Chapter 27 #3
Theodora looked at her for a long moment. "Catherine—"
"I know what I'm asking you to do," Catherine said. "I know what it costs you to let someone else take the wheel." She paused. “But I'm asking anyway."
Theodora reached up and covered Catherine's hands with her own, where they still rested against her face, and held them there.
"Okay," she said.
Catherine leaned forward and pressed her lips to Theodora's cheek, and felt her exhale again, slower this time.
Then she stood and turned. Josiah was waiting at the edge of the hallway, watching them with the expression of a man who had run out of solutions and was hoping someone else had found one.
"It's handled," she said as she stopped next to him. "Don't postpone anything. Keep the schedule exactly as it is."
He looked at her. "The band—"
"Won't be necessary." She glanced back once at Theodora, who was still sitting in the alcove, watching her. "Can you take her to get a drink, please? Make sure she eats some of those expensive canapés floating around, and tell her I'll see her in half an hour."
Josiah studied her face for a moment, and whatever he found there seemed to satisfy him.
"Consider it done," he said.
Catherine nodded and slipped away from the main room, moving past the edge of the crowd toward the quieter side corridors.
She found what she was looking for: a sacristy turned makeshift green room, small and spare, with a mirror, a chair, and a table. It was the kind of space that appeared at every venue she’d ever played, so familiar she could have walked into it blind.
The noise of the room dropped to almost nothing as she closed the door behind her.
She stood for a moment in the quiet and looked at herself in the mirror.
More than two and a half years, she'd spent convincing herself she was done with this.
That the Royal Albert Hall had taken something from her she wasn't getting back.
That the woman who used to walk onto stages and make rooms go silent was someone she used to be.
Well. Apparently not.
She had called her piano technician the week Theodora confirmed the venue, the same man who had tuned her instruments for fifteen years, and asked him to arrange a loan alongside the other instruments being delivered for the evening.
The Bosendorfer had arrived Thursday morning.
She had been there to sign for it, overseen the setup herself, and played it briefly in the empty church while the light came through the windows at the wrong angle for anything except honesty. At the time, she hadn’t examined why.
She exhaled slowly, then reached for the table beside her. There was a pen. A piece of paper. Catherine sat down and began to write a setlist.
She knew hundreds of pieces by heart. Complicated ones, technically brutal ones, things that had taken decades to get right. But most of them didn't matter tonight. Tonight, she needed pieces that meant something. Pieces that had a history.
Chopin first. The Nocturne in C-sharp minor. She would open with that one. She owed it that.
Then Debussy. Clair de Lune, because Theodora had once told her it made her feel hopeful, and tonight of all nights, the room needed hope.
After that, something familiar. Something warm, that makes people smile.
Pachelbel's Canon in D, because once she had asked Theodora to marry her as a joke and Theodora had laughed, and Catherine had felt lighter than she could remember feeling in years.
She had tucked that feeling away without examining it too closely. She understood now what it had meant.
And then, for the appeal, for the moment when The Mission would ask one hundred and fifty people to give generously, something that would make them feel it.
Something that would make the room do what rooms do when music gets inside them, when the walls between people soften, and the ordinary armor of a formal event falls away, and people find themselves moved before they've decided to be.
She knew what that piece was. She wrote it down at the bottom of the list.
Then she set the pen down and let the page sit between her hands for a moment, considering it.
The fear was still there. It had always been there, and she'd stopped waiting for it to leave.
But underneath it was something steadier.
Something that had been building for a year, maybe longer, maybe since an evening in a church in Brooklyn when a woman she hadn't yet let herself love had reached across a dark pew and taken her hand.
She picked up the setlist. Smoothed her dress. And went back into the noise.
* * *
Silence fell across the room as soon as she sat down at the Bosendorfer.
This hadn’t been in the program. There was no announcement, no introduction. Just Catherine Matthews walking to the piano with a single sheet of paper in her hand and sitting down with the calm assurance of someone who had spent her entire life sitting at pianos.
Which, of course, she had.
She adjusted the bench once, lightly, and set the paper on the stand. Then she looked out at the room.
She found Theodora almost immediately, standing near Josiah at the edge of the crowd, surprise and concern written plainly across her face. Catherine felt a small flicker of affection at the sight of it. The worry was, if she was honest, a little endearing.
She held Theodora’s gaze for a second. Then she lowered her hands to the keys and began.
The first note rang out, and she waited, the way she always had, for the fear to catch up with her hands.
It didn't. What came instead was the simple, physical fact of the piano doing what it was supposed to do, sound moving through wood and wire and out into a room full of people holding their breath.
She had forgotten, somehow, that it still worked. That she still worked.
The Chopin moved through her, and she let it. She stopped trying to manage it and just let it happen, phrase by phrase, the way she'd learned when she was nine years old before she'd had anything to prove to anyone. Her hands knew this. They had always known this.
When the Nocturne ended, she transitioned straight into the Debussy without pause. Clair de Lune in the candlelight of a Gothic church, Theodora's favorite piece, in the church where they had first sat together and held hands.
She played it the way she always played it, attending to every phrase, shaping each one with the precision that was not coldness but its opposite, the kind of care that looks like control from the outside and feels like love from within.
She played for forty-five minutes. The room didn't move. She could feel its attention, the held-breath quality of it, and she played into that attention and let it sustain her the way it always had, the old contract between performer and listener, each making the other possible.
She had missed this. Not the performance, exactly, not the lights or the room or the fact of being watched. She had missed this specific thing, the conversation between her hands and the instrument and the people listening, the feeling of being useful in the most precise way she knew how to be.
For the climax, she played the Einaudi. Experience.
Despite what she’d told Theodora, the piece wasn't only about her, though it was that too. It held something of Catherine’s own story as well.
Controlled and restless at the same time.
Always moving forward, even when the movement itself seemed to ache.
She had spent more than two years not moving forward, and now, here she was.
By the time the final phrase faded, three people in the front row were crying. She could see them from the piano.
She stood. She bowed. And the applause came up like a wave.
And then she looked for Theodora and found her immediately, because she always found her, and what she saw on Theodora's face wasn’t surprise, not relief, not gratitude, though all of those were there, but something alongside them that was larger and quieter and that Catherine recognized because she was feeling it too.
The applause followed her into the hallway, and Catherine stood against the cold stone wall with her eyes closed, her chest heaving, her hands trembling with the sharpness of adrenaline.
She pressed one hand to her sternum, feeling her heart going at an absurd rate, and laughed, a short, disbelieving sound that echoed off the stone.
Her other hand came up to her forehead. She felt giddy, almost dizzy with it, the relief and the happiness, and something that took her a moment to name because she hadn't felt it in so long. Pride. She was proud of herself.
She stood there until she could breathe properly, then straightened, smoothed her hair, and went back in.
The next hour was a blur of hands finding hers, faces she half recognized, voices layering over each other in phrases that arrived and dissolved before she could hold onto them.
She smiled and said thank you and meant it, dimly, in the part of her that was still operating on automatic, while the rest of her remained at the piano, in the last note, in the moment she'd looked up and found Theodora's face across the candlelit room.
Josiah found her near the bar, his expression a mix of relief and disbelief she'd seen on people who'd been told something was handled and then watched it actually be handled.
"The donations," he said, without preamble. "Catherine, we've exceeded the record. Not just tonight's target. The all-time record for the gala. By a significant margin."
Catherine smiled, "Good. And the residential program—"
"Fully funded. Twice over." He shook his head, still processing it. "Whatever you need, whenever you need it. It’s yours. The Mission owes you big time."