The interview lasted twenty-two minutes.

Evelyn had done dozens of interviews — the particular skill of being interesting to journalists while revealing nothing she did not intend to reveal was one she had developed early, in the years when her family name had made her newsworthy before her own work had. She knew how to answer questions. She knew how to give answers that were true in the technical sense and contained in the practical one, that satisfied the requirement of the question without exceeding it.

The interviewer was a junior at the university, writing for the Cresthaven Quarterly, which published once a semester and was read primarily by alumni and parents. Her voice was earnest and her questions were prepared — Evelyn could tell prepared questions from spontaneous ones by the rhythm of the asking, the slight delay that was the reading rather than the thinking. She had answered them well: about the concerto, about working with Dr. Pearson, about what the performance had meant after the injury that had affected her sight. She had given the word *injury* to describe it, which was not inaccurate but was contained.

The final question was spontaneous.

"Was there anyone or anything that particularly inspired your performance last night? Something that made the difference?"

The interviewer had looked up from her notebook when she asked it, which meant she had not written it in advance. It had arrived while they were talking, generated by the conversation rather than by preparation. Spontaneous questions were the dangerous ones — they arrived before the management could meet them.

Evelyn opened her mouth.

She was going to say: my teacher. She was going to say: two years of work. She was going to say something true and contained that satisfied the question and did not exceed it.

She said: "Yes. His name is Aiden Cross."

A pause. She heard the interviewer's pen make the particular sound of someone writing quickly, the scrape of someone recording something they hadn't expected to record.

"Is he a musician?"

"No." She thought about this. "He listens. In a particular way." She stopped. This was already more than she had planned to say. "He — my music sounds different when he's there. More like itself."

"That's beautiful," the interviewer said. "What is he to you? Is he a friend? A —"

"I don't have a word for it," Evelyn said. This was true. "The closest is — " She searched, and the word that arrived was not hers, it was the interviewer's, she could hear it before the interviewer said it: *

"A muse," the interviewer said.

Evelyn considered the word for half a second. A muse — the source, the inspiration, the person whose presence made the work possible. She thought about whether this was accurate and found that it was accurate in the ways that mattered: without him she had not been able to play measure thirty-four for two years, and then she had, and the change had been adjacent to him in a way that was not coincidental.

"Yes," she said. "A muse."

The interview concluded shortly after. The interviewer thanked her warmly and left. Evelyn sat in the small room the Conservatory had made available for the meeting and thought about what she had just done, which was say a true thing to a person with a notebook who wrote for a publication.

The article appeared at three-fourteen that afternoon.

She knew the time because Priya, who monitored the university's publications on her behalf, sent her a text: *Cresthaven Quarterly just posted the interview. You mentioned someone named Aiden Cross as your muse. Do you want me to — what do you want me to do with this?*

Evelyn: *Nothing. Thank you.*

At three forty-seven, a text from a number she had added to her contacts recently: *Interesting.* One word. She recognized the economy of it.

She wrote back: *Hello, Serena.*

Serena: *You said his name in a published interview.*

Evelyn: *Yes.*

Serena: *Was that deliberate?*

Evelyn thought about the spontaneous question and the answer that had arrived before the management could intercept it. *Not entirely,* she wrote.

A longer pause. Then: *I see.*

The text conversation ended there. Evelyn thought about what *I see* meant from Serena Sterling, who used words with the precision of a lawyer, and concluded that it meant: *I have information now that I did not have before, and I am placing it in its appropriate category.*

She was in the faculty lounge, waiting for Dr. Pearson, when Aiden found her.

She heard him coming down the corridor — the footsteps, the headphones, the particular quality of someone who was walking toward something rather than through it. He stopped in the doorway. She turned her face toward him.

"You're here," she said.

"I was in the building," he said. Which meant he had come to the building, not that he had happened to be there.

She said: "You read the article."

"Someone mentioned it."

She waited. His silences, she had learned, were not empty.

