitted! She was someone who had just come to Paris—how could she have written something like this? She stole it!”
Murmurs rose from the audience; some people began whispering to each other, and some looked toward the stage with suspicion.
Annelise did not speak.
Just then, Bastian stood up from the audience.
He walked onto the stage step by step and stopped in front of Talia.
When Talia saw him, her face changed. “You… what are you doing?”
Bastian did not answer. He took out his phone and connected it to the venue’s projection system.
A video began to play.
Talia appeared downstairs outside the orchestra building late at night. She looked left and right, then pushed open a side door and slipped in. The footage cut to inside the rehearsal room: she walked to a violin case, crouched down, and held a pair of scissors in her hand.
Talia went deathly pale, and the papers in her hand fell to the floor.
She tried to run, but the security guards who rushed up stopped her.
“Let me go! Let me go! That was fake! Those videos were fake!”
At that moment, Theodore also walked onto the stage with a stack of manuscripts in his hands.
“These were Annelise’s working drafts from the past three months.” His voice was not loud, but it was steady. “Every revision, every annotation—the dates were crystal clear. I had been there with her, polishing this piece little by little.”
He held her hand and raised the manuscripts with her so everyone could see.
“If this was plagiarism, then I was an accomplice.”
The crowd fell silent for a few seconds, then broke into even louder applause.
Amid the cheers, all Annelise could see was the tenderness in Theodore’s eyes as he looked at her.
After the awards ended, Annelise walked out of the concert hall, and Bastian waited at the entrance.
When she saw him, her steps paused, and she stopped in front of him.
“Thank you. For what happened to the violin, and for today.”
Bastian looked at her, his throat tightening, wanting to say something.
But she spoke first. “But I would not forgive you.”
“Not because what you did was unforgivable,” she said, looking at him with clear eyes, “but because I no longer needed to forgive you.”
Bastian opened his mouth, but no words came.
Her voice remained calm. “Now I stood here with a career I loved, friends who respected me, and a peaceful life. To me, you were no longer important.”
No longer important.
When he heard those words, something slammed hard into his chest.
He opened his mouth; in the end he only managed three words. “I’m sorry.”
Annelise nodded. “I heard you. Goodbye.”
She turned and left, walking toward Theodore, who was waiting not far away.
Theodore did not ask anything; he only handed her a cup of hot chocolate.
She took it and sipped. “Let’s go. I’m hungry.”
“What do you want to eat?”
“Anything. You’re buying.”
“Okay.”
They left side by side and disappeared into the night.
Bastian stood where he was, watching her back grow farther and farther away, more and more blurred.
She did not look back, not even once.
In the distance, her figure vanished around the street corner.
Some people, once missed, really never came back.