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“Miss Vance. When you stand on that stage at the Showcase, your concern is the music and nothing else. Everything else is just noise.”

She begins to walk up the center aisle toward the exit of the hall, but before she reaches the doors she turns back to me.

“You have spent thirteen months learning how to technically rebuild this piece. You have spent considerably longer than that learning how to perform it for other people. On the day of the Showcase, play it entirely for you. You know the difference now.”

I am left standing on the stage, the bright house lights shining down on me. Slowly, my eyes drift down to the second row. I stare at the exact seat that Julian Thorne had occupied on the worst moment of my performing life.

The ache in my knees flares up viciously now that the adrenaline is fading, a brutal reminder of the reality waiting for me.

I think about my practice session with him at six o’clock tonight.

But as I glance at the empty seat, the pain doesn’t feel like defeat anymore.

Today, I played Winter.

I’ll take that small win.

I’m going to need it by six o’clock.

10

Julian

Iwasn’t supposed to be here.

I have a composition seminar in five minutes.

I should be across the building, caffeinated, and pretending I give a shit about everyone else’s harmonies. Instead, I’m standing at the back of the main auditorium, leaning against the brick wall by the exit door, tracking the slight silhouette on the illuminated stage.

Ellise is standing dead center on it, wearing her usual insufferable uniform. I’m unsure when corset dresses, white shirts and shiny boots became a fashion staple?

Honestly, I wish she would live permanently in those oversized black sweats. They are way damn sexier.

She is looking at the score on the stand in front of her intently, though she stopped needing it a long time ago. I know that she is now staring at the manuscript paper out of pure, anxious habit.

Down in the front row Professor Jamieson sits, looking at what I think is a score in her lap while Ellise plays. I’ve had limited interactions with Jamieson over the last year, but none of them have gone particularly well. She looks at me with a certain ice-cold expression that gives the impression that she already determined exactly who I am, what my name stands for, and has found that she has no time for me.

But right now, Jamieson isn’t looking around for intruders. She is focused on the tip of Vance’s bow.

And from the shadows, so am I.

It’s quite comical hearing Ellise play this piece now. This is not how I have heard her play it before. It’s not that she is playing differently. It’s that she is actually playing.

Ellise is finally inside the music.

The staccato has weather in it. It's cold, genuinely, physically biting. It isn’t just a sterile demonstration of correct technique anymore.

It is winter.

I lean my shoulder harder against the brick wall at the back of the hall, blending into the shadows as I look at her on stage. This is not the untouchable Golden Girl of Belrose that I watched before. Not the one I tore to shreds and completely annihilated during her first performance here. Her silk ribbon is still in her hair, and her spine is still straight, but this time she isn’t performing for anyone.

She chose to come back to this exact piece. That took serious balls. She came back to it—probably because of me. Because of something I said when I was hungover, bored and wanted a reaction.

I think she is trying to prove a point.

The way that she plays now is extraordinary.

The kind of extraordinary that arrives only when a person stops trying to manage what they are doing and starts producing who they actually are deep down. The acoustics of the hall amplifies the sound, and the whole thing becomes something that I truthfully do not have words for.