Epilogue
Them
Two Years Later
* * *
The last chord of the Schubert faded, and Noah sat with his hands on the keys for a moment, the way Catherine had taught him, letting the sound finish before cutting it off. Then he lifted his hands and turned on the bench.
"The left hand in the second movement," Catherine said, from the armchair behind him. "You rushed it."
"I know." He turned further to look at her. "I felt it."
"That's still excellent progress. A year ago, you wouldn't have noticed it at all." She made a note. "Play it again from the double bar."
He turned back and found the place without looking at the score, which was its own kind of success, and began.
Catherine listened with the attention she brought to his lessons now, different from when he had been eleven and just starting.
She was listening for something more specific these days.
The things that would matter in an audition. The things that Juilliard would hear.
On the small noticeboard by the door, alongside the schedule and the resource list she kept for students who needed it, was a framed certificate.
The Catherine Matthews Music Scholarship
First Recipient:
Noah James Alvarez
She had written his name on it herself, with her best pen, and had felt something she did not entirely have words for when she hung it up.
He finished the passage cleanly this time, the left hand measured and controlled, and she let the silence sit for a moment.
“Better,” she said.
“Better or good?” he asked, a smirk tugging at his mouth.
Catherine considered that for a moment, then smiled, “Good.”
She closed her notepad. “That’s enough for today. I’m sure you have homework before music club.”
Noah groaned as he started gathering his things.
She watched him and thought, not for the first time, about the eleven-year-old who had counted coins onto her palm that first lesson and looked up at her with such earnest determination.
“I was also going to ask,” Catherine continued, “if you would run one of the smaller groups this afternoon. It would look good on your application. And the children seem to enjoy playing with you.”
Noah blinked at her. “For real?”
“Yes. For real.”
His face lit up. “Heck yeah, I would.”
He lifted his hand for a high five, holding it there expectantly.
Catherine looked at it and then back at him.
After a moment, Noah let his hand fall with a dramatic sigh. “One day I will get a high five from you.”
“That seems unlikely,” Catherine said.
“We’ll see,” he laughed as he packed up his bag and headed out.
She remained in the armchair for a while, which she rarely allowed herself after lessons, the days being full enough that pausing felt like a luxury.
The studio had three teachers now besides herself, and two new uprights in the practice rooms that had arrived last Thursday and still smelled of fresh lacquer, and there was a waiting list that she checked with a feeling she was still learning to name.
But she had learned in the past two years to take the pauses, to treat them as part of the work rather than a lapse in it.
She sat with it for a moment longer. Then she reached for her bag and took out the letter she had already read three times that morning.
Her mother's handwriting on the envelope, the looping, careful letters that Catherine had spent her childhood trying to emulate and her adulthood learning to distinguish her own hand from.
The letters had been arriving with more regularity now, three in the past four months. A careful correspondence, her mother seemed determined to build, even when Catherine didn’t answer.
Her mother did not apologize easily or directly; it wasn’t in her nature and probably never would be, but she was doing something that was perhaps harder for her than apology: she was asking questions.
About the studio. About the scholarship program.
About Theodora, whose name she had finally started using rather than referring to her as partner or, in the early months, with a meaningful absence of reference at all.
She took out her writing paper and uncapped her pen. She decided to finally reply. She wouldn’t write the careful version. She’d write the true one.
* * *
Theo had been Director of Medical Services for three months now, which had come with a new office, a bay window that actually opened, and the persistent suspicion that she preferred the window to the title.
The old one had been a converted closet, and she'd spent eighteen months perfecting the art of not elbowing the walls.
This one had room to pace, two chairs for visitors, and enough wall space for the schedules and resource lists that had previously lived in precarious stacks on her desk.
She'd made it hers quickly, the way she made most spaces hers, without particularly trying.
A small succulent on the windowsill that was somehow still alive despite all reasonable expectations.
