4. Millie #2
Three weeks of preparation. I lock in. Practice at home until my fingers ache.
Rehearsal at the hall where I sit in the second row and don't let myself look at the first. More practice.
I focus on what I can control: my intonation, my dynamics, my precision.
The things that are mine, regardless of what chair I sit in.
I don't think about Joseph. Or I try not to.
Sometimes at night, when the apartment is too quiet and there's nothing left to practice, his face shows up uninvited.
The grin. The voice note. The way his hands felt in the dark.
I put it away each time. It's one night.
One good night that doesn't need to become a story.
The first program starts. I'm in the second row, at the opposite end from Vivienne.
The hall is full. The lights are warm. I look over at her once, just before the conductor raises his baton, and something bittersweet moves through me.
She looks right in that seat. She looks like she belongs there.
I breathe. I lift my bow. I play. This is what matters now, not the seat. The music I'm making from it.
The weeks settle into a rhythm. Four programs. Four Fridays under the stage lights.
I learn the shape of my role—where to lean in, where to pull back, how to support the melody without fighting it.
The strings bite the same grooves into my fingertips they always have, and there's comfort in that small, familiar hurt.
It gets easier. Or maybe I just get better at not thinking about the things I can't change.
Except Joseph. What we have is a one-night thing only and that's all it's supposed to be.
But on the worst nights, lying in bed after a long rehearsal, staring at my ceiling, I think about the way he read my texts and never once made me feel like I was slowing him down.
How he laughed at my jokes like they landed exactly when they were supposed to.
How talking to him never felt like translating—it just felt like talking.
And I think, quietly, in a way I'd never admit to anyone, that dating is ruined for me now. Because he set a standard I didn't even know existed, and every guy after him is going to fall short of a bar he doesn't even know he raised.
I don't text him. I don't want to. But I think about him more than I should.
It's been almost two months since that night with Joseph.
After the final program of the opening month, someone suggests a dinner to celebrate.
The whole section is going. I'm not feeling it.
The week has been long, my social battery is drained, and honestly, I just want to go home, eat leftover pasta on my couch, and let my cat—my baby—fall asleep on my lap.
I make an excuse about an early morning and head to the restroom to get ready to leave.
That's when I hear voices in the hallway outside.
"You think Millie's not coming because she's still upset about what happened?"
"Probably. I mean, we all think she's going to get First Chair. She must think so too. I don't blame her for feeling bitter."
I stand there. I don't move. I wait until their footsteps fade and the hallway door closes.
I wash my hands and look at myself in the mirror—the same face, the same quiet girl they feel sorry for. I want to be angry, but instead I just feel tired. Tired of being the person people talk about in hallways. Tired of being defined by the things I don't have.
I walk home, and the conversation loops the entire way, the same two sentences burrowing into a place that's already tender.
People already pity me for being mute, and now they pity me for losing First Chair too.
I'm the girl everyone feels sorry for. Poor quiet Millie.
She can't speak, and she can't win. I wonder if that's all anyone sees when they look at me.
The silence first. Everything else second.
I'm so deep inside my own head that I don't notice the landing.
The rubber mat that's usually over the wet patch between the second and third floor is gone.
The super must have pulled it up to check the pipe and forgotten to put it back.
My foot hits the wet tile and slides out from under me.
I go sideways. My violin case flies from my hand and cracks against the railing.
My left side slams into the edge of the wooden stair, and the pain is so immediate and so enormous that the air leaves my body completely.
I can't breathe. I try to inhale, and something grinds in my chest, and my vision goes white. I need help. I need to scream. I need to call someone.
I can't do any of those things.
My phone is somewhere above me on the stairs.
It slid out of my hand when I fell. I try to reach for it, and the pain in my left side is so sharp that my body locks up.
I can't move. I can't call out. I'm lying on a wet landing in a dim stairwell, needing to do the one thing I have never been able to do.
The thing every other person can do without thinking.
The thing babies know from their first breath.
Scream. Call for help. Be heard.
My vision starts to narrow. Everything goes gray at the edges. I think about the orchestra, my cat who's waiting for me.
Everything goes dark.