A Janitor Played a Secret Song at Christmas—Then the CEO Realized Who He Really Was
ACT 1 — IMMEDIATE CONTINUATION
The next morning, Victoria arrived at the office two hours early, her eyes shadowed from lack of sleep. She pulled Marcus Reed’s employee file and spread it across her desk. The information was sparse, almost deliberately so. Hired three years ago as maintenance staff. No college degree listed. Previous employment at a warehouse, a grocery store, odd jobs.
Emergency contact listed as Emma Reed, age seven, daughter.
No mention of a wife or partner currently.
The file said nothing about music, nothing about talent, nothing that explained how a man working night shifts fixing toilets and changing light bulbs could play like that.
Victoria picked up her phone and dialed a number she hadn’t called in over a decade.
“Dr. Lawrence Kent, please.”
Lawrence Kent had been Daniel’s mentor at the conservatory. The professor who’d recognized genius in a seventeen-year-old with more passion than discipline.
“I need to see you. Today. It’s about Daniel.”
There was a long pause on the other end. “I’ll come to your office. Give me four hours.”
When Dr. Kent arrived that evening, a lean man in his late fifties with silver-streaked hair and kind eyes, Victoria played him a recording she’d found online. Someone had filmed Marcus playing last night on their phone and posted it to a private group for employees.
The video quality was poor. The audio tinny. But the melody came through clear enough.
Dr. Kent listened in silence, his expression unreadable.
“That’s remarkable,” he said when the video ended.
“Is it Starlet Promise? Daniel’s song?”
Dr. Kent hesitated. And in that hesitation, Victoria saw the weight of secrets kept too long.
“It’s the same melody, yes. But Victoria, I need to tell you something. Something I should have told you sixteen years ago, but I didn’t because I thought it would hurt you more than help.”
“Daniel didn’t finish that song.”
The words landed like a physical blow.
“He wrote the opening, the first eight bars. And he was brilliant—he always was. But he got stuck. Couldn’t figure out where to take it. There was another student at camp that summer. Quiet kid, talented, but overlooked. From a poor family. Daniel asked him for help.”
Victoria’s hands gripped the edge of her desk.
“The other student took Daniel’s opening and completed it. Turned those eight bars into something extraordinary. But then Daniel died, and the song became his legacy. I never corrected the record because I thought it would dishonor his memory. Daniel was my star pupil. Admitting he hadn’t finished his masterpiece felt like diminishing him somehow.”
“Who was the other student?”
“I don’t remember his name. It’s been so long. When Daniel died, he just disappeared. Didn’t return to camp the following summer. I assumed he’d given up music entirely.”
Victoria felt the room tilt.
“Marcus Reed. The man who played last night. Could it have been him?”
Dr. Kent looked at the frozen frame of the video on her laptop screen—Marcus’s face illuminated by the piano’s reading light, eyes closed in something that looked like prayer or penance.
“I don’t know. Maybe. The face doesn’t trigger any memories, but it’s been sixteen years. People change.”
He closed the laptop gently.
“But there’s only one way to find out. Ask him.”
Victoria tried. She called down to the maintenance department.
“Is Marcus Reed working tonight?”
The supervisor sounded confused. “No, ma’am. He called in sick this morning. First time in three years.”
“What about tomorrow?”
“He requested personal days through the end of the week.”
Something cold settled in Victoria’s stomach.
“I need his address.”
She sent Tom Morrison, her head of security, to check on Marcus. Tom returned an hour later with news that made her blood run cold.
“Boss, I went to the address on file. Apartment building on the east side. Pretty rough neighborhood. The landlord says Reed and his daughter moved out three days ago. Paid rent through the end of the month in cash. Left no forwarding address. Wouldn’t say where they were going.”
Victoria’s hand trembled as she reached for her phone.
Three days ago. That was before the party. Before she’d confronted him. He’d already been planning to disappear.
“Did anyone see them leave?”
“Neighbor across the hall said they left early morning with just a couple suitcases. The little girl was crying. Reed told her they were going on an adventure, but the neighbor said he looked scared.”
Victoria felt panic claw at her chest.
She’d driven him away. Her questions, her intensity, her desperate need for answers had frightened him off. But why? What was he hiding? Or more accurately, what was he protecting?
