I walked into Viktor Lasko's studio class without knocking, carrying a violin case in front of me.
The shop was closed at half past three on a Tuesday, which cost me two pickups and every polite word I owned. And I still didn't know who had put my violin into a laundromat girl's hands.
Room 214 had a radiator that knocked. Eleven students sat in a half circle with their instruments in their laps. Ada was in the second chair, and she went the color of paper.
Lasko stood at the piano with one hand on the lid. He had gotten smaller, or I had gotten taller. The gold ring was still on his left little finger.
"Miriam," he said. "How good of you to return Ada's violin before Friday."
"It's mine." I set the case on the piano and flipped the latches. "My grandfather made it. His hand is inside the back."
"Is it?" He didn't look down. "Ada, do you have a violin of your own?"
"No, sir," Ada said, to her knees.
"Then it must belong to someone." He opened the top drawer of the piano bench, as if he had been expecting this very hour, and took out a folded sheet. He held it out between two fingers.
BILL OF SALE. One violin, Ferenc Sandor, Port Ellery. Nine thousand dollars. Received in full on the seventh of November. At the bottom, in the looping R she used on my report cards: *Rosa Sandor.*
The seventh of November was sixteen days after I walked out of Harrowgate Hall.
"My mother sold you my violin," I said.
"Your mother sold it to me. A fair price. Your grandfather's surgery was not cheap." He said it gently, which was worse.
The paper had no smell. I kept looking at it anyway, because I couldn't look at the room.
"Somebody pressed the top in," I said. "With the heel of a hand, over the soundpost. There's a mark in the varnish."
His ring turned a quarter turn, and then another. "Children are careless."
"That isn't carelessness."
"Isn't it?" He faced the class. "You have all heard of Miriam Sandor. The girl who walked out of the Harrowgate finals. Some of you thought she was a story I told."
Nobody laughed. Somebody coughed.
"This Saturday Ada Whitcombe takes the seat," he said. "I would hate for her to be distracted by the past."
He lifted a violin from the rack by the window, a student instrument with gray strings and a scar of rosin on the belly, and held it out to me.
"Play the opening of the Brahms," he said. "Show them what happens when you stop."
I should have walked out. I took it, because he was right that I'd been waiting fifteen years for someone to hand me a violin and say *now.*
The chinrest was too high. I tucked it under my jaw anyway and put the bow on the string.
The first four bars came out like something I'd read about. The fifth had a shape to it. At the sixth my bow thumb began to shake, and the shake climbed my wrist, and the tone went to powder on the string.
At the eighth bar I stopped. The room was entirely quiet. Then I saw the phones come up, one, three, five, small black windows with a red dot in each.
I put the violin on the piano. I picked up my case. Lasko did not say a word, and I understood that silence was the lesson. Nobody in that room would remember my first four bars.
Ada caught me in the corridor, under a fire extinguisher and a poster for a viola recital.
"I told him I'd leave the violin with you, I swear. He just kept asking." She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. "I'm such an idiot. Put it on my tombstone."
"He knew where it was before you did."
"Yeah, well." She looked at my hands, which were still going. "You were good for eight bars."
"Eight is what I had."
"No, I mean you were *good.*" Her voice cracked on it. "Don't tell him I said so."
She went back into 214 and closed the door as quietly as you would on a sleeping child.
Outside, the steps of the Sorensen were wet with someone else's rain. Joel Adeyemi was sitting on the third one with his viola case between his knees, which was wrong in four ways. He lived upstairs from my shop. He had no reason to be here.
"Eleven seconds," he said, and held up his phone. "Someone in the cello studio sent it. Have you completely lost your mind?"
"Yes. Why are you here?"
"Because Priya sent the draft to the section principals this morning, and I wanted to tell you before the video did. Questions, Mira. What's the Harrowgate going to think when they see you shake?"
"I don't care what the Harrowgate thinks."
"Then why are you on their list?"
I stared at him. A bus went by and put a wave of water over my shoes.
"The candidate list goes public Thursday," Joel said. He was already looking at the pavement. "Thirty, Whitcombe, Ada. Thirty-one, Sandor, Miriam. Right behind her. Who else is named Miriam Sandor?"
"I never applied."
"Then somebody did it for you. And you can withdraw, if you want. Priya says if you do it by midnight tomorrow, your name never goes up." He tried a smile and dropped it. "Which is it going to be? You have until then, and I'd like to be somewhere else when you choose."
Somebody had signed me up for the Harrowgate in my own name. And I had until midnight tomorrow to decide whether to let them.