Helena Marie Ashcroft found her voice first, and it was quieter than her earlier questions.
"Where," she asked, "did you learn to play like that?"
Ethan looked at Sophia's bow in his hand, then at the old violin, then finally, reluctantly, at his father. Richard Alan Mercer's face had lost its ready sarcasm. What remained was more difficult: recognition without a map.
"My mother," Ethan James Mercer said.
The words were simple. The room received them like a change in key.
Richard Alan Mercer did not correct him. He could have said that Claire Mercer had been a section player, not a soloist, that she had taught their son in the margins of a life that ended too soon, that the story was more complicated than a single sentence could hold. He said nothing. The silence around Claire's name had been his habit for three years, and habits do not break cleanly in public rooms.