ACT 2 — CONTEXT & ESCALATION
Victoria spent the next two weeks consumed by the search. She hired a private investigator who found nothing. Marcus Reed seemed to have vanished completely. No credit card charges, no cell phone pings, no trace of him or Emma anywhere in the city.
The absence gnawed at her. Not just because of the unanswered questions about the song—though those haunted her dreams—but because she’d seen something in his eyes that night. A recognition that went deeper than strangers meeting by chance.
He’d looked at her like he knew her. Really knew her. In a way that most people never could.
And then he’d run.
Meanwhile, the rest of her carefully constructed life began to fracture.
Preston grew increasingly insistent about wedding plans. Showing up at her office with seating charts and menu tastings she had no interest in. The merger between Sterling Capital and his investment firm was scheduled to close in mid-February, two weeks after their wedding.
Her father called daily from his retirement in Palm Springs to ensure she wasn’t jeopardizing the deal with cold feet.
But Victoria couldn’t focus on any of it. Her mind kept returning to that moment when Marcus’s fingers touched the piano keys and sixteen years collapsed into nothing. To the way he’d held his daughter with such fierce gentleness. To the sorrow that seemed to permeate his very bones.
The cruelest thing about losing someone isn’t that they’re gone. It’s discovering you never really knew them at all.
She whispered the words to herself late one night, standing at her penthouse window overlooking the city.
Daniel had secrets she never knew. A collaboration he never mentioned. A song that wasn’t entirely his own.
And now this stranger carried the truth of it in his scarred hands and wouldn’t stay still long enough for her to understand.
Two weeks after Marcus disappeared, on a night when snow fell thick and heavy, Victoria was about to leave the office when she heard it again.
Piano music. Drifting up from the lobby. Faint, haunting, unmistakable.
She didn’t call for the elevator. Ran down the stairs instead. Heels clicking on marble, breath coming too fast, afraid that if she moved too slowly, he would vanish again like smoke.
The lobby was empty except for a single figure seated at the piano.
Marcus. His back was to her, shoulders hunched as if bearing an invisible weight. He played “Starlet Promise” again, but this time it sounded different. Sadder, more resigned. Like a man saying goodbye to something he’d loved too long from too far away.
“You came back.” Her voice echoed in the empty space.
Marcus’s hands stilled on the keys. He didn’t turn around.
“I shouldn’t have run. Emma asked me why we left. I couldn’t give her a good answer.”
He finally turned, and Victoria saw the exhaustion etched into every line of his face.
“I owed you the truth. Even if you hate me for it.”
Victoria moved closer, her footsteps careful on the marble. “I could never hate you for playing beautifully. But I need to understand. That song—Starlet Promise. Daniel Cross was supposed to have written it for me before he died. But Dr. Kent told me Daniel didn’t finish it. Someone else did.”
She stopped directly behind him.
“Was it you?”
Marcus stood slowly, his movements deliberate. Up close, Victoria could see the silver threaded through his light brown hair, the fine lines around his eyes that spoke of too many sleepless nights. But his eyes—gray-green and achingly honest—held hers without flinching.
“Yes. It was me.”
Victoria’s knees nearly buckled. She gripped the edge of the piano to steady herself.
“Why? Why would you do that? Why would you let him take credit?”
“Because he loved you. And I was nobody.”
Marcus stepped back from the piano, creating distance. “Just some kid who played because he had to, not because he was destined for greatness like Daniel. I was at that music camp on a scholarship I could barely afford. My dad died when I was fifteen. He was a mechanic, died under a car when the jack failed. My mom cleaned houses. My little sister needed braces we couldn’t pay for.”
He turned toward the windows, unable to meet her eyes.
“I worked nights washing dishes at a diner just to afford bus fare to camp and back. Fifty-two hours a week scrubbing pots and mopping floors so I could spend my days pretending I belonged with kids whose parents wrote checks without blinking.”
“I played piano because it was the only time I felt like I mattered. Like I was more than just some poor kid from the wrong side of town who smelled like dish soap and couldn’t afford new shoes.”
“And then I saw you.”
The confession hung between them like a physical thing.
“You probably don’t remember. Why would you? I was invisible. But I watched you laugh with Daniel. Watched the way your eyes lit up when he played. And I thought—that’s what love looks like. That’s what it means to matter to someone.”
