"It takes a tremendous amount of strength to be a single mother. To hold down the forte of a home, a life and your child's entire happiness." Nikki Rowe
——

I. The Piano Man

1st October 2020

London, England

Sophie Cartwright burst into tears as she physically tried to drag her eight-year-old daughter, Maddie, into Westgate Primary School.

Everyone was staring, judging, and looking down on Sophie as the dirty, little scrubber who was too poor and too stupid to be a good mum.

And goddammit, they were right. Sophie couldn't even get Maddie to go into school. She had only managed to get Maddie into school three days in the last fortnight.

"Maddie, please!" Sophie begged, on her knees before her daughter. "Please, just go inside. Stop fighting me!"

Maddie was glaring down at Sophie, her large, brown eyes flaring with hysterical anger. Sophie knew hers would mirror Maddie's exactly.

"NO!" screamed Maddie, with no care whatsoever for the scene that she was making. Sophie's own tears were not helping the situation. Maddie threw her backpack on the ground and folded her arms stubbornly. "I will not go! I hate school!"

Maddie had been academically challenged since nursery school. Her teachers had always told Sophie that Maddie was just away with the fairies and was never interested in school, no matter what they tried to do for her. Maddie was in all the support classes in school, and had reading, writing, and maths assistance. She had not progressed further than a Year 1 student in reading and was only being put up at the end of the year because Sophie had begged the school each time.

Maddie would certainly never return to school if she was not in the same year level with her friends.

Not that she had many friends. Maddie struggled socially, too.

Not being able to afford a tutor made Sophie feel like even more of a failure as a mother. All she could do at home was borrow simple books from the library to read with Maddie, but she had always refused to do her readers.

Maddie had been such a beautiful child up until the age of four when she had needed to start going to school. The next four years had aged Sophie dramatically. Biologically she might have been twenty-six, but she felt fifty-three.

"Maddie, please, I can't be late for work again," Sophie implored. "Do you want me to lose my job?"

Sophie knew that Pete, the owner of the bar where she worked, would never sack her, but that was beside the point.

Maddie just glared at her mum. "You cannot make me go inside. I will scream that you kidnapped me," she threatened.

Sophie just looked at her daughter with utter defeat. What on earth was she supposed to do? She couldn't just sit on the side of the road and cry. She climbed to her feet and grabbed Maddie's hand before picking up her backpack. She then started to drag Maddie back towards the tube station, and Maddie trotted along willingly this time, having won the battle.

Maddie won more than Sophie did these days, and Sophie knew that she was failing in that respect, too. Nobody needed to point that out to her, though many took pleasure in doing that.

Namely Maddie's arsehole of a dad, who thought he was entitled to an opinion because he put two hundred pounds in Sophie's account every month.

It didn't help that he frequented the bar where Sophie worked, though Sophie knew that was just to torment her.

Sophie and Maddie travelled on the tube into the city, getting off at Sophie's usual stop at Leicester Square. Maddie was decidedly happier now, and there was no evidence on her face that she had only just threatened her mother with shouting out to the public that she had been kidnapped.

Still holding Maddie's hand, they walked up Charing Cross Road, and turned onto Shaftesbury Avenue. Sophie loved this part of London. She loved how busy it was, how everyone seemed so much happier to be around the art and the excitement of the West End.

It had been her dream once to perform on the West End, but the closest she had gotten to a theatre was the West End Piano Bar.

Sophie had been studying a musical theatre degree when she had met Kyle Becker, known to his moron rugby mates as "Beck". But having just turned eighteen, Sophie was charmed by his handsome face and movie star good looks, and three months into their relationship, she had discovered that she was pregnant.

Beck could not drop her fast enough, and Sophie's parents wanted nothing to do with her either. Luckily Beck's mother forced him to do right by Sophie in financially supporting her as she found herself a tiny flat in a dodgy part of town, and a job at the only place in the city that didn't mind hiring a pregnant teenager. She had dropped out of her uni degree and had been working ever since.

Sophie would not ever change her mind about the blessing that had been Madeleine Jane Cartwright, even if Maddie did make each day a battle. She had learned over the years that while she would love her beautiful daughter endlessly and would trade her life for Maddie's in an instant, bloody hell she did not like her sometimes.

The West End Piano Bar was a cosy theatre pub, frequented by patrons coming and going to the many productions each night. As indicated in the name, there was a huge grand piano on the stage in the corner, but without a proper piano man. Pete had been advertising in the window for months and was too tech illiterate to try to source someone online.

Sophie sang every few nights, and was accompanied by a CD, rather than the live music that the setting of the bar demanded.

