"You're becoming soft," a board member joked at a July luncheon.
"I'm becoming accurate," Harrison replied, and surprised himself with the firmness of it.
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Jack's second year at Westbridge arrived with longer limbs and a voice that cracked at inconvenient moments. He was twelve, then nearly thirteen, freckles stubborn as ever, sandy hair still negotiating with gravity. The forest-green sweater had been replaced—Eleanor knitted him a new one in the same color, thicker, with a pattern of small cables that looked, if you squinted, like measures of music climbing a staff. Jack wore it on audition anniversaries and important recitals as if it were a quiet uniform of origin.
He was no longer only "the lobby story," though the phrase still surfaced among younger students like campus folklore. He was Jack, who practiced early, who helped Mina, who once defended a nervous first-year during studio class when Pierce made a joke about "charity technique." The defense was not loud. Jack simply said, "If you're measuring people by what they can afford to waste, you're measuring the wrong thing," and returned to his score. The room shifted. Pierce shrugged, but the joke died.
Ms. Blake began preparing him for external competitions—not because winning was the point, but because the preparation widened his repertoire and thickened his resilience. Jack placed respectably. He did not always win. When he lost, Eleanor made pancakes and Mr. Delgado assigned extra slow practice as if grief were a tempo problem. When he won, Harrison sometimes sent a brief handwritten note to the scholarship office folder, not for publicity, just for the record: Student continues to justify our better instincts.
One November evening in Jack's second year, the academy hosted an open house for prospective families. The lobby filled again with winter coats and hope. The grand piano, inevitably, became a magnet. A small child wandered toward it. A parent reached out too late. Principal Harrison, passing through, felt the old reflex rise—Careful, that piano isn't part of the waiting area—and then felt it change shape mid-breath.
He walked over, not to scold, but to kneel slightly so his eyes met the child's. "Would you like to see how the lid opens?" he asked. "We can look together. Playing comes later, with permission."