“So I wrote a love song for you. Daniel just delivered it. He knew I had feelings I couldn’t express. He wasn’t cruel about it. He offered to tell you the truth, but I said no. I told him you were meant for someone like him. Someone brilliant and confident and whole. Not someone like me who’d never be anything more than the guy washing dishes in the back.”
Victoria found her voice, though it emerged hoarse. “And then he died.”
“And then he died,” Marcus echoed, his voice breaking on the words. “And I let the song be his legacy because it made you happy. Because it gave you something to hold on to. And I went home and tried to forget I’d ever been anyone other than what I am now.”
ACT 3 — RISING TO CLIMAX
Victoria’s tears came then, hot and unchecked. The man she’d mourned for sixteen years hadn’t written the song that saved her. A stranger had. A boy who loved her from the shadows and gave away his heart without ever expecting anything in return.
The revelation shattered something fundamental in her understanding of her own history.
“What happened to you?” The question came out desperate. “Dr. Kent said you were talented. Why are you fixing pipes instead of playing concert halls?”
Marcus held up his right hand, turning it so she could see the scars that webbed across his palm and up his wrist. The damaged tissue caught the light, creating shadows in the valleys where surgical steel had tried and failed to completely restore what had been destroyed.
“Three years after that summer, I signed a contract with a performance company. Sterling Productions. Your father’s company. It was supposed to be my big break. Regional concert series, twenty cities. My name on posters for the first time in my life.”
Victoria felt ice crawl up her spine.
“Opening night, Cleveland. I got there early for rehearsal. Stage crew was setting up rigging for lights. I was walking past when I heard this crack. Metal fatigue. The whole truss started to fall. There was a cellist right under it. Young woman, maybe nineteen. Juilliard student. She didn’t see it coming.”
He looked down at his hand.
“I shoved her out of the way. Got my hand caught in the rigging when it came down. Half a ton of equipment. The bones were pulverized—like crushing an egg in your fist.”
His voice went flat. Emotionless.
“Three surgeries couldn’t fix it completely.”
Victoria’s vision blurred. Her father’s company. Her family’s negligence—had destroyed this man’s future.
“Your father’s company settled quietly with everyone involved. I got enough to cover medical bills. Barely. $75,000. Medical bills were $68,000. The surgeries, the physical therapy, the specialist consultations that went nowhere. Contract was terminated two weeks after I got out of the hospital.”
“How much was the contract worth?”
“Three hundred thousand for the tour. Plus recording opportunities if the series went well. Potential endorsements. Dr. Kent said I could have had a real career. Nothing stratospheric, but solid, respectable. Enough to support a family and do what I loved.”
Victoria felt bile rise in her throat.
“And my father gave you $75,000.”
Marcus’s smile held no warmth. “So I learned to fix the things that break. Seemed fitting, don’t you think? The broken pianist fixing broken pipes.”
Preston arrived at her office unannounced one Tuesday afternoon. His expression harder than she’d seen it before.
“We need to talk about the wedding.”
Victoria didn’t look up from her computer. “Not now, Preston. I’m in the middle of the Riverside contracts.”
“It’s been four weeks since you’ve answered any of my planning emails. The caterer needs final numbers. The venue needs a deposit. My mother’s been calling your assistant because you won’t return her calls.”
His voice rose with each sentence.
“Are you even planning to show up, or should I start canceling things?”
Victoria finally met his eyes. “Do you love me, Preston? Really love me? Not the merger. Not the business opportunity. Me.”
The question caught him off guard. “What kind of question is that?”
“A simple one. Do you love me?”
Preston’s jaw worked silently for a long moment. “I care about you. I respect you. I think we make a good partnership. That’s more than most marriages have.”
“But you don’t love me.”
“Love is for children and poets. We’re adults building empires. What we have is better than love. It’s strategic, sustainable, mutually beneficial.”
Victoria thought about Marcus’s scarred hands on piano keys. Playing a song he’d written as a teenager for a girl he’d never spoken to. Thought about the way he held Emma like she was the entire world.
“Love is for children and poets,” she agreed. “And apparently for janitors who give away their hearts without expecting anything in return. But not for people like us.”
Preston’s expression shifted to calculation. “This is about him, isn’t it? The maintenance worker who played piano at the Christmas party. I’ve seen you talking to him.”
“He has a name. Marcus Reed.”
“I don’t care what his name is. I care that you’re jeopardizing everything we’ve built because of some misguided attraction to the help.”