The scent of beer that had long since leeched into the timber of the bar, stools, and floor immediately filled Sophie's nostrils as she made her way into the establishment.

Still wildly stressed and upset, she immediately set Maddie up at one of the tables and began to unpack her school bag. She pulled out her lunch box and her reader that she had refused to read the night before.

Maddie also had a mindful colouring book in her bag, as well as her pencil case, and Sophie knew she would have better luck keeping her occupied with that.

As soon as she turned around, she met Pete's eye as he stood behind the bar with a disapproving look on his face. Pete Gregson was much like Sophie really, only twenty years older. He had once had a musical theatre dream and had channelled it into the bar when nothing had really happened for him. He was a kind man, with a sweet, round face, and baby blue eyes.

"I'm sorry!" cried Sophie hysterically.

"Sophie, sweetheart, that's every day this week, so far," Pete noted, frowning. "The kid's got to go to school."

"Really?" Sophie found herself retorting sarcastically. "I never thought of that."

Pete rolled his eyes and came out from behind the bar, before wrapping arms around her tightly. Sophie whimpered. She had really needed a hug.

She knew Pete would never really be angry with her. He was never really angry with anyone. He was the reason she had stayed working at the bar for so long. That and who else would put up with Maddie's shenanigans?

"Go and clean yourself up, sweetie. You look like shit. I'll go and give Miss Maddie a broom. If she's going to skip school, she'd better learn a skill." Pete kissed Sophie's temple.

Sophie scoffed. "Do you know, Pete? If you were twenty years younger, and, you know, straight, I would totally marry you."

Pete chuckled. "Get out of here."

Sophie disappeared into the backroom. It was very basic, with a vending machine, a tatty, old couch, and a few hooks for handbags and coats. Sophie walked through the backroom and slipped into the employee bathroom. God, Pete was right. She did look like shit. She looked like she hadn't slept in a week, which was entirely accurate. She looked like she hadn't washed her hair in a week. Again, accurate.

Sophie splashed her face with water and ran her fingers through her long, strawberry blonde hair, which was looking much redder with the grease. She looked pale, and her brown eyes looked dead.

If you ever wanted to see a picture of a failure of a mother, you needed to look no further.

Sophie stared at herself and watched as her tired, brown eyes began to fill with tears. How she hated crying, but she couldn't help it. She gripped the sides of the sink and sobbed for a minute, needing to get it out of her system.

"Pull yourself together, Sophie," she whispered to herself.

Sophie left the bathroom, and grabbed an apron from the backroom, before returning to the bar to start work.

Sophie worked double shifts five days a week. Usually it was only her and Pete during the day. She spent time cleaning, cooking, and preparing for the busier nights. The bartenders, waitresses, and bouncers all worked the nightshifts. Sophie usually left work at three to collect Maddie from school, brought her home, cooked her dinner, and fought with her about homework, before leaving her with a babysitter so that she could work the nightshift.

Their crappy flat didn't pay for itself.

But that was only the routine on the odd occasion that Maddie actually went inside the school building.

As soon as Sophie had picked up the bottle of spray and wipe and a cloth to start wiping down the surfaces, she noticed that Maddie was not alone on the bar floor. There was someone sitting at the piano.

A man, who appeared very deep in thought, was scrawling all over sheets of music, some of which had spilled over onto the floor.

From across the room, Sophie could see that he was young, perhaps her age or a little older. He had shaggy, dark hair, and an intense stare. He looked tall and lean as he sat before the instrument.

No sooner had Sophie noticed him, he began to play the piano, and her jaw dropped. Maddie, too, stopped colouring and turned to stare at him.

She had never heard anything like it, not even on television. He sounded perfect, poetic and passionate, a true professional. His fingers flew across the keys as though he did not even need to think about what he was doing. The music just flowed out of him.

And then he stopped abruptly, slamming his fingers down roughly on the keys.

"It's crap, right?" he asked, an obvious American accent about him.

Just as Sophie was about to answer him, assuring the stranger that his playing was magnificent, a voice answered him, coming from the speaker of a phone.

"Yeah," said an American female voice. "Not your best."

Sophie's eyes widened. Not his best? How on earth could this man play if that was not his best?

The man picked up his phone, and Sophie saw that he was on FaceTime with a woman.

"I'm screwed, Tally," he told her, not seeming to care that he wasn't alone in the room.

"You're not screwed," the woman, Tally assured him. "You just haven't figured it out yet. You like this piano, right? Keep playing, and you'll find something you like. The right tune will come. It always does. Anyway, I've got to go. Call me later, okay? I love you."

"I love you, too," murmured the man, before disconnected the call.

