The Tuner's Ear

The room has been listening since 1913. It will tell her what happened - but it charges.
Margo Dolan tunes pianos. She has ten days to make a 1921 Steinway playable before the Verhagen hotel goes under the hammer, and then she is gone.
Her first night alone in the ballroom, a woman counts two, three, four at her shoulder.
The room has rules. It cannot make a new sound. It cannot answer her. It cannot follow her out the door. It plays back what was played in it - and it takes payment. A minute of September 1974 costs her a minute of her own: a sound she carries in her head, named out loud before she listens, and gone for good afterward.
Elias Verhagen is the last of the family. He hasn't cooked since the fire. He sleeps in room 214 because the house in town has a kitchen in it. In ten days he will have sold everything his grandfather buried.
What the room knows will cost him his name.
What it costs her, she doesn't tell him.
Ten days. Three payments. And a man who has never once said what he wants.
Read if you like: haunted hotels, slow burn, closed-door romance, small-town secrets kept for fifty years, a heroine with a real trade and no magic at all, and a hero who has to learn how to ask.