Chapter 1

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The apartment was full of the kind of heat that doesn't move. Ezra sat on the edge of his bed with the guitar flat across his thighs and watched a pigeon on the windowsill turn its head in small, considering clicks. Outside, the late August air hung over the city like a sheet somebody had forgotten to bring in off the line. He had opened every window he was allowed to open. He had turned the fan up to three. He had still sweated straight through the back of his T-shirt, and he had still not played the phrase cleanly.

It was a three-bar figure, nothing fancy, the kind of thing his guitar teacher Tobias would have called a wrinkle. Just a small place where the left hand and the right hand had to agree, where the thumb had to climb up to the fifth string at exactly the right instant or the whole thing stumbled over itself like a kid running in flip-flops. He had been practicing the figure for six days. He was pretty sure he was one of those kids now, standing with his thumb pointed the wrong way, watching the phrase get away from him for the forty-seventh time.

He breathed. He tried again. The pigeon tilted its head. The fan hummed.

This time, for reasons he would not have been able to name, it sat down.

The first note bloomed, and then the second, and the third climbed up the neck to find the fifth string exactly where it was supposed to be, and the whole little figure closed with a soft click at the end, like a door latch finding its groove. Ezra did not let himself smile. He did it again. Again. Four times in a row. Then he played it twice fast, the way Tobias liked, and it still worked. Then he laid his hand over the strings to mute them, and in the quiet of his bedroom he let himself exhale.

It was a stupid little wrinkle. It had taken him six days. Six days felt like a long time, in August, at fifteen, with school a week away and everything on the edge of starting.

From the kitchen he could hear his mother moving. She was the kind of mover who made very little sound — the soft tock of a cabinet closing, a spoon's patient touch against the lip of a bowl, the small exhale that meant she had just tasted something and found it correct. His mother was a legal scholar. Her name was Chinwe. She wrote law review articles in which every sentence was balanced like a dancer on one foot, and she made jollof rice the way her mother had made it, which was the only way, she said, that rice was properly made. Ezra liked to listen to her cook. You could learn something about a person by the rhythm of their kitchen.

From the living room his little sister, Ifeoma, was narrating an argument between two of her stuffed animals. The argument was about whether clouds were alive. The giraffe said yes. The penguin said no. Ifeoma was eleven. She was at the age where she still played with stuffed animals when she thought no one could hear her, and she was also at the age where she was starting to understand that someone always could.

"They are alive because they move," the giraffe said.

"Cars move," the penguin said. "Cars aren't alive."

Ezra almost smiled. He set the guitar into its stand, stood up, stretched until his shoulders popped, and went to his door. He could hear his father, too, down the hall, talking in low tones on the phone in French. His father spoke five languages. His father was in five languages the way other people were in sweatpants, comfortable, half-dressed, moving easily between rooms.

"Yes," his father was saying, in French, "yes, I understand."

Ezra was not meant to listen. He had not been raised to listen at his father's door. His father's work, by the time Ezra was old enough to be curious about it, had become a closed room in the apartment, a room you knew was there but did not enter. You did not enter it, and your father, after a long day of being inside it, came out quietly, and sometimes put a hand on the top of your head, and sometimes asked you to play him something.

"I understand," his father said, and then he said it again more slowly, "yes, I understand," and Ezra could hear in that repetition the thing his father did when he was understanding something he did not want to.

Ezra went to the kitchen.

"Mommy," he said.

"Ez."

"Do we have the lemon?"

"You can ask for more than a lemon, you know."

"I will," he said. "I'm starting with a lemon."

His mother looked at him over the top of her glasses and handed him a lemon. She did not ask what it was for. He carried it back to his room, cut it in half on a plate he had smuggled out of the kitchen three weeks ago and never returned, and rubbed the cut side along his fingertips. Tobias had taught him this. Tobias was full of small weird pieces of advice from the last sixty years of playing guitar, and most of them worked. A little lemon on the pads of the fingers before practice tightened the skin so the strings did not slide. Ezra did it for good luck now, as much as for anything else.

He was washing his hands in the bathroom sink when his father's voice down the hall lifted, just once, and then went quiet, and then lifted once more, and then the hallway went still.

Ezra, washing his hands, looked at himself in the mirror. He was fifteen. He had his father's height already, and his mother's narrow face, and a head of hair that his Aunt Ngozi, visiting from Lagos last Christmas, had declared a disgrace, and which Ezra had immediately decided was his favorite thing about himself. He wore it high and round and he liked how he looked when he caught himself in a shop window. He had his father's hands, long, with a reach at the thumb that Tobias said God had made specifically for classical guitar and that it would be a scandal to waste. He had a small scar over his left eye from where Ifeoma had thrown a wooden block at him when she was four. He had the beginning of something like a mustache, if you squinted, which he only did when no one was in the room.

He looked at the mirror fifteen-year-old and felt, as he sometimes did, the funny doubled feeling of being the person and also looking at the person. Then he dried his hands and went back to his room and practiced for another forty minutes, and by six o'clock his mother called them to dinner.

They ate at the long table by the window, the one his mother had found at an estate sale in the first year of the family's move to the city, the one she had refinished herself one weekend with sandpaper and linseed oil, his father making a joke about how she was going to end their marriage with the smell of it. Now the smell was gone and the table was beautiful, dark wood with a shine like still water, and they ate around it the way they had eaten around it for three years.

His father sat at the end nearest the window. His father was a tall man, broad at the shoulders, narrow at the hips, gray coming in at the temples now in a way Ezra only noticed under certain lights. His father's name was Tunde. Dr. Tunde Okonkwo. His father's father had been a schoolteacher in a small town in the south, and his father had climbed from that small town to Ibadan to Oxford to the United Nations, and now sat at Ezra's dinner table in a soft blue cotton shirt opening a dish of stew with the tip of a wooden spoon.

His father was quiet that evening.

Quiet from his father was not unusual. Tunde Okonkwo was, by disposition, a listener. When he spoke, it was after long consideration, and often slowly, and when he did not speak, you did not push. Ezra had grown up being read to at bedtime by a man who paused between the end of one sentence and the start of the next as if he were walking down a stone staircase, one careful foot, then the other. His father's quiet, on a normal day, was a kind of room you were always welcome in.

But tonight the quiet was different. Tonight the quiet had a wall.

"Chinwe," his father said, after a while, and his mother, who had been listening to Ifeoma explain about the clouds, looked up.

"Mm."

"The call came in earlier."

"I heard you on the phone," his mother said. "I thought it might be."

"They are serious," his father said.

Ezra did not look up. He had learned, over fifteen years, the way his parents handled a thing. His parents did not handle things by shielding their children. That was the phrase his father used. We do not shield our children. His father said this as if it were a proverb. But they also did not rush. They were going to say whatever they were going to say in their own time, and Ezra was going to keep eating the rice, and Ifeoma was going to keep feeding a little bit of chicken to the underside of the table because she thought nobody saw her do it, and eventually his father would tell them what he needed to tell them.

"How serious," his mother said.

"Very serious," his father said. "By month-end, they want an answer."

"For when?"

"For the new year. January."

Ezra felt his hand, holding the fork, go still. He did not look up. Ifeoma had stopped feeding the chicken to the underside of the table. Ifeoma had noticed, because Ifeoma noticed everything, eventually.

"For how long," his mother said.

"They did not give a number," his father said. "They did not need to give a number. You know what this kind of position is."

"Yes," his mother said, "I know."

Ezra looked up now. His father was looking at his plate. His mother was looking at his father. Ifeoma was looking at Ezra, her eyes very large, which was the look she wore when she was trying to figure out, by watching the big people, whether a thing was bad.

"Papa," Ezra said.

"Yes, Ezra."

"What is it."

His father set his wooden spoon down on the rim of his plate. He folded his long hands. He looked, in that moment, like a man preparing to deliver a speech in a hall full of strangers, and then he took a breath and let the posture go, and Ezra saw, again, that he was just his father, his father who read to him at bedtime when he was small, his father who had carried him on his shoulders through the airport in Abuja when Ezra was four and the line at customs had stretched out the door.

"They are recalling me," his father said, "to Lagos."

"To Lagos," Ezra said.

"Yes."

"As what."

"For a position I have been asked to fill," his father said. "A difficult position. It is not the work I was going to do. It is the work they are asking me to do."

"Because of the crisis," his mother said.

"Because of the crisis," his father said.

"What crisis," Ifeoma said.

His father's face, for the first time in the conversation, softened. He reached over and put his hand on Ifeoma's head, not a pat, not a mussing of her braid, just the weight of his hand settling on top of her head the way a blanket settles.

"A hard one," his father said.

"Are you going," Ifeoma said.

"That is what we are all going to talk about," his father said. "We. Together. As a family. Not yet. Tonight we are only saying it out loud so that the word is in the house."

"Which word," Ifeoma said.

"Lagos," his father said.

Ezra, for the rest of the meal, could barely taste the rice.

After dinner he helped his mother carry the dishes to the sink. His mother washed. He dried. They did not speak. His mother was not the sort of woman who filled silence. When he was small this had scared him. He had thought, when his mother was quiet, that he had done something wrong, and he had cast around in his head for the thing he had done until his father, once, passing through the kitchen, had stopped and said, Ezra, sometimes a quiet mother is only a tired one. He had laughed, a little, the way his father laughed, and he had kissed the top of Ezra's head, and then he had kept walking. Ezra had taken the word tired into himself then and folded it up and kept it.

