"Did you cry?"
"On the bus." Denise smiled, small. "Then I came home and practiced. Crying is allowed on the bus. It is not a rehearsal plan."
Nia stored this the way children store stories they will need later without knowing the shape of the need. The big hall. The polite voices. The man who swallowed a sentence. She did not know his name. Denise might have said it and Nia might have lost it between eight and eleven, the way a person loses a word and keeps the weather of the sentence.
What Nia did not lose was the feeling of her mother's hands correcting her wrist from above, light, never pinching. "Soft thumbs. The thumb is not a hammer. The thumb is a person walking into a room who intends to be invited back."
By the spring Nia was eight, she could play a slow movement cleanly enough that Denise closed her eyes while listening, which was her highest praise, higher than good, higher than again. They were working on the opening of a Bach prelude, the one that sounds simple if you have never tried to keep it honest. Nia liked it because the notes made a room she could stand inside. Denise liked it because it refused to be faked by charm.
"Again from the second system," Denise said. "You rushed the place where you got comfortable. Comfortable is where the rhythm goes to hide."
Nia played it again. The radiator knocked. Somewhere below them a neighbor laughed at a television. The harp, throat cleared, told something like the truth.
Neither of them knew it was the last month the instrument would live in that corner.
The pain started as a rumor Denise refused to repeat.