"Mrs. Keene says a scholarship is a door, not a sofa."
Harper almost smiled. "Your teacher sounds strict."
"She is. It's why I can play."
He went to class. Harper stood by the trophies a moment longer, not as a man redeemed, as a man who had been given a boundary and had managed, for once, not to lean on it.
Years later the lobby was the same and the light was older.
Elijah was nineteen, home from his second year at the Lanier Conservatory, invited by Reynolds to play the spring open house as the alumnus who had once been number 17. He was taller. His hands had not become someone else's hands, only more certain of their reach. He wore a jacket Denise had insisted on and shoes he had polished himself, poorly, in a dormitory bathroom. The Steinway under the stairs had been rebuilt the year before. The gold letters shone with a slightly different gold. The recital-hall doors stood open. Families waited. A girl held a flute case and shifted it from hand to hand, and Elijah felt time fold, not as a haunting, as a rhyme.
He had come early on purpose. He liked to hear a building before it performed itself. Reynolds met him with a hug that was brief and exact.