"You wanted a show," she said, not loudly. "A show is usually fast. This is the other thing training is for."
She played the Allemande from the G major French Suite, Bach, dancing and exact, the sort of piece that sounds like manners and is actually architecture. The Steinway's clarity made each voice visible. Her hands, warmed now, remembered the fingerings Voss had drilled until remembering became muscle and muscle became choice. She did not rush the places she felt safe. The bass stayed. For two pages the Winslow was a room with a pulse it had not ordered and could not send back. A man near the bar stopped pretending to look at his phone. The woman at the next table put her hand on her husband's wrist, not to shush him, he was already silent, but to have somewhere to put the feeling.
Claire did not play the whole suite. She was not a recital. She was a woman in an apron who had made a point and did not need to bludgeon it. She ended the Allemande at its proper cadence, clean, and lifted her hands. This time the applause came quicker, and she liked it less. Applause could turn a true thing into a stunt if you held still for it too long. She stood. She pushed the bench in, carefully, the way Ruth had taught her to leave an instrument: as if someone else would need it to be honest later.
Martin's face, when she finally looked, was unreadable in the professional way, which meant readable to anyone who knew him. He was angry. He was also, against his job description, moved. He pitched his voice under the room.
"Office. After you finish nine and the four-top. Not before. If you abandon a table to have a feeling, I will remember it longer than I remember the Bach."
"I'm finishing," Claire said.
"See that you do." He glanced at the Rowes, already restoring the surface. "Madam. I apologize for the interruption. The next course is coming. Claire will take care of you."
Evelyn found a version of her smile. It did not fit as well as it had an hour ago. "No apology on my account. We asked."
"Even so," Martin said, because the Winslow apologized for disruptions the way churches apologized for weather, as a matter of form. He moved off to intercept Diane, who had appeared in the doorway from the kitchen pass with the expression of a person who has heard music through a wall and knows it is about to become a meeting.