Tonight his mother was not tired. His mother was thinking. He knew the difference now.

"You will have questions," his mother said, eventually, her hands in the water.

"Yes," Ezra said.

"Let them come."

"I don't know what they are yet."

"That is normal," she said. "That is the shape of this. The questions arrive later. Let them come when they come. Then you tell us."

"Okay," Ezra said.

"Okay," she said.

She pulled the plug in the sink. The water gurgled down. She dried her hands on the good blue towel. Then she looked at him, really looked at him, and for a moment her hand came up to his cheek, the cool of the towel still in it, and she cupped his face in the way she had not done in a very long time.

"My Ezra," she said.

"I am here, Mommy."

"Yes," she said. "You are."

She went to the living room.

He stood at the sink for a long moment after she had gone. His hands were still damp. He looked at the towel hanging on the oven handle, the good blue one, the one his mother had brought back from a trip to her cousins in Port Harcourt the summer he was twelve. He looked at the small ceramic dish on the counter where his mother kept, at all times, three cloves of garlic and a half an onion. He looked at the window over the sink, at the reflection of his own face half-lit by the small yellow light over the stove. He looked at himself, and for a moment he was not sure which version of himself he was looking at — the boy on the edge of a Thursday in an American apartment, or the boy who might, four months from now, be rinsing a different sink in a different kitchen looking at a different window into a different street. He thought, with some effort, that both of them would still be him. That was a small comfort. It was not a full one. But it was something to set on the shelf.

Ezra, later, went back to his room and shut the door and sat on the edge of his bed and looked at the guitar for a long time without touching it. Then he took it out of the stand, and he did not play the wrinkle he had finally learned that afternoon. He played a slow, low progression he had been writing all summer, one he had not shown to Tobias yet, one he had not shown to anyone yet. The progression had a little shape in it, a little descending line, that he had lifted, without asking, from a Persian scale a friend of his had hummed to him in the spring.

Rana, her name was. Rana Mehdizadeh. She would be back at school on Monday.

He played the progression until the window went dark. He played it until his fingers were tired. He played it until his mother called softly from the hallway that it was almost ten. Then he put the guitar away, and he sat in the dark, and he said, very quietly, to nobody, "Lagos."

The word was in the house.

He did not know yet what to do with it.

He lay awake a long time. The word Lagos sat on the ceiling. He looked at it. It did not move. Eventually he rolled over, and he picked up his phone from the nightstand, and he scrolled back through the photos. He scrolled past the summer — Miles at the beach, Aditi in a yellow hat, a picture of his own guitar in the afternoon light that he had taken because he had liked the way the grain of the wood had caught the sun — and back, further, into the spring, where there were pictures of Rana at school, and pictures from the ensemble concert in May, and a picture of Tobias holding up the mug that had the words WORLD'S OKAYEST GUITAR TEACHER on the side, a gift from last year's Christmas which had made him laugh for ten straight minutes. Ezra looked at that picture for a long time.

Then he kept scrolling. He scrolled back further, and further, and eventually he was looking at pictures from two years ago, from a family trip to Ibadan and Lagos in the summer he was thirteen. There were not many. His father had not wanted a lot of pictures that summer. His father had wanted, instead, to walk his children through the streets, to introduce them to people, to make them eat at certain stalls and hear certain stories from certain uncles. But there were a few pictures. He looked at them now. He looked at himself at thirteen, standing in his grandmother's kitchen, a little too thin for his shirt, grinning at whoever was holding the camera. He looked at Ifeoma, nine then, perched on the edge of a chair with a glass of Fanta, serious and dignified. He looked at a picture of his father that his mother must have taken, his father in a pale short-sleeve shirt standing on a balcony at dusk looking out at something beyond the frame.

He put the phone down.

He lay on his back. He felt, then, the thing he had been trying all night not to feel — a cold sharp thread of guilt running through him. Not a big guilt. A thin one. The guilt of a boy who had not really thought, all summer, about the country his father had come from. The guilt of a boy who had spent his July on his guitar and his August on a wrinkle in a piece and most of the rest of it at the pool, and who had not once, in any of those months, said the word Lagos out loud, even in his own mouth. The guilt of a boy who had, without meaning to, become a person more from here than from there, and who had not, until his father said the word at the dinner table, noticed that this had happened to him.

He did not know if that was normal. He did not know if it was a thing he should let himself feel badly about. He thought, after a while, that the feeling itself was probably the beginning of the answer to it. You could not be guilty for what you had not known you had. You could only start, now, to know.

He let the feeling sit with him. He did not fight it. He let it be the first of the questions his mother had warned him would come.

He slept.

Ezra came in alone. Rana's family had moved across town over the summer and she took a different train now. Miles Park-Baumgartner, his closest friend from last year, was at a summer program in Iceland through the weekend. Aditi Chaudhuri, who had sat next to him in world literature, had posted a selfie from the airport at six that morning, still in Mumbai, joking she would arrive at school halfway through second period. So the front hall, loud and flashing as it was with the return of nine hundred teenagers from every corner of the earth, was not, for Ezra, full of the people he knew. He pushed through it with his guitar on his back and his head down and he went straight to the auditorium.

The auditorium was the best place in the school for the first hour of the first day. Nobody used it until third period. The lights were on low. The stage was swept. A single piano stood in the far corner and an upright bass in the other corner and between them the long, gleaming, uninterrupted wood of the stage itself, which at that hour of that morning looked to Ezra like a lake.

He set his guitar case down by the apron of the stage. He opened it. He took out the guitar. He sat on the edge of the stage, his legs hanging off, and he tuned — slowly, low E first, then A, then D, each string called up to its proper pitch with the soft patient finger of the tuning peg. Then he started to play.

He was not thinking about anything in particular. He was letting his hands move. He was playing fragments — a bit of a Sor study Tobias had made him memorize when he was twelve, a bit of the wrinkle from yesterday, a bit of the progression from the Persian scale he had been writing all summer. He played them loose, and in no particular order, the way you might try on shirts in front of a mirror.

He did not hear her come in.

He heard, after some long time, a soft sound from the fifth row of the auditorium, a sound like a breath held a moment too long and then let out on purpose. He looked up.

A girl was sitting in the fifth row. She was alone. Her hair was pulled back tight and she was wearing a dark blue cardigan over a white shirt and her hands were folded in her lap. She was looking at him, not with the pointed sort of looking that teenagers did at each other in hallways, but with a quiet watchful way that Ezra, who thought about these things sometimes more than he let on, would later think of as the way his mother looked at a difficult paragraph in a law review.

She did not move.

He did not stop playing.

He played another three bars of the thing he had been working on. Then he let the last note fall, and he laid his hand flat on the strings to hush them, and the auditorium was quiet.

"Sorry," she said. "I can go."

"You don't have to go," Ezra said.

"I didn't mean to listen."

"You can listen."

"Are you sure."

"You came in quietly," Ezra said. "That's kinder than most people."

She smiled, a little, the smile of a person who did not yet know whether she was welcome anywhere. She did not get up. She did not come down to him. She sat there in the fifth row with her hands folded in her lap.

"What was that piece," she said.

"It's something I'm writing," he said.

"Oh."

"It's not done."

"No. I can hear that. It turns at the end like it's looking for something."

He put the guitar across his lap. He looked at her properly now. She was somewhere his age, maybe a little younger. Her voice was low and even and careful. Her accent, to his ear, had the shape of something East African, but softer, sanded down by other places she had lived.

"What's your name," he said.

"Grace."

"I'm Ezra."

"I know," Grace said.

He laughed. "You know."

"I asked the lady at the front desk who was in the auditorium," Grace said. "I was looking for a practice room. She said the auditorium was not meant to be a practice room and that someone was in there anyway. She said his name was Ezra. She said I should tell him to share."

"She's very direct."

"She said you would understand."

"I do," he said. "Are you new."

"Yes."

"From where."

"Nairobi," Grace said. "By way of — by way of a few places. Most recently Geneva. Now here."

"Welcome," Ezra said. "To the auditorium."

"Thank you."

"What do you play."

"Piano," she said.

She said it the way some people said their own name, which was to say, she said it like a thing that had been true so long she no longer knew how to be embarrassed about it.

"I'm going to go," she said. "You were working."

"Don't go," he said, without thinking about it, and then heard himself, and then recovered. "I mean — you can stay. I was about done. The piano's over there. I don't mind."

She did not move for a long moment. Then she stood up, and she came down the aisle, and she came up the little stairs to the side of the stage, and she walked with the careful small steps of somebody who had not yet decided if the floor was solid. She sat at the piano. She adjusted the bench. She ran her right thumb down the keys, not a scale, just a light testing touch, the way you might run your hand across the top of a wall to see how warm it was in the sun.

Then she played.

She played, at first, something she was clearly just warming up with — an arpeggio, a little Bach, a bit of Debussy, the sort of thing Ezra had heard played in hotel lobbies. He listened with mild interest. Then she shifted. She did not announce the shift. She did not meet his eyes. She just moved — moved into a piece he had never heard before, something in a minor key, something unhurried, something that built and did not build, that started somewhere quiet and kept returning to it the way a river returns to a river, and Ezra, who had been half looking at his guitar when she began, stopped looking at his guitar.

She played for maybe four minutes. Then she lifted her hands, and laid them in her lap again, and looked over at him.

