For a moment neither of us moved.
“Evan,” she said.
“Celeste.”
She glanced at the shopping basket in my hand.
“I heard Sophie is enjoying Boston.”
“She is.”
“I hope you realize this has hurt many people.”
I put the rice in the basket.
“I do.”
“I spent fourteen years making that council important.”
“Then you know it wasn’t supposed to belong to you.”
Her mouth tightened.
“You think the world is divided into good people and bad people.”
“No,” I answered.
“I think people can do good work and still do harm.”
She stared at me as though I had taken away the argument she expected.
“I only wanted the girls to succeed,” she said.
“Then you should have let them tell you what success meant to them.”
I walked past her toward the register.
My hands shook only after I reached the parking lot.
Sophie did not ask for the details of that encounter.
She had stopped making Celeste the center of her days.
Her summer mentor asked her to revise Sidewalk Chalk for a student ensemble, and she spent the last two weeks of August discussing the clarinet part with a boy who cared mostly about jazz.
Their disagreements were lively and harmless.
She learned to compromise without surrendering authorship.
She also became interested in teaching younger children the basics of reading music.
At the library she offered a free workshop for beginners who could not afford private lessons.
She insisted that everyone make up a tune of their own before learning to play one written by somebody famous.
The children produced strange, delightful noises.
One little girl wrote a song about a lost shoe.
Another created a rhythm by tapping a pencil against the chair legs.
Sophie laughed more during those two hours than she had in months.
When we packed up, she told me the workshop had felt like the opposite of Celeste’s studio.
“Nobody had to be impressive,” she said.
“They just had to be curious.”
Lila attended one workshop as a volunteer.
She helped tune the children’s violins and showed a shy boy how to rest his shoulder without squeezing the instrument.
Afterward she and Sophie walked beside the library garden, speaking softly enough that I couldn’t hear.
Lila had accepted a place in a regional youth orchestra that did not depend on her aunt’s approval.
Her family was working with a counselor to separate practical help from the emotional pressure they had endured.
