The Encore of Us novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: Empty Hall

At one in the morning the stage door of Brandvold Hall was propped open with a folded program.

The concertmaster had left it that way for us, and one work light burned in the middle of the dark stage.

Rhea had Tove in Richfield, asleep under the music box.

Anders carried my violin up the fourteen iron steps in one hand.

He took them without stopping, and he did not touch the rail.

"Six weeks," he said at the top. "The surgeon said I could lift anything I wanted."

"Don't start with the piano."

"I wasn't going to."

He grinned in the dark, and for the first time in two months he looked twenty-four.

The county attorney had told us that afternoon she would be in the house on Saturday night, in a seat near the aisle.

She had said she was coming to listen, and she had not said to what.

The black grand sat under the work light.

I tuned in the dim, and he sat down and put his hands on the keys.

"Ingrid will say I pushed him," he said. "Tomorrow, in front of everyone."

"Let her."

"I've already said it to the one person who matters."

"You've said it to me, and the county attorney, and a judge. She can't hurt you with it anymore."

"No," he said slowly. "She can't."

He began the old rain phrase on the low strings.

I came in over him, and for six notes it was the song we knew.

On the seventh, I did something I had never done.

I played a note that wasn't in the phrase.

It rose where we had always stopped, and it went somewhere new, and he followed it without a word.

Four bars.

Eight.

We found the end of the song that we had never finished, together, in the dark, in the hall that had cost us seven years.

When the last chord died, there was nothing but the hum of the work light.

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