A coffee mug Catherine had given her last Christmas that read ‘Functioning adult, allegedly’, which Theo thought was one of the best things she owned.
She grabbed the mug, topped it up from the machine in the corridor, and headed toward the community room.
Near the entrance, the small framed note from the American Epilepsy Foundation caught her eye, the way it always did.
They’d partnered on three awareness events now, and Catherine had been named a patron last year.
Theo had helped make the introduction, which had felt, at the time, like the right use of something that had once only hurt.
She lifted her hand, kissed the tips of her index and middle fingers, and pressed them lightly against the frame.
Inside, Noah was leading the younger students through a clapping exercise in the corner, his voice carrying the easy authority of someone who was looked up to.
He was taller than Theo now, which still surprised her, and he had that quality that serious musicians sometimes had of being more fully present than other people, more inside the moment he was actually in.
She guessed he'd learned that from Catherine.
She could see her now, at the piano, sitting beside a small girl of about eight who was picking out a melody with one careful finger while Catherine guided her hand with a patience that Theo had watched develop over two years and never stopped finding remarkable.
Theo crossed the room and settled into the chair beside Mary, who had arrived before her as she always did, a container of baked goods for the kids set out on the table.
"You're late," Mary said.
"Sorry, sorry. My meeting with Marcus ran late. Where's Luis?"
"Parking. He brought his guitar." Mary's eyes moved back to Noah, and she watched him with quiet pride. "That boy."
"I know."
Josiah appeared in the doorway, which was unusual.
Wednesday music club wasn’t typically his territory, largely because he claimed he already endured enough of his mother’s questions and gentle strategic meddling at their weekly dinners and saw no reason to volunteer for a second round of it at the office.
"I'm not staying," he said, reading her expression. "I just wanted to drop this off in person." He held up a folder. "The arts education grant. It came through."
Theo couldn’t stop the grin that tugged at her lips. Five months of applications and two rounds of revisions had finally arrived in the form of a brown envelope. “All of it?”
"All of it. Three years guaranteed." He was smiling in the contained way he smiled when something had gone very well, and he was trying not to make too much of it in a room full of children. "I thought you'd want to know before the end of the day."
“Josiah.” Theo stood and took the pages. “Thank you. Genuinely.”
She hugged him before he had time to dodge.
"Thank your wife," he said. "Her name on the application didn't hurt." He lifted a hand in greeting toward Catherine across the room, who glanced up from the eight-year-old's hand position and gave a small wave.
When Josiah left a little while later, Theo sat back down, and Mary looked at her with unmistakable smugness.
"Your wife?” she teased.
"It’s a joke," Theo said, for what was probably the thirtieth time. “He started saying I needed to ‘wife’ Catherine up after the gala, and then it just stuck.”
"The best things usually do." Mary accepted a tambourine from a small child who had materialised at her elbow and shook it once, gravely.
Luis arrived with the guitar case and a coffee for Theo, which she accepted with gratitude that was not only about the coffee.
He settled beside Natalie, who had come in behind him and was in conversation with one of the older students about something that had apparently been weighing on the boy for weeks.
The fact that Luis had taken the seat beside her hadn't gone unnoticed.
Catherine was privately, and somewhat insufferably, pleased about this development.
She maintained that she was technically responsible for their entire relationship existing and liked to remind Theo of her failed Natalie–Josiah matchmaking attempt with a frequency Theo considered unnecessary.
* * *
As the session moved through its rhythms, the younger students moved from clapping to instruments with the chaos Catherine had learned to choreograph rather than suppress.
The older students worked through the folk arrangement they had been building for weeks, each part slightly more secure than the previous session, the whole thing beginning to sound less like an exercise and more like music.
Noah circulated between groups with a natural ease that made Catherine look across the room at Theodora at one point with an expression that contained an entire conversation. Theodora received it. She looked at Noah and looked back at Catherine and nodded.
I know, the nod said. Look at what he's become.