Ethan walked the courtyard with Sophia for twenty minutes in a cold wind before answering anyone.
"I want the orchestra," he said finally. "Not the ranking. But you don't get one without risking the other."
"Then risk it," Sophia Elise Lang said. "You're annoying when you pretend you don't want stages."
He grinned. "You're annoying when you're right."
"I'm often right. It's a burden."
Preparation for the concerto competition reshaped his weeks. Helena chose, with him, a movement of Haydn that suited his age without insulting his ability, and kept Claire's arrangement as an encore option if the format allowed. Richard hired no extra coaches, asked no daily report cards, and instead cooked dinner more often—badly at first, then passably—which Ethan recognized as love translated into a new dialect. They spoke about Claire without the old flinch. They spoke about school and friends and the annoying excellence of Sophia's sight-reading. The house learned a warmer acoustics.
There were still hard days. One evening Ethan found Richard in the study staring at a spreadsheet as if it contained a moral verdict. Richard admitted he was afraid of becoming irrelevant to Ethan's musical life, of being only the driver and the tuition and the man who had once said, in a room full of students, that Ethan's playing should be painful.