Free Our Song Returns: Falling In Love At The Wrong Time by Sheila Bradley

Chapter 1
    Maggie Brennan hurried up the stairs of Park Street station toward Boston Common. It was early December, and snow floated lazily down from the overcast sky. Dusk was falling, and the trees on the Common were already lit up in red, green, yellow and blue. She could hear the faint sound of Christmas carols coming from a nearby restaurant. She broke into a trot, she was late for rehearsal. She could have stayed on the train for one more stop, but the Green Line had been moving so slowly that she had decided to get off and walk across the Common to the Park Plaza Hotel. She rushed past the Frog Pond where kids of all ages skated around in circles, and breathed a sigh of relief when she crossed Boylston Street and opened the door that led to the hotel lobby.
    Her pianist, Patrick, was waiting for her with a pained expression on his face. He hated it when she was late. She grimaced an apology in his direction, and he rolled his eyes and tapped his wrist.
    “You’re not even wearing a watch! How do you know I’m late?”
    He smirked at her. “You’re always late. It’s one of your least endearing characteristics.”
    She feigned hurt. “Oh, really? Pray tell, what other non-endearing characteristics are you keeping track of?”
    He brushed her cold cheek with his lips and tucked her hand into the crook of his arm so he could lead her across the lobby to the ballroom where they would be performing the next day. “Let’s see. You can’t tell a joke to save your life, your cooking is atrocious, and it’s impossible to stay angry at you.”
    She laughed and patted his arm. “We have that last trait in common.” and looked up at him fondly.
    She and Patrick had been friends since their college days, and when she had started playing weddings, he was the first accompanist she had called. They had been performing together for nine years now, and had an easy rapport that made a job that could have been disheartening (always the wedding singer, never the bride) and turned it into a genuinely good time.
    They headed toward the largest ballroom. The pair had played this hotel dozens, maybe even hundreds of times over the years, but Maggie could not suppress a gasp of wonder when they walked into the place. The hotel staff had transformed the room into a winter wonderland, complete with sparkling trees and snow. They were testing the lights as twinkling snowflakes danced across the walls and ceiling. It was breathtaking. She had known this was a spare-no-expenses wedding because of the location, but this surpassed any other event she had played with its sheer elegance. She wondered who the bride and groom were.
    Maggie and Patrick crossed to the platform where the grand piano sat waiting for them. Patrick pulled out the set list, which included standards as well as some special requests from the wedding party. Patrick said, “I checked our email right before you got here; we’ve got an additional request. Apparently the wedding planner left the couple’s song off of the set list.”
    “Okay, is it something we know? The wedding’s tomorrow, I hope we don’t need to pull sheet music for it.”
    “It’s ‘Just the Way You Are’, we haven’t played it in a while, but I remember it. Do you need me to print up the lyrics? I can do it in the business center.”
    She shook her head. “I know them. It’s one of my favorites.” Her mind drifted back to high school; the classic Billy Joel song had been hers and Bill’s song. Bill used to say that he had picked it because ‘We Williams have to stick together,” but the song had meant something to them. She still got a little choked up when she heard it, it brought back a lot of bittersweet memories.
    Maggie and Bill had met their freshman year of high school. She had grown up in Massachusetts, but he had moved there from New York the summer before high school. He had a hard time at school at first because he walked in the first day wearing a New York Yankees cap, a