"You didn't have to do that," he said.

"I know."

"You said my name. In something that — people read it."

"Yes."

A pause. The particular kind that was deciding something. "Why?"

She had been thinking about how to answer this since three-fourteen. She had constructed several answers, tested them against what she knew of him, discarded the ones that were too large or too exposed for this conversation at this stage, looked for the right size.

"Because it was true," she said. "And I've been learning from you that true things are worth saying, even when they're inconvenient."

Silence.

"That's not something I said," he said.

"No. It's something you do." She paused. "There's a difference between what people say and what they teach."

He was quiet for a long moment. She tracked his stillness — the particular quality of it, the interior processing she had learned to recognize.

"I don't want to be something you need," he said finally. "To play."

She had been expecting something like this. "I know."

"If I'm the reason the music works, then — "

"You're not the reason the music works," she said. "You're the reason I stopped being afraid of the parts I was afraid of. That's not the same thing." She found her hands were resting on the arms of the chair, open-palmed, the way she sat when she was saying something she had decided to say. "The music was always there. The measure was always possible. I just couldn't play it."

A pause.

"And now you can," he said.

"And now I can." She paused. "That will be true whether you're in the wings or not. You gave me the door and now the door is mine."

He was quiet for longer than his usual silences. She waited.

"I don't want you to need me to play well," he said. Lower than before. Not quite the same thing as what he had said before — revised, closer to what he actually meant.

"I know," she said. "I heard you the first time." She tilted her face toward him slightly. "Why?"

The silence that followed this question had the quality she associated with approaching a wound rather than describing one — the particular texture of someone who had arrived at the edge of something they kept a distance from.

"Because if you need me to play well," he said, "then it's not — then what I'm doing is being useful. And I —" He stopped.

She waited.

He did not finish the sentence.

But she had enough. She had the beginning and the stop and the particular silence of what came after, and she held the shape of it carefully — not pressing it, not requiring it to be more than it was yet. She had learned, in fourteen weeks of practice sessions, that the pieces of him that were most true arrived slowly and required space to arrive in.

She said: "The note last night. The measures you wrote down."

A pause. "Yes."

"You were paying attention to the specific ones."

"Yes."

"Not to the performance in general. To those measures specifically."

"Yes."

"Because you knew which ones were difficult for me."

A longer pause. "Yes."

"That," she said, "is not being useful. That is paying attention to me." She paused. "There is a difference. You know what the difference is. You said so yourself, to Iris, about needing and wanting."

She heard him very still on the other side of the room.

"You knew about that," he said.

"Iris told me. In her way." She paused. "She found me in the quad two days ago and communicated for forty minutes via gestures until I understood what she was trying to tell me. She is very determined when she wants to make a point."

A silence. Then, faintly: the sound of him almost laughing — the precursor to it, the breath that would have become a laugh if he had let it.

"Yes," he said. "She is."

"She wanted me to know that you said *because I want to,*" Evelyn said. "I think she wanted me to know because she thought it was information I could use."

The almost-laugh sound again. Then quiet.

"She's probably right," he said.

Evelyn turned her face fully toward him. "I'm composing something," she said. "I've been composing it for three weeks. It has two voices. I want you to hear it when it's finished."

A pause. "All right."

"That's all I wanted to say," she said. "The interview was true. The muse was true. And the piece I'm composing is about something I haven't finished understanding yet, and when I understand it better I'll be able to say it in words, but until then the music is what I have."

Silence. The specific kind that received something.

"Okay," he said.

She heard him leave. His footsteps down the corridor, the headphones, the even weight of someone who was walking back the way he had come.

She sat in the faculty lounge with her hands open on the chair arms and thought about what he had not finished saying — *then what I'm doing is being useful. And I —*

And I what.

She did not know yet. She was learning, by the method she had learned everything since losing her sight: slowly, by touch, by the accumulation of what she could reach without seeing.

She thought she was close.