"Say it back."
"I can be no trouble and still play big."
Denise laughed, a ghost of the saved laugh, and it hurt her, and she did it anyway. "Close enough. Come here."
Nia climbed onto the couch. Denise's hands, once so sure on the strings, rested on her daughter's braids. "If you get to the Meridian someday, you walk in like the hallway is not the boss of you. Polite is fine. Small is not required. And if a man who swallowed his sentence is still in that building, you don't need him to be brave for you. You be accurate. Accuracy is a kind of courage people can't argue with as easily."
"What if I never get a harp again?"
"Then you will have been my daughter who knew how to practice in the air," Denise said. "That is not nothing. But I think you will get a harp. Not because the world is fair. Because you are stubborn, and because June will feed you, and because Miss Alvarez at Eastbridge owes me a favor she keeps trying to pay back with pound cake."
"Miss Alvarez doesn't have a harp."
"She will," Denise said, with the unreasonable confidence of a woman editing the future because the present had become unacceptable. "I told her where to look."
She died in March, early in the morning, while the microwave clock blinked an hour that was wrong in a different way than it would be later. June was holding one hand. Nia was asleep against Denise's leg and woke to the change in the room, which was not a sound. The absence of a next breath is its own kind of note. It does not ring. It rearranges every other note that will ever happen in the house.