"That was you," he said.

"That was me."

"Yours."

"Mine."

He did not say anything for a moment. He had been ready to say something polite. The polite thing would have been small.

"I'd like to hear more of it," he said instead.

"It doesn't have more of it yet."

"Then I'd like to hear it again."

She smiled at that — not a polite smile this time, but a real one, the smile of someone who has just heard a thing that belongs to them taken seriously by a stranger in an auditorium on the first day of school.

"Maybe later," she said.

The bell rang.

Grace stood up. She did not say goodbye. She walked to the edge of the stage, and down the little stairs, and up the aisle, and at the door she paused with her hand on the handle and turned, once, and looked at him. She did not wave. She did not smile. She looked at him the way a person looks who is deciding whether something is going to turn out to be important.

Then she was gone, and the double doors swung heavy on their hinges, and Ezra was left on the edge of the stage with his guitar across his knees, and the auditorium was quiet, and in the quiet the whole day had become different than it had been five minutes before.

He packed up the guitar. He went to homeroom.

In homeroom Rana was already at her desk, and when she saw him her face did the thing her face had always done, which was to light up in a careful controlled way, as if she did not want to use all the light at once. He went to her and she stood up halfway out of her chair and hugged him, one-armed and brief and sisterly, and sat back down.

"Ez," she said.

"Rana."

"You look taller."

"Everyone says that."

"Everyone is right."

"How was your summer."

"Quiet," Rana said, and he knew, from the shape of the word in her mouth, that she meant that in a specific way, the way a person means quiet who has had the loudest summer of her life and come out the other side of it. He did not press.

"I heard someone new at the auditorium," he said. "Before homeroom."

"Who."

"A girl named Grace. Pianist. From Kenya most recently. Her father does something at a consulate."

Rana raised an eyebrow. "Already scouting the new kids."

"I wasn't scouting."

"You always scout."

"I do not."

"Ez, you scout. It's your best thing. You have a scout's nose."

"I was practicing. She came in."

"And she played."

"She did."

"Good."

"Good?"

"Good, as in is she good."

"Yes," Ezra said. "She's very good."

Rana nodded the small considered nod she gave when she was filing something away. Ezra watched her nod it and thought, again, about how different the two of them were, and also how alike, and how much of last year had happened in between them and how much of it had not been spoken out loud. Rana, in a way, was the friend he had been most surprised to make, which was, it turned out, a good way to make a friend.

"Ezra," Rana said. "You look like you have news."

"What kind of news."

"Family news."

He did not answer for a second. The homeroom teacher came in and called the roll. Ezra said present when his name was called. Rana said present when her name was called. The teacher made a joke about how she could tell it was September because the overhead lights were already flickering. A boy at the back of the room said something that made another boy laugh. Life, as it always does, returned quickly and loudly to its normal volume.

"Tell me later," Rana said under her breath.

"I will," Ezra said.

"Today."

"Today."

"Promise."

"Promise."

At lunch Miles was back. He had come in overnight from Iceland and his eyes had the hollow look of a boy who had not slept in thirty-one hours, and he was nevertheless, in full Miles fashion, the loudest person in the cafeteria.

"Okonkwo."

"Park-Baumgartner."

"My brother."

"My brother."

"I brought you something."

"From Iceland."

"From Iceland."

It was a keychain. It was a small felt puffin in a knitted scarf. Ezra laughed out loud, the first full laugh he had laughed since Saturday.

"It's the most aggressively cute thing I have ever seen," Ezra said.

"I know."

"I love it."

"I know."

"Miles."

"Yeah."

"I missed you."

"I missed you too. What did I miss."

"A lot."

"Tell me."

"Not here."

"After school."

"Tobias after school. Thursday is Tobias."

"Tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow."

"Are you all right."

"I think so."

"Ezra."

"Yeah."

"You're lying a little."

"I am."

"I'll let you lie for a day."

"Thanks."

Miles, for all his volume, had never once, in the four years they had known each other, asked Ezra a question that pushed past where Ezra wanted to be pushed. That was one of the things Ezra loved about him. Miles was a boy who filled every room he was in and who had nevertheless, somehow, always known how to make room. They ate, together, a school cafeteria lunch of dubious pasta. Aditi, arriving late from the airport, dropped her bag at the table and collapsed into a chair and announced that she had given up on the concept of time zones as a personal philosophy. Coco, two tables over, was describing to Tomas, at length, an argument she had had in French with a waiter in Montreal. Jamal walked by and flicked Miles in the ear. Miles screamed at him in mock horror. For five minutes the cafeteria was the cafeteria, and Ezra, even through the gray thin weight of Sunday still sitting in his chest, let himself feel it as the cafeteria. He let Northgate be Northgate for five minutes. Then he stood up, and he shouldered his bag, and he went to his next class, and the weight came back, as he had known it would.

It turned out Grace was in his English class.

He saw her when he walked in after lunch — second row, near the window, her hands folded on an empty desk. The desk in front of her was empty. He sat down in it. She looked up.

"Of all the rooms," she said.

"Of all the rooms," he said.

Ms. Aboah came in and wrote the word PARADIGM on the board and underlined it twice and told them this was going to be their first unit of the year and also the hardest thing they had ever been asked to do, which was her joke, but also not, and then she handed out the syllabus. Ezra kept half turning to look at Grace. Grace pretended not to notice. Ezra pretended to pretend not to notice her pretending.

After class, in the hallway, he caught up with her at the fountain.

"I'm going to the music room," he said. "You don't have to come."

"Okay."

"But if you wanted to."

"I could."

"You could."

She looked up at him. She had very steady eyes. She had, he was beginning to realize, the steadiness of a person who had been the new kid so many times that she had made steadiness into her first line of defense.

"Let me put my things in my locker," she said.

He waited for her by the water fountain. She came back without her bag, her hands tucked in the pockets of her cardigan. She walked next to him down the hall and he tried very hard not to notice that she was walking next to him.

The music room at Northgate was a good room. It had a row of high windows along the north wall that let in a clean gray light all day. It had instruments on the walls and a piano in the corner. Mr. Bellamy, the music director, kept a kettle on a hot plate in the back and a tin of very bad English tea next to it. The room always smelled, faintly, of tea. Ezra loved the smell.

Bellamy was not in.

"Is this all right," Grace said, in the door.

"It's better than all right," Ezra said. "It's ours."

"For how long."

"Until third period tomorrow."

He set his guitar case on a chair. He sat at the piano bench. She did not sit next to him. She stood to one side and looked at the piano and ran her palm along the closed lid as if checking that the wood would still be there.

"Play your piece again," he said.

"Now."

"If you want."

She looked at him, and she weighed the question, and she did not answer it, but she sat down, and she lifted the lid, and she played.

It was the piece from the auditorium. It was, in this smaller room, different. In the auditorium it had been water. In this room, in the clean light from the north windows, it was something more careful, something she had carved rather than poured. He sat on a chair across from her and he watched her hands. Her hands were small and squarish at the palm and her fingers were long and she held her wrists very straight. When she was playing she did not move the rest of her body. Her shoulders did not rock. Her head did not bob. She was as still as a person walking a balance beam, and all the music was in her hands.

She finished. She laid her hands in her lap.

"What's it called," he said.

"It isn't called anything."

"You haven't named it."

"I don't name things until they're done."

"That's fair."

"It isn't done."

"I know," he said. "I can hear that."

She lifted an eyebrow at him.

"You said that this morning."

"I did."

"What do you mean when you say that."

"I mean I can hear where you left off," he said. "Where you stopped for the day. Where you're going to come back tomorrow. I can hear the door you left open."

She was quiet. She looked at her hands in her lap.

"Nobody has ever described it that way to me," she said.

"No."

"No."

"It's how I think about my own stuff."

"You write too."

"A little."

"Show me," she said.

He looked at her. She was looking at him with the steady eyes she had looked at him with at the fountain. He realized, in a way he had not realized before in his life, that being asked to play something was not always the same as being asked to show something, and that she had just asked him to show her something, and that this was different.

"Okay," he said.

He got the guitar out. He tuned. He sat on a chair across from the piano. He played the progression from the Persian scale. He played it the way he had played it for himself in his room last night, slow, low, with long rests between the phrases, and he did not look at her while he played it.

When he was done he looked up.

Her hands were in her lap. Her chin was a little tilted. She was looking past him, at the north windows.

"That's a maqam," she said.

He blinked. "You know maqam?"

"I played a concert at a festival in Amman two years ago," she said. "A friend of my father's hosted us. A violinist. He tried to teach me a little. I am not good at it. But I know the sound."

"It's Persian, not Arabic," Ezra said. "I think. My friend — Rana — she hummed me the scale. I pulled it."

"Where is she."

"Rana."

"Yes."

"Here. In the building. I'll introduce you."

"Please."

"She's —"

He stopped. He did not know how to say it. He did not know how to explain Rana to Grace on the first day. He did not know how to say that Rana's father had been imprisoned in Iran for his faith and that the sentence had come down in May and that Rana had spent the summer in a kind of grief that had no obvious shape because the person she was grieving was still alive. He did not know how to say that what Rana and he had worked on last year in this same room — the first draft of the Persian scale thing — had been, for Rana, a small way of carrying her father with her, and that when Rana was quiet this fall it would not be because she was shy, it would be because she was the daughter of a man who was in a prison in Tehran, and who, at 15, could say that about herself in the middle of September in a music room in America.

