Everyone Told Her to Sell Grandmother's Piano — Soundboard Cavity Had $178M in Rare Coins

Everyone Told Her to Sell Grandmother's Piano — Soundboard Cavity Had $178M in Rare Coins

The auctioneer's hammer hovered in the air, ready to strike. "Going once for $200..." Sarah Chen's hand trembled as she gripped the edge of the folding chair. Around her, estate sale vultures whispered and pointed at the 1927 Steinway grand piano that had belonged to her grandmother. Two hundred dollars. That's all anyone thought it was worth. A beaten-up relic with cracked ivory keys and a soundboard that hadn't been tuned in thirty years.
"Going twice..."
Sarah thought about the eviction notice folded in her purse. Forty-eight hours until the sheriff came. Forty-eight hours until she and her seven-year-old daughter Lily would be on the street. The piano could bring maybe three, four hundred if she was lucky. Enough for a security deposit on something cheaper. Enough to survive another month.
But it was the last thing she had left of Grandma Rose. The last connection to the woman who'd raised her when her own parents couldn't be bothered. The woman who'd taught her that music could heal anything, could make the unbearable bearable.
"Sold for $200 to the gentleman in the back!"
Sarah's stomach dropped. She hadn't raised her hand. Someone else had bought it. A man in an expensive suit who looked like he bought antiques for sport, not sentiment.
She stood up too fast, knocking her chair backward. "Wait!"
The auctioneer looked over his reading glasses at her. "The sale is final, miss."
"That piano belongs to me. It's my grandmother's."
"Then you should have bid on it." The man in the suit was already filling out paperwork, a smug smile on his face.
Sarah pushed through the crowd of bargain hunters picking over her grandmother's estate like crows on a carcass. Forty years of life reduced to lot numbers and liquidation prices. The dining table that had hosted every holiday dinner: sold for $75. The china cabinet filled with hand-painted teacups from Rose's travels: sold for $120. The quilts Rose had stitched by hand during the dark Minnesota winters: sold in a bundle for $30.
"Please," Sarah said to the auctioneer. "That piano—it's all I have left of her. Can't I match the bid?"
The man in the suit turned to her, his expression somewhere between pity and contempt. "Little late for sentimentality, don't you think? This whole estate went up for auction because someone didn't pay the property taxes." He looked her up and down, taking in her thrift-store jeans and the coat with the broken zipper she'd been meaning to fix for two years. "If you cared so much, maybe you should have taken care of your grandmother's affairs before the county seized everything."
The words hit like a slap. Sarah felt tears burning behind her eyes but refused to let them fall. Not here. Not in front of these people.
"I tried," she whispered. "I tried so hard."
It was true. When Grandma Rose died six months ago, Sarah had been drowning in her own financial crisis. A single mother working two jobs—mornings at the hospital cafeteria, evenings cleaning office buildings—barely making rent on a one-bedroom apartment she shared with Lily. When she'd discovered Rose had died owing $8,000 in back property taxes on the small house in St. Paul, Sarah had called every agency, every charity, every distant relative she could find.
No one helped. No one cared.


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