Chapter 3: What Remains

“The note you had me listen to. At Nora Bell’s.”

The name was quite distinct. She had no need to angle her head or watch his mouth.

“What about it?”

“Why did you change it back?”

She fitted the mute into its pocket, narrow end first. It went too far down, and she had to pinch the canvas around it to bring it up again.

“You make adjustments. You listen, then you adjust.”

“I know.”

He said it without the quickness she had expected. She looked at him. His hand had come off the lever, and both hands were now below the table.

“Sometimes something sounds right on its own,” she said, “and you have to hear it with the notes around it.”

“You did that.”

She remembered the neighboring keys beneath her fingers. The little passage she had played. He had been standing close enough to see everything, which was where she had wanted him.

“Yes.”

“Then you played it by itself. And it stopped doing that thing.”

He moved a finger from side to side above the tabletop, a small, uncertain gesture.

“The beating,” she said.

“Then you moved the handle again, and it started.”

There was a reasonable explanation for making another adjustment after a note had sounded clean. There were several. She could give him one, and he would have only the sound he remembered to set against it. He had come here to learn where things belonged in a bag.

She picked up the wrapped lever. The fold was good. She could not improve it without undoing his work.

“Yes,” she said again.

He waited.

The radiator gave a click. She heard that, and the slight drag of his shoe as he brought his feet beneath the chair. From next door came a dull movement she could not identify. She found herself attending to it as though it required an answer.

“Was it because I said it was finished?” he asked.

She looked up.

“No.”

“I thought perhaps I wasn’t supposed to say that. Because I don’t really know.”

“You heard it correctly.”

The words left her before she could soften them. He sat a little farther back, but did not look away.

She laid the lever across the open bag. Its weight drew the canvas inward. She put a hand beneath it, holding it clear of the other tools, and remained like that longer than she needed to.

“There was still something to come back for,” she said.

He looked at the bag, then at her.

“Because you left it?”

She nodded.