"She's my friend," Ezra said, finally, and he meant it the way Rana would have wanted him to mean it, because all the rest of it was Rana's story to tell and not his.

"Okay," Grace said.

"Tomorrow," he said. "I'll introduce you tomorrow."

"Okay."

They did not play anything else for a while. They sat in the clean light. After a few minutes Grace stood up and wandered over to the wall of instruments and ran her fingers along the curve of an acoustic bass. She asked who played it. He said Tomas Vargas, a sophomore, very serious, very tall, mostly a jazz kid. She asked what Jamal played. He said saxophone. She asked about Coco. He said Coco played violin and also lived, at all times, one-quarter in a movie in her own head. She laughed at that, a small clean laugh, the first real laugh he had heard from her.

"And you," she said. "You're the guitar."

"I'm the guitar."

"And what else."

"What else do I play."

"What else are you."

He thought about it.

"A brother," he said, "a son, a guitar player. I don't know. A fifteen-year-old."

"Okay."

"What else are you."

"A daughter," Grace said. "A sister — I have a brother, eight years older, in Nairobi for university. A pianist. A fifteen-year-old, yes." She paused. "An immigrant."

"You say that like it's a job."

"Sometimes it is."

He nodded. He did not push. He had a feeling she had already said more than she had meant to, and he did not want to be the kind of person who took advantage of that. Instead he started to put the guitar away.

"What are you doing after school," she said.

"Practicing."

"Where."

"My teacher's apartment. Tobias. Over on the avenue. I go Tuesdays and Thursdays."

"Okay," she said. "Tomorrow."

"Tomorrow," he said.

He walked her down the hall to her locker. He did not ask if he could walk her. She did not ask if she could be walked. They just turned in the direction of her locker, and when they got there she stopped, and she smiled a small smile at him, and she said, "See you tomorrow, Ezra," and he said, "See you tomorrow, Grace," and she opened her locker, and he walked away and did not look back, because he had the sense that looking back would be wrong in some small important way, and because he knew, already, somehow, that he was going to think about her on the train home.

On the train home, standing because the car was full, holding the overhead bar with one hand and balancing the guitar against his knee with the other, he thought about her. He thought about her on the train home. He thought about her the way a fifteen-year-old thinks about a person he has just met, which is to say, he kept rerunning the moments in his head, one at a time, in a kind of slow documentary he was making for himself. He ran the moment of looking up in the auditorium. He ran the moment of her hands on the piano keys. He ran the moment of her saying the word immigrant as if it were a job. He ran the moment of her hand on his hand, not quite on purpose, at her locker. He ran these moments, and he smiled, faintly, at himself, in the reflection of the train window against the dark of the tunnel, and he thought that he should probably also think about homework, and about the Persian progression, and about what he was going to say to his mother when he got home, and about his father's face at the dinner table the night before. He thought, instead, mostly about Grace. He thought about her hands in the clean light. He thought about the way she had said the word immigrant as if it were a job. He thought about her steady eyes. He thought about how he was going to have to go home and sit down at a table with his father and mother and Ifeoma and talk about whether to move to Lagos.

He thought, also, for the first time in a while, and with a small surprising embarrassment, that he had a life in this city, and that the life had, as of today, gotten a little larger.

His mother, at her end of the table, looked up once and said, "That's a long list for a Monday."

"Music, Mommy."

"I thought so. You have the look."

"What look."

"The one where you are not here even though you are."

"I am here."

"Yes. Also not. It is okay. I like the look. I have had it. Your grandmother used to accuse me of it at your age. She said I was writing a paper with my eyes."

"Were you."

"I was. I was writing many papers with my eyes, at your age."

"What were they about."

"The same things I write about now."

"Which are."

"People and what they owe each other."

Ezra smiled.

"That's a big question."

"All the real ones are."

He went back to his list. She went back to her paragraph. They worked at the same table for another hour. His father, in the bedroom, was on another long call. Ifeoma was in her room talking, probably, to the giraffe and the penguin. The apartment had the quiet industrious hum of a house in which everyone was quietly at work. Ezra, for a moment, put his pencil down and just listened. He listened to his mother's page turning. He listened to his father's voice through the wall, low, in a language he could not identify at this distance. He listened to the small scrape of Ifeoma's chair being moved in the other room. He thought, with a sudden and almost painful clarity, that this was his house. Whether he moved or stayed, whether he went to Lagos or did not, whether his father left alone or the whole family packed up together, this was a night he was having in this house, and this night would have happened, and it would be, no matter what, one of the nights he would remember later.

Tobias lived in a fourth-floor walk-up on a quiet tree-lined avenue five blocks from the school. The building had been there a hundred and twenty years. The stair smelled, always, of old wood and a faint, not unpleasant, whiff of cooking — the downstairs neighbor's garlic, the upstairs neighbor's cardamom, Tobias's own kettle. By the third flight Ezra, guitar on his back, was winded every time, and every time Tobias, when he opened the door, pretended to be surprised he had made it.

"Okonkwo," Tobias said, at the door, on Thursday, "you survived the stairs."

"Barely."

"You need more exercise."

"I just climbed four flights."

"With a guitar on your back. It doesn't count if you play it after. Come in."

The apartment was the same as it had always been, which, for Tobias, was the point. The front room had two bookshelves, a leather chair, a low coffee table with a chess board on it, a music stand, a small hard wooden chair for students, and, along the wall, four guitars on stands. On the wall hung a framed poster from a concert in 1974 in Madrid, a poster of Segovia sitting in a similar hard wooden chair, and a framed letter, in Spanish, from a teacher Tobias had studied with as a young man. The light came in from the west in the afternoons and made the room, at this hour, look like a photograph from the seventies.

Tobias, as far as Ezra was concerned, also looked like a photograph from the seventies. He was in his sixties now, nearly seventy, with white hair he wore a little long and round gold glasses and a blue button-down shirt he had probably owned for thirty years. He had been Ezra's teacher since Ezra was ten. He had been, in certain weeks, more present in Ezra's day than any other adult except his parents.

"Tea," Tobias said.

"Please."

"Chamomile or black."

"Black."

"Of course black. You will not be a tasteful old man like me. You will be an impatient young man who drinks black tea at five in the afternoon and cannot sleep. This is the tradition."

"I can sleep."

"You cannot sleep."

"I can."

"You cannot."

Tobias put the kettle on. Ezra took the guitar out and sat on the hard wooden chair. They had this same ritual every Tuesday and Thursday. They had this same ritual, Ezra realized, a little later than he would have liked, since he was ten. Many things had changed in Ezra's life in that time. This ritual had not.

Tobias came back from the kitchen with two mugs. He handed Ezra one. He sat in the leather chair across from him with his own. He put his own mug down on the coffee table next to the chess board. He put his hand flat on his thigh, palm down, as if to steady it. Ezra noticed the hand.

The hand was thinner than it had been in June.

"How was the summer," Tobias said.

"Good."

"Only good."

"I practiced."

"Good."

"I wrote some."

"Show me."

"After lesson."

"After lesson," Tobias agreed. "Because your written things are dangerous. They make us talk. We talked too much last lesson. Today we play. Scales."

They did scales. They did scales for ten minutes. They did scales like every lesson started — two octaves, three octaves, the ones with hard shifts, the ones with the left thumb that gave trouble on humid days. Tobias watched from the leather chair. He watched with his whole body still, the way only people who have taught for a long time know how to watch.

"Good," Tobias said.

They did etudes. They did a bit of Sor. They did the wrinkle. Ezra played the wrinkle well. Tobias laughed at how hard Ezra was trying not to grin about it.

"You got it."

"I got it."

"Six days?"

"Six."

"That is normal."

"It felt like a year."

"That is also normal."

Ezra was mid-sentence when Tobias, reaching for his tea, trembled.

It was a small tremble. It was the kind of tremble you would have missed if you had not been watching his hands. But Ezra had grown up watching Tobias's hands. Tobias's hands had taught him most of what he knew about the world. Tobias's hands were not supposed to tremble.

The tea, in the mug, did not spill. Tobias lifted the mug steadily and took a slow sip and set it down. If he had felt the tremble, he did not let it show on his face. Ezra looked back at his own guitar and pretended he had not seen.

"Now your piece," Tobias said.

"It isn't done."

"It is never done. Play it."

He played the Persian progression. He played the version he had played for Grace yesterday in the music room. Tobias listened with the still-body attention of a man listening to somebody else play in a church.

When Ezra finished, Tobias did not speak for a long time.

"Where did the scale come from," he said, finally.

"From a friend."

"Persian."

"Yes."

"She gave it to you."

"She hummed it. Last year."

"Then it is hers."

"I'm not going to —"

"I did not say you are going to. I said it is hers. You know the difference. You are writing, at this point, a conversation with her. Make sure she knows it, if you mean to use it."

"I will."

"I know you will."

Tobias reached for his tea. This time Ezra saw the tremble again. This time Tobias saw Ezra see it.

Tobias did not pretend. He was not the kind of man who pretended. He set the mug down, slowly, with the small precision of a man placing a piece on a chessboard.

"Ezra."

"Yes."

"I am well enough for a lesson. Today we have had a lesson. I do not want to talk yet about what is next. Not today. I am seeing a doctor on Monday. After Monday I will know more. After Monday I will tell you."

"Okay."

"Do not ask me before then."

