Ethan bowed then, awkward and sincere. He looked once toward the dark where he believed his father sat, and once toward Helena, and once nowhere, which was where he kept Claire. Then he walked off with the old violin held carefully against him, the scratched case waiting like a faithful dog.
Backstage, Sophia reached him first and hugged him hard enough to tilt him.
"You didn't stop," she said into his shoulder.
"Neither did you, earlier," he said.
Helena arrived next, eyes bright behind her glasses. "That arrangement stays in the academy library," she said. "With your mother's name on it. If you allow it."
Ethan nodded, unable to speak for a moment. Richard came last, moving through the backstage clutter as if afraid of breaking props. He put a hand on Ethan's hair, messy and damp at the temples, and left it there.
"I'm proud of you," Richard Alan Mercer said. The sentence was plain. It did not try to be enough for three years. It tried to be true for one night. Ethan leaned, almost imperceptibly, into the hand.