Helena Marie Ashcroft rebuilt Ethan's place in the curriculum with brisk intelligence. She did not treat him as a miracle to be displayed. She treated him as a student with gaps—theory notation he could hear but not always name, ensemble habits he had never needed in a living room, the social grammar of rehearsing with peers. She corrected him without softness and praised him without spectacle. Ethan thrived under that weather. Richard, true to his word, stayed mostly out of the way, though he began arriving five minutes early to wait in the lobby, and once Helena saw him close his eyes when a phrase from Studio B leaked under the door.
Still, there were fractures. At home Richard's wealth arranged Ethan's life into clean schedules and silent dinners. Claire's absence sat at the table like a third place setting no one acknowledged. Ethan had learned to move around it. Playing made the absence speakable without words. Not playing made it a wall.
Two weeks after that first class, Helena asked him to stay again.
"There is a regional showcase in November," she said. "Not a competition with rankings. A concert for selected students from the academy. I would like you to play. Alone."
Ethan thought of the scratched case in front of an audience larger than Studio B. He thought of his father's face. He thought of Claire's handwriting.
"What would I play?" he asked.
"Whatever you can stand to mean in public," Helena Marie Ashcroft said. "We will choose together. But Ethan—your father should hear you decide, not decide for you."