"Okay."

"Do not tell your mother."

"Okay."

"Drink your tea."

"Okay."

He drank his tea. Tobias leaned back in the leather chair. He closed his eyes for a second. Ezra, sitting on the hard wooden chair, realized that he had, in fact, been holding his breath, and that he had been holding his breath since he noticed, from across the room, the tremble.

"Play it once more," Tobias said, without opening his eyes.

"The piece."

"Yes. Slowly. Do not hurry the low phrase. The one that drops. Let it drop."

Ezra played it again. He played it slowly. He let the low phrase drop. He did not hurry it. He did not look at Tobias. He did not look at his own hands. He looked at the small square of light on the wall above the chess board. He played the piece, and he did not cry, and he did not hurry, and when he was done the sun through the west window had moved a little and the square of light on the wall had changed shape.

"Good," Tobias said, from the leather chair, without opening his eyes.

"Tobias."

"Mm."

"Thank you."

"For what, stubborn boy."

"The lesson."

"Oh," Tobias said. "The lesson. Yes. Of course. Every lesson, always. We always do the lesson."

Ezra put the guitar away. He stood up. Tobias opened his eyes.

Tobias looked at him for a long moment without speaking. Tobias, Ezra had learned over the years, was a man who used silence the way other people used sentences, and the silence he was using now was a careful, deliberate kind. It was not a silence that was waiting to be filled. It was a silence that was, itself, the thing Tobias wanted to say. Ezra stood in it. He let it be said.

"Thursday."

"Thursday," Ezra said.

"Come on time."

"I will."

"Ezra."

"Yes."

"One more thing. I will not bring it up again. But I will say it once, tonight, because tonight is a night for saying things. You are a serious boy. You have been a serious boy since you were ten. You walked into this apartment the first time with a guitar that was too big for you and you sat on the hard wooden chair with your back very straight and you said, I want to be good. Do you remember."

"I remember."

"I did not tell you this then. I will tell you now. That first sentence, from a ten-year-old, is not a small sentence. I have heard it from many students. Some of them mean it. Most of them only think they do. You meant it. You have meant it every day since. You mean it now. I am telling you this because whatever you decide about Lagos, and whatever I decide about my hands, and whatever your piece decides about its own ending — you will be a serious boy about it. That is a thing your parents gave you, and it is a thing you gave yourself, and it is a thing no decision can take from you. Do you hear me."

"I hear you."

"Good. Now go home. Your mother is waiting."

"I can tell you this," Tobias said, as Ezra paused at the door. "No matter what the doctor says on Monday, I will teach you. I will teach you until I cannot. Do you hear me."

"Yes."

"Good."

Ezra walked down the four flights of stairs slowly. He did not play the guitar on the way home. He carried it on his back and he walked with his hands in his pockets and the sky overhead was the kind of gold that comes in early September when the sun goes down earlier every day and the trees have started, unnoticed, to go dusty at the edges.

He did not tell his mother.

He did not tell his father.

He did not tell Rana.

He had promised.

He sat with it, instead, alone. He sat with it in his bedroom with the door closed and the guitar across his knees. He played the wrinkle. He played the Persian progression. He played a slow, sad, simple G chord until his throat closed and opened again. Then he put the guitar in its stand, and he got up, and he went to the kitchen, and he helped his mother slice the onions for dinner, and he did not say a word about any of it.

His mother, at the counter, slicing next to him, looked at him once.

"All right," she said, softly.

"All right," he said.

She did not say anything else for a while. The onions were making her eyes water, as they always did, because she refused to wear the goggles Aunt Ngozi had sent from Lagos two Christmases ago. He had his own tears, mild, from the onions, and under them another kind of tears that were not exactly tears yet, a kind of pressure behind his eyes that he had learned, this afternoon, to hold. He held them. He sliced. His mother sliced. Ifeoma, in the living room, was singing to herself, something she had learned at school, a small round about a boat on a river, and her voice through the wall was clear and a little off-key and very, very eleven years old.

"Mommy," Ezra said, after a while.

"Yes."

"Can I ask you a question."

"Always."

"When you came here. To this country. Were you scared."

His mother did not answer for a long moment. She kept slicing. The knife on the board made its small rhythmic knock. Then she set the knife down. She turned and looked at him. Her eyes were red from the onions, and beautiful.

"Yes," she said.

"For a long time."

"For a long time."

"How long."

"A year. Two years. I was scared in a background way for about five years. I was scared in a foreground way for about two."

"How did you stop being scared."

"I am not sure I stopped. I think I learned to do the work over the top of it. That is a kind of stopping. If you can do the work over the top of the fear, the fear becomes quieter. It does not go away. It is a thing that you learn to live next to, like a neighbor you did not choose, whose radio is too loud sometimes, but whose presence you eventually get used to."

"Mommy."

"Yes."

"That is such a you thing to say."

"Yes."

She smiled. He smiled. She picked up the knife again. She kept slicing. He watched her, and he thought, with a quiet certainty he would not have been able to describe to anybody, that whatever the decision at the end of the three weeks turned out to be, he was the son of a brave woman, and brave was what he wanted to be.

"Thank you, Mommy."

"Thank you, Ezra."

She did not ask what she meant. He did not answer. She kept slicing. He kept slicing. He loved her, then, in a way that is hard to say out loud in any family, but which in his family was said, at that counter, by the two of them slicing onions at the same rhythm and not saying anything at all.

He did not tell Miles that night. He had meant to. He had promised himself he would tell Miles after ensemble. But Miles, on the train, had been in the middle of telling Ezra about a girl he had met in Iceland whose name was Sólrún and who had, at one point in their brief summer friendship, corrected his pronunciation of her own name fourteen times in a single afternoon, and the story was so elaborate and so Miles-shaped that Ezra had not been able to find a door into his own story. He had laughed at the right moments. He had asked the right questions. He had, at a certain point, simply decided to let Miles have the ride. Miles would listen to him when he needed Miles to. Miles would listen to him tomorrow.

That was a thing he had been learning about friendship. He had not known it at fourteen. He had been learning it this year. That friendship was not a thing of equal halves. Friendship was you holding the other person up some days and the other person holding you up some days, and if you tried to measure it out evenly you would ruin it. On some days Miles needed a person to listen to a fourteen-minute story about a girl in Iceland. On other days Ezra would need a person to sit across from him in a cafeteria and not ask. The bank account did not need to balance every day. It needed only to not be empty.

He got off at his stop. He walked home. He went into the apartment. The living room light was on. Ifeoma was on the rug in her pajamas, drawing. His mother was at the dining table with her laptop. His father's briefcase was on the bench by the door, which meant his father was home, which meant, most likely, his father was in the shower or on a call.

"Ez."

"Hi, Mommy."

"How was school."

"Good."

"How was ensemble."

"Good."

"How was the piece."

He looked at her. He had not told her that they had been going to play it for Bellamy today. She had not asked. But his mother, in her quiet way, kept track of things.

"It was good," he said.

"I would like to hear it, sometime."

"I will play it."

"When you are ready."

"Okay."

"Ifeoma has drawn the apartment."

Ifeoma held the drawing up, without looking up, without speaking. The drawing was of the living room, the dining table, the kitchen, the hallway, the bedrooms. She had drawn everyone in it. She had drawn Ezra at his desk, which was funny, because she had never actually seen him sit at his desk — he did most of his practicing on the edge of his bed. She had drawn their father at the dining table. She had drawn their mother at the kitchen counter. She had drawn herself on the rug with the giraffe and the penguin. She had drawn the potted jasmine plant Grace had brought.

"It's a good drawing," he said.

"I know."

"Why am I at the desk."

"Because a desk is what you draw a guitar at. If I draw you on the bed it looks like you are sick."

"Oh."

"Do you like it."

"I like it very much."

"Good," Ifeoma said, and went back to her drawing, and did not look up.

He went to his room. He sat on the bed. He thought, for the first time, in a very concrete way, about what it would be to be in a drawing of a different apartment. He thought about Ifeoma drawing the Lagos living room in a few months. He thought about it, and he did not know whether the thought made him sad or curious or both. Both, he decided, was fine. Both was, maybe, honest.

The Okonkwos held consultations. This was the word his parents used. They did not hold family meetings. They did not hold sit-downs. They held consultations.

The word had come from Ezra's grandmother, his father's mother, who had been a schoolteacher in the small town in the south, and who, before she had died when Ezra was nine, had been the undisputed matriarch of the Okonkwo family. When she had faced a hard decision, she had gathered the adults in the house, and sometimes the older children, and she had said, Let us consult. She had said it in Igbo, and sometimes in English. She had said it with the solemn specific sound of a word that was not an invitation but a structure.

Ezra's father had carried the word into the household he had made with Ezra's mother, and Ezra's mother, who had her own reasons for respecting the word, had welcomed it in. When Ezra was eight they had held a consultation about whether to move to the city. When Ezra was eleven they had held a consultation about sending Ifeoma to a different school. When Ezra was fourteen they had held a consultation about whether Ifeoma could finally get a puppy. (The puppy had not happened. Ifeoma had taken it as the first and so far only injustice of her young life.)

On Saturday afternoon they held a consultation about Lagos.

They did it the way they always did it. His mother made tea. His father cleared the dining table of everything that was not the tea and the four cups and the plate of cookies she set in the center. They all sat. His father spoke first. His mother spoke second. The children were allowed to speak in the order they wished, and they were expected to speak, even Ifeoma, even if Ifeoma did not know what to say.

