"From my mother," Ethan said. "I'm not hiding that anymore."
Helena smiled then, a rare full smile that changed the geometry of her elegant face. "Good. Hiding is expensive."
Sophia Elise Lang, when she heard Ethan would play alone, practiced harder without making a production of it. She was selected for a chamber group in the same showcase. On Saturday afternoons they sometimes stayed in an empty practice room and traded excerpts, correcting each other with the blunt affection of equals. Once Sophia asked, carefully, what Claire had been like.
Ethan considered the question while rosining his bow.
"She hummed when she cooked," he said. "She got mad if I rushed the ends of phrases. She said my father loved us in the language of plans, and she loved us in the language of sound, and both languages were real, but only one of them could tuck you in."
Sophia was quiet for a while. "My dad loves in plans too," she said. "Maybe that's why I liked you the first day. You looked like someone who understood that plans aren't the whole house."
Outside the practice room window, autumn had begun to argue with the trees. Ethan felt, for the first time since Claire's funeral, that the world might contain rooms where he did not have to choose between being a son and being a musician.