Pianist: I expect you to wait.
Guest: This should be interesting.
Noah: It will be.
He smiled at Elena. "Then I played. And the interesting thing, it turned out, was not whether a catering worker's child could land his fingers on the right keys. The interesting thing was how many people in a beautiful room were willing, after one honest hour, to become slightly better than their first sentence."
He stood. He thanked Harold Quince, absent and present. He thanked Elena, who had walked him out of corridors and into rooms. He thanked Luis Ortega, long retired to a sister's house near the coast, who had sent a postcard that simply read: Twenty minutes. He thanked even Victor Langford, who had learned to wait, and whose waiting had become a kind of music of its own.
Afterward, walking Elena to the car through the hotel's side entrance—the same route catering staff still used—Noah felt the night air of the city on his face and the old ballroom light still faintly behind his eyes.