"Is there a problem?"
She turned the smile toward him as if he had arrived to agree.
"I think she may be in the wrong place."
Mr. Carter looked at Nia. He did not inventory her shoes. He looked at her face, and at the registration list he already knew, and at the harp beside the doors.
"Did you bring your own instrument?"
The question landed clean. Nia answered it cleanly.
"No, sir."
He nodded once, the way a man nods when the answer is the one the procedure was written to hold. He stepped past the ivory blazer, took the bench by its wooden edge, and pulled it out from beside the harp until it sat where a player would need it. The legs made a small, definite sound on the stone. A few parents turned. A boy with a cello case stopped chewing his thumbnail.
"Use ours."
The sentence was not loud. It did not need to be. It rearranged the air around the harp more effectively than a speech would have. Claire's fingers tightened on the scarf-wrapped handle. The woman's smile thinned into something more honest, which was not the same as something kinder.