"I shouldn't have said it would be painful."
Ethan stared through the windshield at a row of trimmed hedges. "You say a lot of things you shouldn't."
It was the bravest sentence he had offered his father in months. Richard flinched, then accepted it the way a man accepts weather he cannot sue.
"Your mother," Richard said, and stopped, and started again. "Your mother would have loved what you did in there."
Ethan closed his eyes. The car smelled of leather and the cold mint Richard kept in the console. Somewhere under those smells, if Ethan tried hard enough, he could still invent the ghost of Claire's perfume.
"I know," Ethan said.
They drove home through the late afternoon of a town that looked richer the closer they got to the Mercer house—wide lawns, quiet sprinklers, porches that never needed paint. Ethan held the scratched case on his lap the whole way, as if the violin might otherwise decide the day had been a dream and leave him.