“Understood.”
He nodded once and moved toward the kitchen—for the Armagnac. It lived in a bottle stored in a cabinet next to the refrigerator. This evening required it.
“Luca.”
“Yes.”
“Lock the courtyard gate.”
In seven years, I’d never once heard him say those words. The courtyard was at the rear of the house. The gate stayed latched but was never locked. That was a key principle of the house.
“Yes,” I said. “I will.”
I locked the gate and stood in the courtyard while the rain came down.
My father sold architectural salvage: iron balcony rails, old cypress doors, and load-bearing beams pulled from buildings scheduled for demolition. He believed structures held what they’d witnessed. Wood absorbed sound. Iron remembered the hands that had shaped it.
Someone had entered and moved through the house before the shot. They’d placed that sheet on the bench with surgical composure, walked back out, and waited.
I thought about the handwriting. Decades of practice in it. The arrangement itself was technically accomplished; the transposition not vandalism but recomposition. It was someone who understood “Saints” from inside the music.
Dominic was in the kitchen with a glass of Armagnac in his hand. “This isn’t about the concert,” I said.
He turned toward me. In that moment, he was not my employer or the man whose dry commentary had made me laugh at some deeply inappropriate junctures over the past seven years. He was simply a man who was a victim of a home invasion.
“No,” he said. “It isn’t.”
He raised the glass and drank slowly.
“It’s about me. Whoever this is,” he said, almost to himself, “they’ve been living with it for a long time.”
“Yes.”
“Long enough to have made something out of it. We’d better understand what they’ve made before they finish it.”
We occupied the kitchen for a while, with Dominic at the counter with the Armagnac and me at the stove with a teakettle. He stared into the middle distance above the copper pots. “I want Celeste’s contact information for whoever she’s sending, and I want it by morning.”
“Already on the list,” I said.
He looked over. “What else is on the list?”
“Security review of all possible entry points. A call to the Orpheum’s venue manager before we get deeper into production week.” I poured the water for my tea. “And I need to move the lemon trees back once the rain stops.”
Dominic offered a dry half-smile. “The lemon trees.”
“They were already stressed from the heat.”
The house was ready to absorb another chapter in its history. The bullet hole was part of it now, and the minor-key “Saints” was part of it too. I didn’t like either fact, but I understood them.
Around ten, Dominic said goodnight and went upstairs. He closed every day regardless of its contents. It was how he was still standing at seventy-two.
I stayed in the kitchen a while longer.
There were two unread texts from a man I’d been seeing occasionally, a visiting cellist, uncomplicated and warm, the kind who liked a slow drink after rehearsal and knew how to kiss a man without asking permission for it first. He was not the kind of man you called when a bullet had come through a window.
I had always liked men who arrived in a room already settled in themselves. Men who knew how to stand close without crowding and could rest a hand at the small of my back andmean it. I had grown up around men like that: big voices, warm hands, and the Creole ease that made a room feel alive the moment they stepped into it.
For most of my life, that had been enough. Lately, I found myself wanting something steadier than charm alone.
