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“Julian?” Nancy repeats, her brow furrowing deeply as she senses the difference in me tonight, and she is reading this one accurately.

“I’m just—I’m tired, Nance,” I say. It lands like the lie it is. “I’ve had too much to drink. My head is absolutely bloody pounding. Let’s just go to sleep. Yeah?”

She looks at me for a long moment before shifting her weight and climbing off my hips. Nancy does not do well with rejection. As a ballerina, she’s used to absolute control and adoration by everyone. She is too sophisticated, or perhaps used to my volatile moods enough, not to push for an explanation I can’t give her.

“Nance, look, I didn’t mean …” I feel awful. She doesn’t deserve this.

“It’s fine, Julian.” She cuts me off, her voice smooth and entirely devoid of the warmth she had seconds ago. “Really, don’t worry about it.”

“Nance, I didn’t mean—”

“I said it’s fine.”

She strips down to her underwear, deciding that the evening is over and she has no interest in discussing it further. She slides under the duvet and turns her back to me.

“Night, Nance.”

There is no response. She’s asleep within minutes, her breathing steady and peaceful against the plump pillows.

I lie on my back staring at the ceiling with a weakness that feels like punishment. The silence of the room amplifies everything, and I can’t stop thinking about what I said to Ellise on the way out, the way her face looked as the words hit her.

“Maybe if you lost the bow, you might loosen up a little. Watching and listening to you is fucking painful.”

I stare up at the ceiling in the dark a little longer until my eyes finally start to drift, realising there is only one thing that I am comprehensively certain about.

Bow-Peep is going to be the absolute death of me.

9

Ellise

The heavy glass library doors click shut behind me, and the toxic noise of the Academy corridors instantly disappears. The warm amber glow of the study lamps and the familiar, towering rows of mahogany bookshelves release the suffocating weight that has been pressing into my chest since the moment I stepped onto campus this morning.

This is the only place at Belrose where I do not have to prove anything.

No performance is required here. There are no insufferable standards to meet. It’s the one corner where I can drop the armour in this place and finally be myself. I needed this silence—this space today. After the war in the practice room last night, I needed it more than usual.

I force my legs toward the back of the library, heading deep into the humanities section. My knees click loudly with every step I take. It’s a sound that I have spent a lifetime trying to conceal, just like the chronic aches and pains, but the sound echoes in the quiet aisle, completely betraying my best efforts.

My body is still actively rebelling after yesterday's brutal six hour practice session for the duet. The nauseating pain in my joints is only slightly calmed by the anti-inflammatories I took this morning.

I run my fingers along the leather-bound spines until I find the exact blue cloth book with gold lettering I came for.

The Physics of the Violin by Lothas Cremer.

I pull it from the shelf, and before I can even check if anyone is watching, I press my nose directly onto the cream-colored pages and inhale deeply.

If I close my eyes, I’m not standing in the most exclusive conservatory in Manhattan. I’m six years old again, standing on my tiptoes in a narrow building on Main Street in Mystic, Connecticut, my small arms stretching toward a shelf that is still slightly too high.

I’m back in Vance’s Volumes.

That’s what my parents called it. They spent every single cent of their savings to open our quirky little store. The narrow building with a dark green façade, and the name painted above the door in cream letting, with a gold shadow that my Dad spent a whole week perfecting.

Vance’s Volumes.

From the front window, when the tide is in, there is the perfect view of the Mystic River. It runs parallel to the street. My father chose the building because of that window.

To the rest of Mystic, it was another dusty bookstore. To us, it was everything. It was a haven for local poets and eccentric authors, for the beautiful and broken creatives who needed a place to exist that was not the world outside. They gathered in the narrow aisles and drank lukewarm coffee, trading gossip and scraps of unfinished works.