"First," his father said, "I will describe the thing. I will describe it as accurately as I can. I will not describe what I hope or what I fear. I will describe what is in front of us. Then your mother will add. Then you two will speak, in the order you wish. Then we will sit quietly for ten minutes. Then we will speak again. Then we will end today without a decision, unless the decision is very clear, which it is not."

"Okay, Papa," Ifeoma said.

Ezra nodded.

Then his mother spoke.

"I will add two things," his mother said. "One is mine. One is ours. The one that is mine is that my work is here. My work can move. It would move slowly and with some cost, but it can move. I do not consider my work a reason to stay." She paused. "The second is ours. It is that if your father goes and we do not go, he will not be at this table. We all know what that means. None of us will say it lightly. This is the second thing."

Ifeoma was looking at her hands.

"Ifeoma," his mother said. "You first."

"Why me first."

"Because you are the youngest. And because I think you have more to say than you think you do. And because your brother would like a minute."

Ezra laughed, in spite of himself. His mother, small-smiling, passed him the plate of cookies.

Ifeoma thought for a while. She was good at thinking. She thought with her whole small serious face, with her eyebrows pinched, with her mouth a little open. When she spoke, she spoke to the table, not to any one person.

"I don't want to leave my school," Ifeoma said. "I love my school. I love Ms. Paz. I love my friends Ada and Harper. I love the library. I love the hallway. I love when it snows on the field in January. I have never been to Lagos. I have been to Grandpa's village and to Grandma's village. I was four. I don't really remember. I want to meet Uncle Emeka and Aunt Ngozi and the cousins. I want to see where Papa grew up. I do not want to leave my school. I am saying both at the same time. Is that okay."

"It is okay," his mother said.

"It is good," his father said.

"Will I have to cut my hair."

"No."

"Will I have to wear a uniform."

"Probably."

"A plaid one."

"Maybe. I don't know the school's uniform."

"If it's plaid, I will wear it. If it's grey I will wear it. If it's orange I will not wear it."

"Orange is unlikely," his father said.

"I do not trust you."

His father laughed. The laugh, from his father, in that moment, was the first laugh at the table, and it was a small and brief thing, but it cracked something open, and for a second the four of them, around the table in the light from the window, were only a family in a room with tea.

Then Ezra spoke.

He had been thinking about what to say for two days. He had thought about it on the train. He had thought about it in his bedroom. He had thought about it yesterday walking home from Tobias's apartment. He had written, last night, in the notebook he kept by his bed, three paragraphs about what he might say. Now he did not say any of them.

"I am going to say the obvious things first," Ezra said. "I love this city. I have a life here. Miles is here, Rana is here, Aditi is here, Tomas, Coco. Tobias is here. Papa, you know Tobias is here. My guitar is here. I mean — my guitar is not here, my guitar is there, I can take my guitar — I mean the way I play it. Here. The way I think. My teacher. My ensemble. I am fifteen, Papa, and I have spent ten of those fifteen years here. Almost. Enough. This is my city."

"Yes."

"And Lagos is yours."

"Yes."

"Mommy. Is Lagos yours."

"It is one of mine."

"Okay."

"I have more than one."

"Okay."

"It matters," his mother said, "that I said that. Let me say it once more. I have more than one. I will not pretend, to any of you, at this table, that my heart lives in Lagos in the way your father's does. That is not how mine is built. Mine is built in pieces. But you asked, and I said. Go on."

"I do not know yet," Ezra said, "what I want. I do not know yet. I do not know if I am a person who should decide this in a week. I do not think I am. I know —" he paused. He felt his throat go thick. He made himself breathe. "I know that I don't want to lose Papa at the table. I know that. I know I don't want to be a kid whose father is a voice on the phone in another country."

His father's face, across the table, did something that Ezra would not, later, be able to describe. His father looked down at his cup. Then he looked up. Then he looked at Ezra in a way Ezra had felt in his life maybe six times.

"I hear you," his father said.

"I am not done."

"Go on."

"I also don't know if I want to be a kid who has only ever really lived in one country. I am Nigerian. Papa, I know I am Nigerian. Mommy, I know I am Nigerian. I speak a little Igbo because Grandma taught me. I eat Mommy's food. I go to funerals and weddings on WhatsApp with the family. But. I don't know Lagos. I don't know the streets. I don't know where the market is. I don't know — I don't know what the air smells like at the end of a rainstorm. I want to. Sometimes I want to very badly. Sometimes I am scared to. Sometimes I wonder if I will ever get the chance, if we keep staying."

He stopped. The room was quiet.

"So I don't know," he said. "I am telling you I don't know. I think I need time. I think I need more than a week."

"We have three weeks," his father said. "From now."

"Three weeks," Ezra said.

"That will have to be enough."

"I will try."

"You will not try. You will sit with it. That is what this consultation is about. Not trying. Sitting with."

"Okay, Papa."

They sat quietly for ten minutes. They did not set a timer. They did not check their phones. They sat. Ifeoma, after about three minutes, put her head down on the table and went to sleep, or pretended to, Ezra could not tell which. The little clock on the sideboard ticked. The fridge hummed. Outside, a car went by, and then another, and then it was quiet.

At the end of the ten minutes his father said, "That is enough for today."

His mother said, "That is enough for today."

Ezra said, "That is enough for today."

Ifeoma, whose head was on the table, said, "I want a cookie."

They ate cookies.

He underlined it once. He turned out the light. He lay in the dark. He did not sleep for a long time. He thought, instead, about his father at the UN, speaking in French on the phone. He thought about Tobias's hand on his mug. He thought about Grace at the piano in the music room. He thought about Rana on the train. He thought about Ifeoma's head on the table.

He thought, at a certain point, that he did not have the right word for the thing he was feeling. He thought about it. He tried on homesickness. Homesickness did not fit; he was home. He tried on grief. Grief was close, but it was too heavy, and it was early. He tried on longing. Longing was closer. He tried on a word that was not yet in his head as a word, only as a shape — the shape of a person with roots in three places and no single ground to put his feet on. He did not have a word for that yet. He thought, half asleep, that maybe no one had a word for that yet. Maybe the word for that was only what you could write, in the notebook, or play, on the guitar, or find, in the quiet steadiness of somebody else's eyes across an auditorium.

He fell asleep with the notebook open.

He woke, some hours later, to the sound of his father moving through the apartment. His father did this on nights when he could not sleep. He did not pace. He did not turn on lights. He moved the way a man moves in his own house in the dark, with long known hands, confident of every corner. Ezra heard the soft creak of the hallway board near the bathroom, and then the click of the kitchen switch, the small one over the stove, and then the muffled sound of water at the sink. Ezra lay in bed and listened.

After a while he got up. He pushed his feet into slippers. He padded down the hall. His father was at the counter with his back to him, hands on the counter, head a little bent.

"Papa."

"Ez."

"You can't sleep."

"No."

"Me neither."

"I noticed the light under your door for a long time. I almost came in. I thought maybe you needed to be alone."

"I did. Then I stopped needing to be."

His father half-turned. He made a small inviting gesture with his chin. Ezra came up to the counter. His father, without asking, got down two mugs, and a small yellow jar from the cupboard, and two tea bags. He put the kettle on.

"I do not drink tea at this hour," his father said. "Your mother, if she knew I was doing this, would make me sleep on the couch."

"I won't tell her."

"You would not dare."

"I would not dare."

The kettle started its soft small breath. The fridge hummed. A car went by in the street below. Ezra sat down on the stool by the counter. His father stood with his hands in the pockets of his flannel pajamas and looked at the kettle as if the kettle were a wise small animal he was consulting.

"Papa."

"Yes."

"Can I ask you something."

"You can ask me anything."

"Are you tired of New York."

His father was quiet for a while.

"Yes and no," he said. "I am tired of being in New York and not being home. That is one kind of tiredness. I am not tired of the city. The city is a fine city. I have raised a son and a daughter in it. I have walked in the park. I have drunk coffee on a Sunday morning in February with the snow on the window. I have been a man here. I will not be ungrateful to the city. But I am tired in the other way. The deeper one."

"Homesick."

"Yes. Homesick. The word is too small."

"Why."

"Because homesick, in English, sounds like a passing thing. Like a small flu. Something you can fix by eating your own mother's cooking and sleeping in your own bed. But the kind of homesick I am has been with me for twenty-seven years. It has children now. You and Ifeoma are, in a way, the children of my homesickness as much as you are the children of your mother and me. Do you understand."

"I'm trying to."

"That is fair. I did not understand it either, at your age. I knew only that I wanted to go away. That is the funny thing. At your age I wanted only to go away from home. Now, at mine, I want only to go back."

"Do you think I will want that too."

"I do not know, Ezra. I truly do not. Some do. Some, like your mother, become something else. Your mother is not homesick. Your mother has made a home wherever we have been. She is a remarkable woman. She has built a home inside herself. I envy her that, often. I have never been able to do it."

"I don't know what I will be."

"You do not have to know yet."

"Okay."

The kettle clicked. His father poured. He slid the yellow jar across the counter.

"Honey. Not sugar. At this hour. One spoon only. Mommy is right about that."

"I know."

They stirred. They sipped. They did not speak for a while. The small light over the stove made the kitchen look like a photograph.

"Papa," Ezra said.

