Chapter 6: Sixty-Four

On Wednesday Matthias cooked.

He did it the way he did everything, with a timer and a clean station and no pleasure in it, and the result was a perfect lemon pasta.

Esme ate four bites.

The rest she moved around her plate, because the chemo had turned lemon into a smell like a hospital floor.

Clarissa came down at seven in a white silk blouse and took the chair at Matthias's right.

Esme noticed that the chair was where she herself sat.

She said nothing about it.

"The Saint-Saëns, I think," Clarissa said, tearing bread. "Then the Bach, for the doctors. And something of mine to finish."

"Something of yours?" Matthias asked.

"I wrote it in Vienna. In the spring, after." She stopped, delicately. "After I got the news."

Her left hand lay on the tablecloth with the ring finger curled a little inward.

It was the only thing about her that looked tired.

Esme looked at it for a moment longer than she meant to.

"What does it say?" Matthias asked. "The piece."

"That I wasn't ready. That I'm still not." She smiled, glassy-bright. "I want to play it for you first, Matt. Before anyone else hears."

"I'd like that."

"You're so good to me."

The thing about what followed, Esme thought later, was how well it was staged.

Clarissa reached for her water glass, and her hand seemed to miss it.

She said, "Matt, I feel," and her voice thinned out like a thread pulled through cloth.

Her head went back and her body slid sideways off the chair.

The chair scraped and the glass fell and shattered, and Matthias was out of his seat so fast his napkin was still in the air.

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