The young couple from the city arrived at ten past two, which meant that Lucien spent the first hour of his afternoon pretending not to be a person whose wrist still felt warm.

He had barely made it home in time. Hester had insisted on feeding him soup in the farmhouse kitchen, and a borrowed sweater, and a second cup of cider, and by the time he walked up the lane with the Cortlands in a paper sack it was a quarter to one and Walt Pruitt's white pickup was already idling at the end of the drive. Walt had waved. Lucien had waved back. He had gone upstairs and changed his shirt and looked at his reflection in the hall mirror, and the man looking back had had apple leaves in his hair and a color in his face that he could not account for, and had been smiling at nothing.

He had wiped it off. It came back. He gave up.

Now he stood in the front hall with his hands clasped behind his back, like a footman, while the couple, Anya and Ravi, a pair of earnest thirty-somethings with a toddler in a carrier and a spreadsheet on a phone, moved slowly through his father's living room with the slow, appraising, tender cruelty of people imagining their own furniture in it.

"The light in here is incredible," Anya said.

"The original floors," said Ravi, crouching. "Is that quarter-sawn oak?"

"I believe so," Lucien said. "My father always said it was."

"And it's all been maintained." Anya touched the windowsill as though it might bite. "Honestly, it's so rare. Usually with an estate sale you find, I don't know, a leak, or a squirrel. This is spotless. Whoever looked after it, they really cared."

"Yes," said Lucien. "They did."

He said it more softly than he intended. Walt, passing with a clipboard, shot him a quick glance, and looked quickly away.

It was a good showing. Lucien knew it the way he knew a good performance, by a thickening of the air. Ravi asked about the furnace and the age of the roof and was told, by Walt, in a rumble of professional pride, that the whole system had been serviced this very September. Anya stood for a long time at the kitchen window looking down the long slope of the garden toward the stone wall and the Oakhurst chimney and the river. "Can you hear the kiln from here?" she asked, and Lucien said, "Sometimes," and she said, "That's lovely," and meant it, and he felt an odd flicker of something that was not quite jealousy.

When they had gone, and the pickup had crunched off down the gravel, Walt lingered on the porch.

"That's a serious pair," he said. "They'll want to think. They'll want to see the basement again, probably. But I'd say there's something there."

"Good," said Lucien.

"Is it?" The big man looked at him, a long, mild, uncle's look. "You've got a face on you, son, like you've lost something."

"I've lost nothing."

"All right." Walt put his hat on. "I'll call Monday."

Lucien watched him go. Then he went upstairs, shut the door of his old room, and sat on the bed with his phone in his hand for a long time without touching it.

The call came at four.

He knew the number before he looked. Of course he did. It was the one he had been trying not to know for three weeks.

"Margit," he said.

"Lucien." The voice at the other end was dry, warm, and Scandinavian by way of thirty years in conservatories, a voice that could cut a stuck violin section to ribbons with a single raised eyebrow, and had. Margit Sorell had conducted the first piece he ever played in public. She had also been, for most of his twenties, the person who had come closest to being on his side. "You sound better."

"I haven't said anything."

"You said my name. It was a different name from the one you said in June." A pause, the soft clink of a teacup. "Where are you?"

"I'm at my father's house. Alderbrook."

"Yes. I heard. I was sorry." Another pause, shorter. "I'm going to be very brief, because I am a coward and you are on holiday. There is an offer. It's not a seat. I would not insult you. It's the spring tour: ten weeks, eleven cities, solo, with the orchestra for three of them and recital programs for the rest. Dvorak. The new commission, if you'll have it. And the Elgar, which you will say you do not wish to play, and will play better than anyone alive."

Lucien closed his eyes.

Ten weeks. Eleven cities. A tour like that was not a job. It was a sentence, and a prize, and the thing he had spent twenty years being trained to want. In June it had made him physically ill. He felt, now, listening to the dry kind voice describe it, not nausea but a strange, hollow ache, like the place where a tooth used to be.

