Page 71 of Crescendo

“I talked to my dad earlier,” I told her.

“Ah.” She didn’t sound surprised, or particularly confused that they’d send me a gnome. They’d probably like her—Papa especially. She’d like him too. And Dad.

I opened the envelope that had been tied to the box with a ribbon.

Hello, dearest, darling daughter of ours,

This is Atlas. Don’t you think he looks a little like me (Papa)? (In a few years when my beard is whiter!) It’s like we’re there, looking after you.

You are stronger than you know and more loved than you will ever understand.

Dad and Papa xxx

“Atlas,” I told Lydia, a little croaky, as I pointed at the gnome.

“Atlas?”

I hummed and handed her the note. There was nothing in it that she couldn’t see.

She laughed and tilted Atlas towards herself. “This is what your Papa looks like?”

“No.” I shook my head, laughing. “He’s just… really into gnomes right now, apparently. I guess it’s aspirational.”

She looked at me with the softest, warmest smile I’d ever seen. “I like them.”

“I thought you might.” My voice was whisper-quiet.

“Atlas is a good name. Like they’re telling you you’re the whole world.” She said it reverently, likeshethought I was the whole world.

My heart ached in my chest. “Atlas was forced to hold up the sky in Greek mythology. His punishment. Holding the whole thing on his shoulders.”

My voice was loaded, pouring as much as I was ready to tell her into the words, to let her know I was carrying something heavy and painful. I didn’t expect her to understand, but she looked at me like she did exactly. Her eyes shimmering and filled with far more understanding than she could have possessed.

She was good and patient and warm. And she handed me a container of hot food while looking at me like I was holding up the whole sky—and, this time, it wasn’t a punishment.

Chapter 17

Lydia

Clara and Dodge caught me, the two of them lurking outside the practice room like they were waiting to jump me. I was pretty sure they were too posh to jump someone—more the type to pay a goon to jump someone for them.

“You look stressed,” Clara laughed. “You all right?”

I picked idly at my cardigan. “Just trying to bat my way past the legions of fans. You know how it is.”

Clara gave me that smile she did when she knew I was bullshitting. I didn’t like it. “Things are sorted with Ella, then? She seems rather more cheerful.”

Dodge elbowed her with a low laugh. “Sortedis one way to put it. You have to ask how Lydia’s been cheering her up?”

Clara rolled her eyes. “Not everybodycheers upin quite the way you do, Dodge.”

I wasn’t exactly looking to get into the thick of it right now—how I’d been stressed from trying to figure out what the hell Ella and I were now. When she’d played thatsongon Wednesday, it had changed something—in the air, in her, in me, between us. I wasn’t even going to try pretending anymore that my feelings for Ella were just casual, and it wasn’t like I didn’tknow she felt the same way about me. She’d come to bed with me after we finally picked ourselves up off the floor that night, once we’d set Atlas the gnome lovingly in a place of honor on top of the piano—didn’t come to bed with me as in having sex, which would have been easier. Instead, she came to bed with me to curl up in my arms, protesting weakly that shewould have bad dreams sleeping alone,and she fell asleep soft and small and precious in my arms.

Soft and small and precious and vulnerable, and I knew more than she wanted me to. I knew I should have justtoldher, should have sat down and admitted my friend had stalked her social media and found out what happened to her brother, but I was terrified of breaking this small, fragile thing that had blossomed into her music the way she’d played it that night. But being close to her didn’t feel right when I was carrying this, and so I’d panicked, closing myself up, making sure to slip out of bed before her in the morning and be fully cleaned up, dressed, and presentable when she found me in the kitchen.

I’d read all about trauma responses and how it poisoned and weakened your body, and I hadn’t been expecting such a clear textbook example immediately after I closed the book and went home. Ella was still recovering, even here a few days later, Friday evening after we’d turned in our composition assignments. Still tired after the smallest bit of effort, still without a lot of motivation, still with this tender weakness about her like the last leaf on a tree in the fall, trembling like she could break and fall away at any minute. So I’d done what I could, being there for her in all the ways I’d read about—finished the book and went through another one too, reading in the spare moments while Ella slept more than ten hours a night, and I had one hell of a chance to put it all instantly into practice. I alternated between giving her companionable silence, being alone in the same room, parallel play and just doing our separatethings in the same room, talking about nothing to distract her when her thoughts started to spiral, and of course, talking about music.

The moment she set out to play music, the small, wounded baby bird Ella disappeared, and I didn’t know who it was that came out in her place, but she was captivating. The way sheplayed—she only kept building on the way she’d played piano the other night, music that shook me to my core, and I accompanied her because I had no other choice. I couldn’t hear her play andnotbe drawn in, couldn’t help myself from falling into the open spaces left by her music, a dance that needed two people. All of the damn inspiration I’d known would be buried under her surface if I dug deep enough for it.

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