Preston pulled out his phone, tapped the screen, and handed it to her.
Victoria stared at the spreadsheet displayed on the screen. Wire transfers from Sterling Capital accounts to Shaw Investment Partners. Dates and amounts that didn’t match any merger documents she’d signed.
“What is this?”
“Insurance. In case you get any ideas about calling off the wedding, those transfers could look like embezzlement if someone wanted to spin them that way. Or they could look like standard merger preparation. Depends on who’s controlling the narrative.”
“This is blackmail.”
“This is business. The wedding happens in two weeks. The merger closes. We all walk away winners.”
He took his phone back.
“Or things get messy, and everyone loses. Your choice, Victoria.”
After he left, Victoria sat in frozen silence. Then she called her assistant.
“I need you to pull every financial document related to the Shaw Investment Partners merger. Every wire transfer, every approval, every email. And I need you to do it quietly. Don’t tell anyone what you’re looking for.”
The assistant returned three hours later with a flash drive and a grim expression.
“Boss, you need to see this.”
What Sarah had found went beyond simple irregularities. Preston had been systematically siphoning funds from his own firm for over a year, covering the theft with false projections and inflated asset valuations. The merger wasn’t about creating a powerhouse. It was about giving Preston access to Sterling Capital’s accounts to hide the $42 million he’d stolen from his investors.
The wedding wasn’t a partnership. It was a bailout.
“How did I not see this?”
“He’s good at hiding things. These shell companies in the Caymans, the consulting fees that don’t correspond to any actual services. He’s been planning this for at least two years. Waiting for the right opportunity.”
“The right prey, you mean. He chose me because he knew my father would push for the merger. Knew I’d be so focused on business terms that I wouldn’t look at his books closely enough.”
Victoria looked at the evidence of Preston’s fraud. Thought about how close she’d come to walking into his trap. All because she’d been too frozen to feel anything strongly enough to question it.
“I’m going to end this tonight.”
ACT 4 — RESOLUTION & TRANSFORMATION
The board meeting the next afternoon was brutal. Twelve members, seven men, five women, ranging in age from 48 to 73. Richard sat at the far end of the table—a violation of his retirement agreement, but one no one dared challenge.
Victoria presented the evidence methodically. Each slide an incontrovertible case of systematic fraud.
“Preston Shaw has been embezzling from his firm for eighteen months and using our merger as cover to hide the theft. The relationship I’ve been pursuing with him was based on false pretenses.”
Richard spoke with cold fury. “Or it’s about protecting your new relationship. Let’s address the elephant in the room. You’ve been conducting an inappropriate relationship with a maintenance worker.”
“He has a name. Marcus Reed. And yes, I care about him, but that has nothing to do with Preston’s embezzlement.”
“Everything has to do with everything. You want to know why Marcus Reed is really here? Why a failed pianist with a crushed hand suddenly reappears in your life right when you’re about to complete the most important merger of your career?”
He moved around the table like a predator closing in.
“Because he sees an opportunity. A lonely CEO with too much money and too few emotional attachments. He played you a song, told you a sad story, and now you’re willing to destroy everything to play savior.”
“Marcus Reed wrote ‘Starlet Promise,'” Victoria said.
The room went silent.
“The song my first love supposedly composed for me before he died. Daniel Cross started it but couldn’t finish it. Marcus completed it without taking credit because he loved me from a distance and wanted me to have something beautiful—even if I never knew it came from him.”
She turned to face her father across the conference table.
“That was sixteen years ago, before he had any idea who I’d become or what I’d inherit. And twelve years ago, your cost-cutting at Sterling Productions destroyed his career when substandard equipment you personally approved crushed his hand. You ruined his life for a $300,000 contract and a quarterly profit margin.”
Margaret Chen, the oldest board member, cleared her throat. “Victoria, I appreciate your honesty, but how do we know your judgment isn’t compromised?”
“Because I’m bringing you evidence. Not feelings, not personal vendettas. Financial records that any forensic accountant would recognize as fraud. If I were acting on emotion, I’d have quietly canceled the wedding and buried Preston’s crimes to avoid scandal. Instead, I’m exposing everything and accepting whatever consequences follow.”
She met her father’s eyes.
“That’s not compromised judgment. That’s integrity.”