"Margit, I'm not"

"I haven't asked you for an answer. I'm asking whether you are still a musician." She said it very gently. "Whatever else you are. Whatever happened in June. It was a very bad year, Lucien. I watched it. I watched you go gray in front of an audience and I did nothing, and I have been sorry since. But you are still the person who played the Saint-Saëns in the Wigmore at twenty-five and made a man in the third row stand up and leave because he could not bear it. I need to know if that person is in there."

He could not answer. His left hand lay on the bedspread beside him. It had begun, quite gently, to tremble. He looked at it. It was an old, familiar trouble, and it did not frighten him quite as much as it had.

"I'm resting," he said. "That's all I can say right now. I'm resting. I'm clearing the house. I'll be here until December."

"Then I'll ask again in November."

"Margit."

"I won't push." The cup clinked. "Only know this. It is not a test, and it is not a debt. It is a door. If you want it, it is open until the first week of November. If you do not, I will say nothing to anyone, and I will go on being your friend. Is that understood?"

"Yes," he said. His throat ached. "Thank you."

"Eat something."

He laughed, a wet unsteady laugh. "Everyone keeps saying that."

"Then perhaps you should listen."

She hung up. Lucien lay back across the bed with the phone on his chest and looked at the ceiling, and, after a moment, the poster on the wall, where the disappointed cellist looked back at him with unmistakable fellow feeling.

He did not tell her about the orchard. He did not tell anyone about the orchard. He lay there with his wrist resting on his stomach, and pressed his thumb, very lightly, against the place where Silas's fingers had been.

Sunday morning came in cold and clear. He did not go out. He sorted books. He packed a box of his mother's china. He did not look at the wall, and he did not go near the gate, and by noon he had been so thoroughly good for so long that he thought he might scream, and so he put on his coat and walked into town.

The Copper Kettle was warm and loud and smelled of cinnamon. It was the Sunday crowd, families in church clothes, teenagers hunched over phones, an old woman with a crossword and a bad-tempered terrier. Camille was behind the counter. She saw him come in and raised a hand without turning her head, and the espresso machine hissed, and by the time he reached the register she had already put down a cup.

"Black. Cheese scone." She eyed him. "You look better. Slightly. That's a lie. You look the same, but there's something going on behind it."

"I'm fine."

"You said that with your whole face. Sit."

He sat at the end of the counter, on the stool by the wall, and let her feed him. She was talking, easily, about the Fair, the cider tent, a feud between the Rotary and the Women's Auxiliary over the placement of the pie table, and he let the sound wash over him, a warm, quick stream of ordinary things. He had been alone for a long time. He had not noticed how much he missed this: someone telling him about a pie.

"You've been in the orchard," Camille said. "Hester told me."

"She told you what?"

"That you were helping. That Silas was helping. That it rained." Her dark eyes slid sideways and back, entirely innocent. "She said it rained very suddenly. And that she'd have been terrified, if she hadn't been told you both had the sense to take shelter."

Lucien took a large and unnecessary bite of scone.

"She said you were out of sight for twenty minutes."

"It was raining."

"It was," Camille agreed. "Apparently quite hard." The corner of her mouth twitched. Then she looked at his face, whatever was written there, and the amusement softened and went out of her, as snow goes in the sun. "Oh," she said quietly. "Oh, you poor stupid man."

"What?"

"Nothing." She picked up a cloth. "Eat."

He ate. He was grateful for the scone. After a while, because it was warm and he was tired and the woman at the counter had a way of being gently relentless, he heard himself say, "I had a phone call. Yesterday. From a, from an old colleague. A conductor."

"Oh?"

"She wants me to go on tour. In the spring. A long one." He turned the cup in its saucer. "I haven't said yes. I haven't said anything. I don't know if I can. It's, it's an enormous thing, and I'm not" He stopped. "I haven't played in three months."

Camille put down the cloth. She was looking at him with an expression he had not seen before. It was not pity, and it was not pleasure. It was something quieter and more complicated, something very like fear.

"A tour," she said. "Where?"

"Eleven cities. Mostly Europe. A little of the coast." He tried to smile. "Away. A long way."

"For how long?"

"Ten weeks."

"And you're thinking about it."

"I'm not thinking about it. I'm just, holding it."

She was quiet. The terrier barked once and subsided. Behind her the espresso machine ticked as it cooled, and when she spoke again it was in a low, careful voice, the voice of a woman choosing her footing on a frozen pond.

