“Yes.”
I repeated the details. Thiago listened with his arms at his sides and his expression neutral. When I finished, he nodded and asked two clarifying questions: the committee woman’s name, which I didn’t have, and the framing of Henri’s inquiries, which I reconstructed as closely as I could. He excused himself to make a call.
Dominic watched him go and then picked up the kettle and filled it at the sink. He set it on the stove and stood looking at it.
“Celeste has seventeen theories,” he said.
“Yes, I remember that precisely.”
The kettle hissed.
“She’s been theorizing for fifty years,” I said.
“Longer.” He reached for two cups without asking whether I wanted tea. He had been doing that for seven years. “She was very good at it when I met her.”
We stood at the counter and drank. He didn’t ask what I was thinking. He never did when he knew I was working through something.
We returned to the Orpheum for a full rehearsal at seven.
I took a seat in the second row, house left, with my tablet on my knee. I watched Dominic’s face as he turned toward the strings; Bridget sat in the first chair.
Thiago stood at the back of the house, in the dark beyond the work lights. I couldn’t see him, but I knew he was there.
The oboe gave the A, and Dominic let the tuning run its full course. He never cut it short. He believed it was the beginning of the performance. I’d watched him explain this to a young conductor at a masterclass once. Dominic said, “The difficulty is resisting the impulse to begin.”
The tuning resolved, and he raised his baton.
I took notes on my tablet. A section lead in the violas was still rushing the third measure. The second trumpet had been compensating for a breath issue all week. The choir director, seated in the wings, conducted in micro-movements visible from the second row.
I’d give my notes to Dominic later, in the kitchen, after he’d had twenty minutes with his Armagnac.
Then Dominic took them into the climactic section of the “Saints” arrangement. The approach to the final chorus was the emotional climax of the entire concert. The passage was almost there.
Dominic stopped them at the approach and made them run it again. He did it three times, and then let it go.
The music built. The strings took the phrase up, the brass answered, and the entire room leaned into it. Goosebumps rose on the back of my neck.
Dominic turned toward the strings at the top of the phrase. He nodded once at Bridget. I had watched him give her that nod for seven years. Tonight it landed differently.
And then I heard it. Bridget’s bow came down a quarter-beat early.
Small enough that most of the room wouldn’t register it as an error, but it was wrong, and I knew it the way you know when a sound you’ve heard a thousand times is suddenly off. She corrected within the measure, seamlessly, and I wasn’t sure Dominic caught it.
She had been somewhere else for that fraction of a phrase. Her playing was impeccable for the rest of the evening.
Once was enough.
I didn’t connect it to the letter. Not yet.
We got home at ten-fifteen.
Dominic went upstairs. I made myself useful in the kitchen, putting away the dishes from the drying rack and wiping the counters.
I found a note from Thiago on the counter by the coffee machine.
He’d folded it and printed my name on the outside. Inside, I found ten numbered questions about Dominic’s schedule for the following week. He arranged them in operational order rather than chronological. I read through them, found a pen, and answered one through nine in the spaces he provided.
Below the last question I added:
