Chapter 3 An Unwelcome Introduction #2
Catherine caught herself watching, one eyebrow lifting of its own accord.
"Yours, honey, always. But it's late. Go to sleep. Whatever this is can wait till morning."
"Fine," Theodora muttered, the word barely audible but clearly meant for Mary to hear.
Then she angled a glance toward Catherine, voice dropping just enough to make it theirs alone. “We’re not done with this conversation, Catherine.” The heat was gone. What lingered was more…mild annoyance, and Catherine found the downgrade almost friendly by comparison.
"I'm sure we’re not, Theodora," Catherine replied.
Theodora looked briefly tempted to commit a crime of passion at the use of her full name, though in this case, passion manifested as pure, homicidal irritation, but one glance at Mary’s steady presence in the doorway seemed to remind her that witnesses complicated things.
Theodora turned and stalked back toward her apartment, her bare feet silent against the plush carpet. Catherine found herself watching the way she moved, noting the tension in her shoulders, the pride she maintained even in retreat.
Mary stayed put, looking Catherine up and down like she was deciding whether to buy her at a market.
"That one," Mary finally said, nodding toward Theodora’s closed door, "works too damn hard.
Pulls doubles at the hospital, comes home, passes out for four hours, then does it all over again.
" She leaned a little heavier on her cane.
"I’m sure your piano sounds real pretty, but maybe save it for when the sun's up, hmm?”
“Of course, I’m sorry for the disturbance, Mrs. Stevenson,” Catherine said, keeping her voice low.
“Don’t apologize for the music, honey. Just the timing.” Mary shooed the air with her free hand, as if brushing the apology aside.
Mary's door clicked shut, and Catherine found herself suddenly alone in the hallway, inhaling a trace of something fresh and citrusy that clung to the space where Theodora had stood moments before.
Catherine closed her door slowly, her fingers lingering on the brushed steel handle longer than necessary. The metal was cool beneath her palm, an anchor in a night that had veered far from her usual routine.
In her music room, the Steinway waited. She ran a hand along its smooth, black surface, feeling the cool polish beneath her fingertips.
Outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, the East River was just a dark void that would reappear with daylight.
For now, the glass only reflected back the piano, her bookshelves, and herself.
She sat down on the bench, the leather creaking faintly under her weight as her hands fell into her lap.
She should keep playing. After nearly a year of walking past this room, of finding reasons to be anywhere but here, of waking at three in the morning with music in her hands and nowhere to put it, tonight she had finally sat down.
Not because she was ready. She still wasn't sure she was.
But because Simon's voice had followed her home and she had run out of ways to outrun it, and the piano had been there, and she had sat down, and her hands had remembered.
But now some sleep-deprived doctor with unfortunate glasses had knocked on her door and broken the spell.
And instead of continuing, Catherine found herself replaying the evening in her mind, sharp and intrusive as a nightmare she hadn’t consented to.
Theodora’s wild hair and wilder eyes. That rough-edged, far too honest voice.
The way she had filled the doorway as if defiance were an Olympic event, she was fully prepared to win.
And Mary’s parting words about letting Theodora sleep lingered in her thoughts.
She didn’t return to playing. But a thin thread of melody escaped her anyway, and she hummed quietly as she gathered her sheet music and a pencil.
It sounded brittle and uncertain and alive as fragments of musical notes rose, broke apart, and reshaped themselves as she jotted them down.
She could almost hear Theodora’s voice threaded through the melody, equal parts sarcasm and something that felt almost like a challenge.
* * *
The following evening, Catherine sat at her piano until her shoulders ached, playing with renewed inspiration. She only stopped when the telltale scrape of Theodora’s key in the lock down the hall broke her concentration.
Her hand hovered over the keys before she deliberately pressed the G above middle C.
It responded with a bloom of sound, honeyed and lingering.
It wasn’t music by any reasonable definition.
It was, however, a loophole, and Catherine’s lips quirked as she imagined Theodora’s reaction to it.
What could she possibly complain about? It was one harmless note.
She struck it again, louder this time. It sounded plaintive, almost childish, a cry for attention rather than music. She knew this even as her fingers continued to slowly dance across the keys, one deliberate note at a time, sliding up the scale then down again, each press a calculated provocation.
When a loud thud came crashing through the wall, Catherine smiled. It sounded suspiciously like something had been thrown. A pillow. A shoe. A surrender.
As she rose from her bench and moved toward her bedroom, she allowed herself the brief satisfaction of knowing that Theodora might believe she had won the silence. But Catherine knew better. Their game had only just begun.
* * *
By morning, light filtered through the blinds as Catherine woke, the single G note from the night before still resonating in her mind with more clarity than any concerto she’d performed in recent memory.
She moved through her morning, selecting a pressed blouse and tailored slacks and retrieving her wool coat, mentally cataloging necessities she needed to get on her grocery run.
Milk. Coffee. Those sourdough rolls from the bakery three blocks over.
Normal errands for a normal person who certainly didn't deliberately antagonize neighbors at midnight because they had called her performance “terrorizing.”
She pulled open her door and stopped short. There, stuck right over her peephole, was a square of neon green paper. Catherine blinked at it, her hand still on the doorknob.
So this was how Theodora had decided to respond. A sticky note ambush?
The note was aggressively bright, the green bordering on hostile.
This was the aesthetic with which she meant to parry?
The green felt less like stationery and more like a provocation.
A deliberate one. She considered ignoring the note entirely, but that would be a forfeit, and Catherine Matthews did not forfeit.
She plucked it from the door with two fingers and read it once.
Then again.
I’ve stitched eleven people back together so far this week.
One note, one scale, or one “technicality” tonight,
and you will join that extremely exclusive list.
- 14C
For a long moment, Catherine simply stood there in the threshold of her apartment, the quiet humming around her. Then, slowly, her lips curved. Not a smile. Never that. Just a small, precise quirk at the corner of her mouth.
Inside her apartment, Catherine pinned the note to her desk with one manicured finger. From the cherrywood drawer, she withdrew a set of cream stationery, thick, textured, expensive, a silent rebuke to neon green paper.
Her fingers closed around the solid barrel of her Montblanc, its cap releasing with a satisfying click that echoed her decision. The nib touched paper, and words flowed without thought.
Thank you for the kind offer, Theodora.
But I will have to decline.
I have no doubt that your sutures would be crooked.
- 14D
She reread her words once, then again, nodding with satisfaction. She blew gently across the ink, watching it dry before folding the heavy paper with three equal creases and slipping it into an almond-colored envelope. Her pen hovered over the front before inscribing simply:
14C.
Before leaving, Catherine paused at her desk, fingering the sticky note's edge. She slipped it into her copy of Persuasion, right between pages 28 and 29.
She added sticky notes to her mental grocery list. It wasn’t a suitable medium for an argument, but if her neighbor required a reply in kind, so be it.
At the elevator, Catherine pressed the call button, then pivoted on her heel. She approached 14C with measured steps, bending to place her envelope precisely at the center of Theodora's threshold with all the pageantry of a stateswoman delivering her terms of war.