The board voted seven to five to support her decision to terminate the Shaw merger and report Preston’s activities to authorities. They affirmed her position as CEO.
Richard stood abruptly, his chair scraping against expensive flooring. “This is a mistake. When the stock price tanks and investors flee, don’t come crying to me to fix it.”
“You are welcome to your opinion. But the decision is made.”
Her father walked out without another word.
Two board members who’d voted against her followed. Allies lost, but fewer than she’d feared.
When the room finally emptied, Victoria sat in Richard’s old chair and let herself shake.
Tom Morrison found her ten minutes later. “Boss, we’ve got Preston Shaw in custody downstairs. FBI showed up with a warrant based on the evidence you provided. Turns out the SEC had been investigating his firm for months. Your documentation gave them everything they needed.”
“There’s someone else here to see you.”
Marcus stood in her office doorway, Emma holding his hand. The girl broke free and ran to Victoria, wrapping small arms around her waist.
“You did it! Sarah told us you won.”
Victoria hugged Emma back, feeling tears threatened for the first time all day. “I did. It’s over.”
Marcus crossed the room and pulled both of them into his embrace. His scarred hands settled on Victoria’s shoulder, solid and real.
“I’m proud of you.”
“I lost my father. Maybe permanently this time.”
“You found yourself. That’s worth the trade.”
ACT 5 — REFLECTION & AFTERMATH
The months that followed were not easy. News of Preston’s arrest and the broken merger sent Sterling Capital stock into temporary freefall. Investors demanded explanations. Richard gave interviews from Palm Springs, painting his daughter as emotionally unstable.
But slowly, steadily, the company recovered. Victoria implemented the transparency measures the board required and went further—establishing an ethics committee, creating whistleblower protections, auditing every subsidiary for the kind of corner-cutting that had destroyed Marcus’s career.
Sterling Capital emerged leaner but stronger, with a reputation for integrity that attracted investors tired of corporate malfeasance.
Marcus returned to music gradually, carefully. He started teaching at the community center Victoria had quietly upgraded with new instruments and soundproofing. Emma thrived in his classes, her natural talent emerging under her father’s patient guidance.
Other children from low-income families joined. Kids who’d never had access to quality music education before.
In April, Dr. Kent visited with unexpected news.
“There’s a new microsurgical technique being pioneered at Johns Hopkins. Nerve reconstruction for old crush injuries. They’ve had promising results with patients who were told their damage was permanent.”
Marcus shook his head. “I’ve made peace with what I lost. I don’t need to get it back.”
“But what if you could? Not all of it, but enough to perform again. Enough to show Emma what you were before the accident.”
Emma settled into Victoria’s lap. “I want to hear you play the way Grandma’s videos show—before the accident, when your hands could do anything.”
Marcus’s resistance crumbled under his daughter’s earnest gaze.
“If I try this and it fails, if my hand ends up worse than it is now—”
“Then we’ll deal with it together. But if you don’t try, you’ll always wonder.”
The surgery happened in July. Eight hours of microsurgical reconstruction that left Marcus unconscious for a day and in pain for weeks after. Victoria took leave from the office to be there, fielding board calls from the hospital waiting room while Emma colored pictures to hang in her father’s recovery room.
The recovery was brutal. Five hours daily of physical therapy, exercises that left him sweating and swearing and questioning why he’d agreed to this.
Emma practiced piano in his presence, her small fingers working through scales and simple melodies. Sometimes Marcus would reach out with his damaged hand, trying to mirror her movements, failing more often than succeeding.
But gradually, incrementally, function returned.
By September, he could play simple pieces again. By October, he was performing intermediate compositions with only occasional cramping. The hand would never be perfect, would never have the complete fluidity it once possessed. But it was functional enough to teach, to demonstrate, to create music that mattered.
In November, Dr. Kent proposed something audacious.
“There’s a benefit concert for the music scholarship program we’ve established in Daniel Cross and Marcus Reed’s names. December twenty-second. I think you should perform.”
Marcus’s immediate reaction was terror. “I’m not ready. What if I fail publicly? What if my hand cramps mid-performance and everyone sees?”
“You’re always telling me it’s okay to make mistakes when I practice,” Emma said. “Why is it different for you?”
Victoria added her voice. “You taught me that being brave means doing what’s right even when you’re scared. Now let me teach you—it’s okay to try and fall short. The courage is in the attempt, not the perfection.”
