When Love's Sorrow Plays Again novel · Chapter 4 of 24

Chapter 4: Behind the Screen

On Thursday they hung a black screen across the middle of the stage.

I stood in the wings in my good black dress, with my grandmother's fiddle under my chin, and tried to remember how to hold a bow.

Behind me, Agatha whispered, "You're going to be perfect."

"I'm going to throw up."

"You can do both. Go."

There were six of us auditioning for one chair, and each of us had a number taped to a stand.

I was number four.

The panel sat in the dark of the house, five people with score sheets: the concertmaster, the principal of the seconds, two board donors in good coats, and Julius.

I could not see them.

They could not see me.

That was the whole point of a screen.

The proctor's voice came over the speaker.

"Candidate Four. The Mozart, then the slow movement of the Brahms."

I put my bow on the string.

For the first eight bars I played with a stiff arm.

Then the Mozart opened up under my hands, light and exact, and I stopped being afraid.

I played it as if I were alone in my kitchen, the way I had played for six years while Ellery slept.

The Brahms was different.

The Brahms was the one I had practiced in a rented room above a laundromat when I was twenty-two and brand new to being alone.

I put it all in.

I did not plan to, and I did not stop it.

The last note hung in the dark hall until it dissolved.

For a moment, nothing.

Then, from the dark, a single sound.

It was the concertmaster tapping her bow on her stand.

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