Page 12 of Crescendo

“Awful,” Hannah replied immediately, like she’d been cued up in a script and was going through the motions of hitting her mark without thinking about what was actually said.

It was an odd dynamic.

I listened to the piece that was playing, and it was like the bows of the celli reached down into my chest to play on my heartstrings. The swell of emotion, the deep resonance, the driving beat underneath it—this had to have been used in a tense scene. It left me aching for resolution that felt like it might never come.

“The countermelody on the clarinets…” I breathed, suddenly forgetting Eliza and Hannah were even there.

Lydia smiled at me. “I told you I loved the clarinet. But it does sound better when you blow into it, don’t you think?”

“It’s beautiful,” I whispered, feeling dizzy with the emotion of the piece.

“Well, look at that,” Lydia said, beaming at Eliza. “Turns out people love the piece.”

Eliza made a disgusted sound, snapping me out of the moment. “Oh, yes, because everyone is always willing to tell bigheaded people their work is actually rubbish.”

I scowled at her. Like most doctors, I put up with a lot at work, but here was a grown woman insulting someone she could be learning from? “You don’t have to be rude just because you can, you know? It’s not a good look.”

When I realised I’d said that out loud, I turned quickly to get us into our flat, hearing Lydia laugh behind me.

“Have a good night,” she said as she followed me inside, and I was grateful when she shut the door on Eliza’s protests and Hannah’s… hypeperson work?

Lydia headed straight for the piano once we were in the flat and I followed after her.

“I really shouldn’t have said that to her.”

Lydia laughed. “You definitely should.”

“I’m not trying to sink to her level.”

“That wasn’t her level. You’d have to start digging to get all the way down there.” She gestured to the piano bench beside her. “Now. Come have your piano lesson.”

Right. A piano lesson. From Lydia Howard Fox. I could do that. I couldn’t see a single way that could lead to deep and lasting embarrassment.

“I’m not going to be good at this,” I warned.

“You’re going to be great. I’m a fantastic teacher.”

“Well, that I believe.”

“Good.” She looked at me, so very close beside me on the bench, and those blue eyes looked like swirling infinity pools shimmering in a distant, magical light.

The moment broke when her eyes shifted into narrowed slits. “You avoided the subject,” she accused.

My eyes bounced around the room, trying desperately to place what she meant. “Which subject?”

The closed clarinet case caught my eye. I hoped that wasn’t the subject.

“You live here.”

“Oh.” I breathed a sigh of relief. “Right. I told you I live in Camden.”

“Yes, but you didn’t tell me why you were staying here.”

“Ah. Well, in my defense, you didn’t actually ask that.”

She scowled at me, her fingers running absently over the piano keys, finding chords like they were meant to be there and eliciting the lightest, tinkling sounds from the instrument.

Maybe that was the thing with truly great composers and musicians, their bodies needed the music, they found it without trying. Like everything was only right in the world if the music that was trapped inside of them was flowing out for all to hear.

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