"He knocked on the window at about five this morning," Pete whispered to Sophie. "American bloke, he is. He saw the piano man advertisement in the window and asked to see the instrument. He bloody looked over my piano like an antique dealer would over Queen Victoria's smelling salts. Didn't have the heart to tell him I bought it for fifty quid from a guy who was taking it to the tip."

Pete chuckled, shaking his head.

"Anyway, he asked for the job, and played bloody Rachmaninoff or something to prove to me that he was a pianist. Get this, then he offers to work for no pay."

Sophie raised her eyebrows in disbelief. "He is working for no wages?"

Pete nodded. "In exchange, he can play whatever he likes during the day. Looks like he's working on something." Pete shrugged. "Doesn't bother me. My piano bar finally has a piano man, and I don't have to pay him. It's like bloody Christmas."

"What sort of nutter would work for no wages?" Sophie asked him.

"The kind who is on a deadline and has perfectly good hearing," interjected the piano man, who looked up from his notes for the first time.

His intense, blue eyes met hers, and he stared at her, frowning, appraising.

Sophie self-consciously looked away, not wanting any sort of scrutinisation in her current state.

"Sorry," she muttered in apology.

The piano man said nothing more, returning to his sheet music, and sporadically playing passages of true art. He kept at it for most of the morning, and Sophie found that she quite liked having the sound of the piano in the background, even if the pianist lost his temper ever few bars and stopped playing.

It made her wonder what sort of work he did.

Pete kept to his word and put Maddie to work. Maddie obeyed him immediately, and that cut Sophie more than it should have.

She looked terribly cute with a broom that was entirely too big for her, as she clumsily swept the previous night's peanut shells into messy piles.

Just before eleven in the morning, when Sophie had unpacked Maddie's morning tea for her, Sophie's phone rang.

As soon as she looked at the caller, her heart sank. It was the school. She hit the answer button, and said, "Hello, Sophie speaking," shakily.

"Good morning, Ms Cartwright," said Ann Peddington, the assistant principal of Maddie's school.

"Good morning, Ms Peddington."

"Our records indicate that Maddie is absent againtoday," she said disapprovingly.

Sophie winced. She knew that the school was not judging her. They were not like the other gossipy mothers. They had put into place every method of support possible to help with Maddie's struggles. Nothing seemed to work.

"I know, I am terribly sorry. She refused again this morning," Sophie said apologetically.

"Yes, well, Maddie's start to the school year has been less than ideal. Ms Cartwright, I would like you to come into school tomorrow morning for a meeting with myself, the principal, and Maddie's teacher. Would nine o'clock be convenient?"

Oh, God, what were they going to say? Were they going to report Sophie to child welfare? Would she be labelled an unfit mother? Would Maddie be expelled from school?

"Yes," squeaked Sophie.

"Excellent. We shall try and get Maddie into the classroom again tomorrow morning, and then we will devise a plan moving forward."

Sophie's stomach settled a little as soon as Ms Peddington said "we". Perhaps she wasn't putting the blame entirely on Sophie.

"Thank you, Ms Peddington," Sophie said gratefully.

"Have a good afternoon, Ms Cartwright." The call then disconnected.

Sophie put her phone away in her back pocket, and immediately noticed that both Maddie and the piano man were watching her. Maddie more accusingly.

"What did she want?" Maddie sneered angrily.

"Eat your apple, please," Sophie encouraged her, walking out from behind the bar.

Maddie reluctantly took an apple segment. "I won't go tomorrow. You can't make me. I hate it there!" she cried.

Sophie needed to physically stop herself from swearing. "Maddie, it's school, not prison. They only want to help you!"

"They all treat me like I'm dumb," Maddie complained, stuffing some apple into her mouth.

Sophie slumped down into the chair next to Maddie. "Maddie, you are not dumb, and there is nothing wrong with needing a little help."

God knew that Sophie needed it.

---

I have had this story in my head for YEARS. It has taken me so long to get it right. I think I first thought of this story when I started my master's back in 2016 hahaha.

Anyway, I hope you liked it, and are intrugued enough to continue! I know it's not what you guys are used to from me - but I do have modern day ideas from time to time! Hahahah

I hope you all are safe at the moment. I've been thinking about you all. I just can't actually fathom what is happening right now. It seems so bloody medieval that this sort of thing could happen in this day and age.

I am healthy and safe, and all my family are okay, thankfully. I hope the same for all of you!

It warms my heart every time I see a comment where you guys say that my authors note shenanigans have made you laugh, or that my chapter has made you happy. That's all I can hope to do. So I will do my best during this time to create a place where you can come and find all the hopeless romance there is. We've all seen the news. We've had enough!

Vote and comment xx