"He turned one down, you know."

Lucien looked up. "Who?"

She had meant not to say it. He could see that. He could see the exact moment she realized she had, the flicker of dismay, the quick reach of one hand toward her mouth. But the words were already out, and she was a woman who had never in her life taken back a true thing.

"Silas," she said. "Six years ago. There was a residency. In Japan, a place in the south, with a master he'd admired since he was a boy. Two years. Room and board, a kiln of his own. It was the thing he'd have given his right arm for." She laid her hands flat on the counter. "He'd been accepted. He had the letter. He carried it in his jacket for a month."

The café sounds seemed to recede. Lucien heard his own pulse in his ears.

"And he didn't go."

"He said it was the wrong time. That the workshop needed him. That his father's knees were bad." Camille's mouth twisted. "All true. All of it. And I said all right, I believed him, because he's the kind of man who makes you believe him. But I saw the letter. I found it in a drawer, months later, helping him clear the bench. It had a date on it. It had a deadline. And on the back, in his handwriting, there was just one line."

"What was it?"

She looked at him. She said it very quietly, as if the words themselves might break.

"'In case someone comes back.'"

There was a long silence.

Lucien could not move. He sat with the cup between his hands and the cinnamon warmth of the café pressing against his skin, and everything he had been told in the last three weeks, every polite word, every dry little joke, every careful closing of a door, rearranged itself in his mind like pieces of a broken thing coming slowly, terribly, back to their shape. The sign had said Oakhurst & Son. The kiln had burned all those nights. The green gate had stayed on its hinges, and the latch had stuck, and had been oiled and fixed, and had stuck again, for nine years.

She had said it was a figure of speech, once, in this very room. Banking the fire. It would be ready to catch again as if you had never been gone.

"Oh God," he said.

"I shouldn't have told you." Camille's eyes were bright. "I'm so sorry. He'd kill me. He never meant anyone to know. And you're, I don't know, you're a person with a tour, and a house, and a whole life that isn't here, and I've just put a stone in your pocket."

"No." It was barely audible. "No, you haven't."

"I have."

"You've told me what it cost." He put the cup down, very carefully, because his hand was not steady and he did not want it to be seen. "I didn't know. I never let myself think about what it cost. I only thought about what I couldn't bear."

Camille said nothing. After a moment she reached across the counter and laid her hand over his, once, briefly, a warm square palm, and took it away.

"That's the first true thing anybody's said about this in nine years," she said. "Go home, Lucien."

He went home.

The afternoon had turned gray and still. A mist was coming up from the river. As he walked up Fennick Lane the whole valley seemed to have drawn in its breath, and a few early leaves came down through the stillness one at a time, turning over and over like pages.

He did not go into the house. At the top of the garden, where the long slope ran down to the wall, he stopped and stood at the edge of the grass with his hands hanging loose.

The Oakhurst yard lay below him in the mist, small and quiet. The workshop door was open. And in the doorway, framed in amber, stood Silas, with his sleeves rolled and his hair pushed back, bent over a table, doing something with a long brush. He did not know he was being watched. He had the complete, unguarded stillness of a person alone with his work. As Lucien watched, he lifted a cup to the window to study the glaze, and the pale evening light came through it, and the cup glowed, green and clear and fragile as pond ice.

He set it down. He wiped his hands on his apron. And then, for no reason at all, he stood quite still for a minute, with his head bent and his eyes shut and one hand flat against the edge of the table, like a man listening for a very distant sound.

Lucien's heart turned over.

Six years. A letter in a drawer. A line on the back of it, in a hand he would have known anywhere, that said everything he had not had the courage to hear.

He stood in the grass with the mist rising around his boots and his own phone, silent, heavy, in his pocket, the unanswered message from Margit still glowing on its screen, and the whole long ache of nine years rose in him at once, like a tide he could not turn back.

She waited, he thought. He did not say it aloud.

He thought it again, more slowly, so that it would stay. He did wait. He waited, and I did not know.

Across the wall, the man in the lamplit doorway opened his eyes, and looked out at the mist, and did not see him there.