You seriously expect him to play that?
I expect you to wait.
This should be interesting.
It will be.
The sequence steadied him. It was not superstition exactly. It was orientation—true north made of human voices. He could be in a train station in another country, or in a green room that smelled of hairspray and nerves, and the ten lines would return him to waxed wood and lemon heat and the dangling sneakers that had not yet learned they were about to become a story.
When the Harold Quince Fund began to receive more applications than it could fund, Noah convened a small board that included Elena, Camila, and a retired hotel manager who reminded him of Luis. They argued productively about need and merit and the falsehood of separating them. Elena pushed hardest for applicants who wrote awkwardly, whose forms arrived stained with coffee, whose mothers' schedules made interviews nearly impossible. "Those are our people," she said. "Polished desperation already knows the doors. Hungry quiet does not."