He had sat very still. Then he had gone to the cabinet.
He did not believe in ghosts. He believed in files, and in the way a building could remember a person poorly if nobody made it remember better. On Friday he walked to the harp storage and checked the concert harp himself. It was the house instrument, a good one, kept for auditions and for students whose families had not yet bought or rented. He tuned what he could and called the regular technician to come early Saturday. He put Nia's name on the schedule at a humane hour, not first, when the room was cold, and not last, when the judges were hungry and merciless. He sent the confirmation email with the door instructions and the sentence about the house harp repeated in bold, because bold sometimes survived other people's convenience.
He thought about writing to Nia about her mother and decided that an audition morning was not a confession booth. If she earned a place, there would be time. If she did not, his guilt was not her extra weight to carry up the plaza steps. What he could do on Saturday was the job. The job, done correctly, was a kind of apology that did not ask the child to absolve him.
He went home. He ate soup standing at the counter. He slept badly and woke ready.
Mrs. Whitmore's kitchen was larger than June's entire apartment, and nobody in it would have said so out loud because saying so would have seemed like bragging or like politics, and Catherine Whitmore preferred the language of standards. The house sat on a quiet street where the trees had been chosen by a planner and the cars were washed more often than some children were hugged. Claire's violin case waited by the door like a well-behaved pet. The scarf on the handle had been Catherine's idea. Presentation mattered. People decided things in the first look, she told Claire, and then they called the decision taste.
Claire ate toast and did not finish it. She was twelve, with her mother's blonde hair pulled back so tight it made her look older, and a face that became honest when she was listening to music and careful when she was listening to her mother. She had played violin since she was four. She was good. She knew she was good the way she knew her shoe size, as a fact that did not protect her from blisters.
"Sit tall when you wait," Catherine said, checking her gold earrings in the hall mirror. Ivory blazer, dark green blouse, black trousers: the uniform of a woman who intended to be taken seriously in a lobby. "And if the coordinator tries to rush you, you smile and you do not rush. They need to hear the Adagio. Last year they cut people off. It was rude."
"They have a lot of kids," Claire said.
"They have a schedule. Schedules are not an excuse for sloppiness." Catherine picked up the leather handbag. "Did you pack your spare strings?"