"Badly," Natalie said. "But with enormous conviction."
Something moved at the corner of Claire's mouth. It was not a smile. It was the place a smile might go, someday, if the ground were cleared for it.
"That's how I played at twelve," she said, and went down the stairs.
* * *
She called in December. They met again in January, at a coffee shop on South Pearl, and again in February. In March, on the first anniversary of Ruth's death, Claire asked Natalie to come to Mount Olivet Cemetery with her and Martin, and Natalie stood a little apart while Martin, gray now and stooped, set a pot of hyacinths on the grave and talked to his wife about the piano he was restoring. When he was finished, he turned and looked at Natalie for a long moment, and then he held out his hand, and when she took it he did not let go for a while.
Emma met Claire in April, at Emma's spring orchestra concert in a middle school gymnasium in Highlands Ranch. Claire sat in the back row on a folding chair, alone, because she had said she did not want to be introduced as anything; she just wanted to listen. Afterward, in the crowded hallway that smelled of floor wax and pizza, Emma walked straight up to her with her cello case on her back, as if she had known her whole life which face to look for, and said, "You're Claire," and Claire said, "You rushed the third movement," and Emma said, "Everybody rushes the third movement," and that was that. Adam, watching from by the trophy case, made a sound that Natalie had only heard from him once before, in a hospital room at three in the morning, holding a paper cup of ice chips.