"Yes."

"If I said I wanted to stay."

"Then we would talk about that."

"If Ifeoma said she wanted to stay."

"Then we would talk about that."

"If Mommy said she wanted to stay."

"Then we would all stay together, in a way. Or we would all go together, in another way. Or I would go, and you would stay, and we would build a way of being a family in two places. I do not want the last. But I have been raised to be prepared to accept what I do not want."

"Papa."

"Yes."

"I think you want us to go."

His father did not answer for a moment.

"I want us to be together, Ezra. That is the only thing I truly want. Where we are together is not the thing. Together is the thing. But I will not pretend I do not prefer a certain shape of together. I will not lie to you about that."

"Okay."

"Finish your tea."

He finished his tea. His father, at the counter, rinsed the mugs and turned them upside-down on the drying rack. His father turned off the small light over the stove. In the new dark his father's hand found the top of Ezra's head and rested there, briefly, the way it had rested when Ezra was small. Then his father went to bed. Ezra went back to his own room. He lay down. He did not sleep for a long time. But the wakefulness, now, was quieter than it had been.

He thought, among other things, that tea at one in the morning with his father in the kitchen was one of the things he would remember when he was an old man, whichever country he was an old man in.

Wednesday was ensemble. Ensemble met after school in the music room. Bellamy had begun, last year, a loose little group of kids who could more or less play — Ezra on guitar, Rana on violin (she was not great, she said, but she was determined), Tomas on bass, Miles on drums, Coco on violin too, Jamal on alto sax, Aditi on vocals, and now Grace on piano, whom Ezra had asked to come, and who had come, and who, within five minutes of walking into the music room, had become the quietly gravitational center of the group.

"Grace," Bellamy said, "where have you been all my life."

"Geneva, mostly," Grace said.

"That was a rhetorical question."

"I know."

"I love her," Miles whispered to Ezra.

"Focus," Ezra said.

They ran a piece Bellamy had assigned in June as summer homework, a slowed-down arrangement of an Antonio Carlos Jobim bossa nova with a weird time signature in the middle. It fell apart twice in the weird time signature section. It fell apart a third time when Coco, who had a cold, sneezed in the middle of her solo. By the fourth time it almost worked, and Bellamy let them out with a satisfied sigh.

"Tuesday and Friday," Bellamy said. "Keep your skins on. We have a show to build."

They packed up. In the hallway Rana caught Ezra's elbow.

"Walk out with me."

"Sure."

"Train together. We can talk on the ride."

"Yes."

She did not say it like a casual suggestion. She said it like a thing she had been planning since homeroom on Monday, which, Ezra realized, she had.

They walked out of Northgate together. It was the first real cold of the year, a dry September cold that had not arrived yesterday but had arrived overnight, and the trees on the avenue had decided, quietly, in the night, to be yellow. They walked without speaking for most of the block. At the corner Rana put her hands deeper in her jacket pockets.

"Ez."

"Ra."

"Family news."

"Yes."

"Tell me."

He told her. He told her on the walk to the train, and on the platform while they waited, and on the train once they had seats. He told her about the phone call and the dinner and the consultation. He told her about the three weeks. He told her, because it was Rana, about Tobias's hand, and then he caught himself and said, "That's a secret. That is not anywhere in the world yet. Do not —"

"It isn't anywhere," Rana said.

"Thank you."

"Tobias."

"Yes."

"I am sorry, Ez."

"Me too."

She looked out the window. The train rose up out of the tunnel and ran along the viaduct. The sun was going down behind the buildings and the whole west side of the car was lit up orange.

"My father," Rana said.

"Yeah."

"They moved him last week. To a different prison."

"Is that good or bad."

"I don't know. My mother does not know. The lawyers do not know. We found out from a cousin who found out from a friend. The change is the first news in twelve weeks. I have not decided if no-news is better or worse than change-news."

"Oh, Ra."

"I am saying it because you said yours. I am not saying it to take the air."

"You are not taking the air."

She smiled faintly at the window.

"Do you remember," she said, "last year in the music room, when I hummed the maqam at you. The one you built the progression off of."

"Yes."

"I hummed it because it was the one my father used to hum to me. When I was four. When I was little. In the kitchen. He did not play an instrument. He was a terrible singer. But he knew a little about the maqam because his uncle had played the tar. He would hum it while he buttered bread for me."

"Ra —"

"I am going to tell you something, and you will not know what to do with it. That's okay. You do not have to know what to do with it. You just have to hear it."

"Okay."

"When I hear the progression you are building, Ez, I hear my father buttering bread. That is what I hear. I hear my father in a kitchen in Shiraz in 2013 buttering bread for a four-year-old. I hear him."

Ezra did not say anything for a long minute. He did not know what to say. He also knew, from the way Rana had said she did not need him to know what to say, that she was telling him the truth about that, and he did not have to pretend he knew.

"Thank you," he said, finally. "For telling me."

"Do not stop writing it."

"I was not going to stop."

"I mean it. Do not stop. Even if you finish it and it is not good. Even if it never goes anywhere. Do not stop."

"I won't."

She looked at him. She had not cried. Rana, Ezra had noticed, did not cry where other people could see. Rana held her face the way people who carried their grief in a bucket for a long time learned to hold their face, very carefully, so the bucket did not slosh.

"Now," she said. "Lagos."

"Lagos."

"What do you think."

"I don't know."

"That is the correct answer. You will say it again many times. Say it every time. 'I don't know.' It is a full sentence. It is one of the sentences I have used the most this year."

He laughed, a little, without feeling much like laughing.

"Grace," Rana said.

"What about her."

"She is interesting."

"She is."

"Do not be a stupid about it."

"Rana —"

"Do not be a stupid, Ez. She is a person. She is a person who is also, on top of being a person, going to have to be the new girl in this school for the next nine months. She is going to have to figure out where the cafeteria is and where the bathroom is and who the mean girls are and who the kind teachers are and where she can sit at lunch without sitting alone. And you are going to be one of the first people who speaks to her. That is a responsibility. You are already good at this kind of responsibility. Don't be a stupid."

"I will try."

"I am also happy for you."

"Don't."

"I am. I am happy for you. You have a little — there is a thing in your face that I have not seen for a long time."

"Rana."

"I am only telling you. Now stop blushing. The man across the aisle is looking."

Ezra did not stop blushing. He pulled the hood of his sweatshirt up and hunched over and Rana laughed at him, the first laugh he had heard from her since they had been on the train, and it was the kind of laugh that made the evening feel possible in a way it had not felt at the start of it. She poked him with her elbow. He poked her back. They did not say anything else for several stops.

At her stop, Rana stood up. She looked down at him.

"Ez."

"Ra."

"I am glad I saw you this week."

"Me too."

"Whatever you decide. About Lagos."

"Yeah."

"I will be there when you decide it. Wherever there is."

"Thank you, Ra."

"And call Tobias. Tomorrow. Just to say hi. He likes it when you call, even if you only just saw him."

"I will."

She got off. The train kept going. Ezra watched the door close after her, and the train picked up speed, and he thought about her, and then he thought about his father, and then he thought about his mother, and then he thought about Grace at the piano, and then he thought about Tobias's hand on the mug, and by the time the train reached his station he was worn out in a way that had nothing to do with the day.

He walked home slowly. He went straight to his room. He put the guitar across his knees. He did not play anything for a long time. Then he did.

He played, at first, nothing that could be called a song. He played the kind of exploratory fingering that had no destination, the kind of thing you played when the hands were asking the instrument a question and the instrument was answering in the same language. He ran up the neck and down. He tried a chord he had never quite understood and it came out ugly and he tried it again and it came out less ugly and he tried it a third time and found, in the voicing, a possible resolution that he had not expected. He sat with it. He put the chord away, for later, in the small closet of his head where he kept chords for later.

Then he played the piece.

He played the piece all the way through, from the beginning. He had not, in any of the versions he had shown to Grace or to Tobias, played it through from the beginning all the way to the place he had actually stopped writing it. He played, tonight, what he had. He heard, as he played, the shape of the door he had left open. He heard, as he played the door, the new thing he might put on the other side of it.

He wrote, after he played, three bars in pencil in the notebook by the bed. Three bars. Not much. But they were three bars that had not been on the page an hour before, and they were three bars he was fairly sure would survive the night.

He turned out the light. He lay in the dark. He thought about Rana's father in a prison. He thought about a kitchen in Shiraz in 2013. He thought about bread, being buttered for a four-year-old who would grow up to sit beside him on a train and tell him not to be a stupid.

He fell asleep.

Thursday's lesson was at five thirty. Ezra climbed the four flights. He stood on the landing for a moment before he knocked. He was not sure why. He adjusted the strap on the guitar case. He knocked.

Tobias opened the door. He was wearing a different shirt than usual. A soft black long-sleeved shirt that made him look smaller somehow, less like the Tobias who had been in this apartment for forty years and more like a man who happened to live in it. His face, when he opened the door, was the face of a man who had decided to tell the truth and was waiting only on the opportunity.

"Come in, Ezra."

"Hi, Tobias."

"Sit down. Tea first. Lesson after. I am going to tell you something and I will not do it over tea. Sit."

Ezra sat on the hard wooden chair. Tobias made two mugs of tea. He brought them out. He sat in the leather chair. He put his mug down on the coffee table next to the chess board. He looked at Ezra, and he did the thing he never did, he folded his hands in his lap, as if he were a student.