Marcus agreed, though his anxiety built with each passing week.
The Sterling Tower Ballroom filled to capacity on December twenty-second. The event had attracted attention beyond their expectations—the story of the janitor turned composer, the CEO who chose integrity over profit, the romance that nearly destroyed an empire but rebuilt it stronger.
When the lights dimmed and the audience quieted, Marcus walked on stage with Emma’s hand in his. He settled at the grand piano while Emma perched on a small bench beside him, exactly as they’d practiced.
His fingers found the keys. The opening notes of “Starlet Promise” filled the ballroom with crystalline clarity. This was the piece that had started everything—the song he’d written for an eighteen-year-old girl he’d loved from afar, completed what a dying boy had started, given away without claiming credit.
Now he played it publicly for the first time. Every note carrying sixteen years of patience and pain and impossible hope.
Midway through, his hand cramped. His fingers stuttered over the keys. Emma reached over and touched his shoulder—just a light pressure, solidarity without words.
Marcus pushed through. Compensating with his left hand, simplifying passages his right couldn’t handle, transforming technical limitations into emotional interpretation.
The final notes hung in the air like prayers.
The audience erupted with a standing ovation that went on so long Victoria feared they’d never let him continue. But Marcus raised his hand for silence and spoke into the microphone for the first time.
“This final piece is new. I call it ‘Second Movement’ because every great piece of music has more than one part. And this—all of this—is just our beginning.”
He began to play, and Victoria understood why he’d kept the composition secret until now. The melody built from “Starlet Promise’s” themes but transformed them. Where the original spoke of yearning and distance, this new piece spoke of connection and courage. Where the original was lonely, this was communal. Where the original grieved, this celebrated.
Emma joined him for the final phrases. Her small hands picking out a simple counter-melody he’d taught her. Father and daughter creating something together, imperfect and honest and achingly human.
When the music ended, Marcus stood with Emma in his arms and found Victoria in the crowd.
She made her way to the stage through applause that felt less like appreciation and more like witness to something sacred.
Marcus took her hand. Emma hugged them both.
A photographer captured the moment—not CEO and employee, not rich woman and poor man, but three people who had chosen each other against every reasonable objection.
Six months later, on a Sunday afternoon when cherry blossoms drifted through city parks like pink snow, Marcus and Victoria sat on a bench watching Emma chase butterflies through spring grass.
“I’ve been thinking about the song,” Victoria said, leaning into Marcus’s shoulder. “Starlet Promise. It has an ending now, but it still feels unfinished somehow. Like it’s still being written.”
Marcus laced his scarred fingers through hers.
“Maybe that’s the point. Maybe the best promises aren’t the ones we make once and lock away. Maybe they’re the ones we keep remaking every day in a thousand small ways.”
Victoria turned to look at him. This man who’d loved her for sixteen years without expectation. Who’d sacrificed dreams to give her something beautiful. Who’d chosen truth even when it cost him everything.
“Then make me a promise. Not forever—not some grand declaration. Just promise me today that you’ll keep playing. That you’ll keep teaching Emma. That you’ll keep showing me what it means to love something even when it’s hard.”
He kissed her soft and sure.
“I promise.”
Emma ran back to them, breathless and grinning. “There’s a piano player over by the fountain. He’s pretty good, but not as good as you, Daddy.”
They walked toward the fountain, Emma skipping ahead. And Marcus thought about how sixteen years ago he’d been a scared kid who poured his heart into eight bars of music, never imagining where those notes would lead.
To this moment. To her. To us.
The pianist by the fountain was young, maybe nineteen, playing with more enthusiasm than polish. But there was something pure in his effort. When the boy finished his song and looked up nervously, expecting criticism, Marcus clapped.
“That was beautiful. Keep playing—even when it’s hard. Even when people tell you you’re not good enough. Even when your hands hurt and your heart is breaking. Keep playing, because the world needs your music, even if you think no one’s listening.”
The young musician’s face lit up with gratitude and relief.
Marcus, Victoria, and Emma sat on the fountain’s edge to listen. An unlikely family bound by love that had waited patiently for sixteen years to be claimed.
Above them, cherry blossoms fell like grace.
Some songs are too important not to sing. Daniel wrote the beginning. Marcus wrote the middle. But the ending—the ending is still being written by all of them together.