"ALS," Tobias said.

Ezra stared at him.

"You know what that is."

"I — yes."

"Say it back. So I know you know. Because some of my students have said yes and not known."

"Amyotrophic —" Ezra tried. "Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis."

"Yes."

"Motor neuron disease."

"Yes. Lou Gehrig's, people say. I never liked baseball. But yes."

Ezra's throat had closed. He did not speak for a long moment.

"Tobias."

"It is early, Ezra. It is, what the doctors say, early. They caught it early. That is what my niece in Boston, who is a neurologist, has made me say out loud several times, because she thinks I will not let myself hear it otherwise. It is early. That means, for now, it means tremor. It means, maybe soon, a harder time with the left hand on the fretboard, if I still played. It means, eventually, other things. It does not mean tomorrow. It does not mean next week. My niece says I may have years, yet, where I am mostly Tobias. She also says I should not lie to you about what it is. She is a sharp woman. She is also correct."

Ezra was looking at his knees.

"Ezra."

"Yes."

"Look up."

He looked up.

"Good," Tobias said. "I am here. I am still Tobias. I am still your teacher. Do you hear me."

"I hear you."

"Good."

"Tobias."

"Yes."

"I don't know what to say."

"Of course not. Nobody does. I didn't, when my doctor said it. I am older than you and I have seen many things, and I did not know what to say. I said, 'Oh.' That is what I said. I said 'oh' and then I said 'I see' and then I said nothing for ten minutes and then I asked when the next appointment was. That is what happened. Nobody knows what to say. But you are here, you are here on time, and you drank the tea, and that is a great many of the right things."

Ezra cried, then, a little. He did not mean to. The tears came up from somewhere in his chest and fell down his face and he wiped them with the heel of his hand and Tobias sat in the leather chair and did not say anything, did not hand him a tissue, did not touch him, did not look away. Tobias simply sat and let the tears happen, and after a minute Ezra breathed, and the tears stopped, and he breathed again.

"Sorry," Ezra said.

"No."

"Sorry."

"No. Do not be. You will cry several times before this is done. So will I. You and I will cry in this apartment. There is no rule against that. The only rule against crying is the one you have made up in your head. Take it back."

"Okay."

"Now. I will tell you the other part of the news, which is that I am going to keep teaching. I am going to keep teaching as long as I can. That will not be forever. But it will not be nothing. If things change and I cannot play to show you, I will speak. If I cannot speak, there are ways. I have thought about this. I did not sleep on Monday. I thought about this. I will teach you. You and Sonia and the two kids in Queens. I will teach you until I cannot. And after I cannot, I will recommend teachers. And after that, I will still be Tobias, and you can still come for tea."

"Okay."

"Say it back."

"You are going to keep teaching. As long as you can."

"Yes."

"And after."

"And after, you can still come."

"Okay."

"Good. Now drink your tea."

He drank his tea. It had gone lukewarm. It tasted fine.

"Tobias."

"Yes."

"I have not told you about Lagos."

"What about Lagos."

"My father is being recalled. We might move. We don't know yet."

Tobias closed his eyes. He did not open them for a long moment. When he did open them, they were clear and steady and old and exactly the eyes Ezra had been looking into since he was ten years old.

"Tell me," Tobias said.

"We have three weeks," Ezra said. "From Saturday. To decide."

"The three options."

"He goes alone. We all go. He says no."

"Tell me what you think."

"I don't know."

"That is honest. Tell me again in a week. Tell me every week. I will not tell you what to do. I am not the father. But I will ask you, every week, and you will tell me where you are in it."

"Okay."

"Ezra."

"Yes."

"The piece you are writing."

"Yes."

"Finish it before you decide."

"What."

"You heard me."

"Why."

"Because you are writing about where you come from. If you finish it, you will know better where you come from. And if you know better where you come from, you will know better where you can go."

"Okay."

"That is your homework."

"Okay."

"Now we will have a lesson. We have talked too much. As always, on Thursday. Now we play."

They played. They did scales, and they did the wrinkle, and they did a new etude, and they did the piece Ezra had been working on, and Tobias made him play it three times, and each time he made one small change. The first change was the tempo of the low phrase — slower. The second change was the dynamic of the middle — softer. The third change was the last note — longer, much longer, let it ring, let it ring out past comfort, until the silence is louder than the note was. He played it three times. The third time he did not play any more, because the silence at the end felt like a thing that should not be broken.

Tobias did not speak for a long time.

"You have your homework," Tobias said, finally.

"Yes."

"Go home, Ezra."

Ezra stood up. He put the guitar in its case. He went to the door. At the door he stopped.

"Tobias."

"Yes."

"Thank you."

"Always."

"I love you, Tobias."

He had not planned to say it. The words came out before he could think about them. Tobias, from the leather chair, raised one hand a little, palm up, and did not speak for a second, and then said, quietly, "I love you too, stubborn boy. Now go home. Your mother is waiting."

He went home.

On the landing outside Tobias's door he stopped, and he turned around once, and he looked at the door, and he thought about knocking again. He did not know, if he had knocked, what he would have said. He did not knock. But he stood there for a long moment. He thought about the poster of Segovia. He thought about the chess board. He thought about Tobias's hand on his own knee as he said the words ALS, with the extra calm of a man who had rehearsed saying them out loud in the mirror. He thought about the way Tobias, who had taught him to roll an R in Spanish and to count in Italian and to read the small language of Baroque ornamentation, had said, quietly, stubborn boy.

He descended the stairs. He touched the banister. He thought, for the first time in his life and in a way he did not know how to name, of the fact that this banister had been touched by the hands of a boy or a girl on every stair for 120 years, and that he was now one of them, and that his hand was becoming, a little, a part of the wood.

He did not remember most of the walk back to the train. He remembered the weight of the guitar on his back, which he had not felt for a long time, because he was used to it, but which he felt tonight because his whole body had become strange to him. He remembered the smell of a hot dog cart on a corner. He remembered the sound of a woman on a phone, crying in another language, in the vestibule of a drugstore. He remembered the feel of the metal handrail on the stairs down to the platform, cold and a little sticky. He remembered thinking, quite clearly, as he stood on the platform waiting for the train, that he did not want to be fifteen anymore. He did not want to be older. He wanted, simply, for this not to be the week that he was fifteen.

The train came. He got on. He sat down. He held the guitar case between his knees. An older woman across from him was knitting something small and green, and her needles clicked in a patient easy rhythm, and he watched them, and he thought, with a small clear piece of his brain that was not yet claimed by the rest of what he was feeling, that he had never in his life watched an old woman knit, and that he had been missing something. The rhythm of her needles did him some small good. He could not have said why. He was grateful to her. She did not look up. She had no idea she was helping him. He got off two stops later.

At home, his mother was in the living room reading. She looked up. She saw his face. She did not ask. She did not say, what is it, what is wrong, what happened. His mother had raised him, and his mother had raised herself before that, and his mother knew the difference between a question you asked and a question you did not.

"There is food," she said. "If you want it."

"Thank you."

"Ifeoma is in the bath."

"Okay."

"Your father is on a call."

"Okay."

He went to the kitchen. He heated a plate. He sat at the counter and he ate the food and he did not taste it and he did not mind that he did not taste it and he was, simply, grateful that his mother, in the other room, did not ask. After a while she came in. She sat down across from him at the counter. She did not speak. She put her chin on her hand. She watched him eat. When he was done she took the plate from him and rinsed it in the sink.

"You want to talk."

"Not yet."

"Okay."

"Maybe tomorrow."

"Okay."

"Mommy."

"Yes, my son."

"I love you."

She did not say it back right away. She never did. She said it back when she meant it, and only when she meant it, and only in a way that he could tell had cost her something to say. That was how his mother loved.

"I love you too, Ezra. Go rest."

He went to rest.

Two Saturdays after the dinner, after the consultation, after the climb up Tobias's stairs, Ezra asked his mother if he could have a friend over for dinner.

"Which friend."

"A new friend."

"How new."

"Two weeks new."

"Oh," his mother said. "Two weeks." She raised her eyebrows without looking up from her laptop. "Male or female."

"Mommy."

"Is that a hard question."

"Female."

"Name."

"Grace."

"Grace what."

"Ochieng."

"Kenyan."

"Kenyan, yes. New student. Pianist. She plays very well. She and I are working on some things together for Bellamy's ensemble. She — it is not — Mommy."

"I did not ask you what it was."

"Mommy."

"Ez, I did not ask."

"You don't have to make a thing about it."

"I am not making a thing about it."

"You are."

"I am not. I am asking what her last name is so I can properly welcome her. Her people must be known to us, and we must be known to them, and we must not meet at the dinner table without a name between us. That is not making a thing. That is being a grown person who has children."

"Okay."

"Sunday."

"Okay."

"Bring her at four. We eat at six. We need the hour to know her before the food."

"Mommy, she's not — I'm not —"

"Okay."

"Okay."

Grace came at four on Sunday. She wore the dark blue cardigan and a long skirt and her hair up and she brought a small potted jasmine plant, which she handed to his mother in the foyer.

"For you, Mrs. Okonkwo."

"Dr.," his mother said, taking the plant.

"Dr. Okonkwo. I'm sorry."

"Do not be sorry. It is a nice plant. It is a well-chosen plant. Come in."

It went about as Ezra could have hoped. Grace had the kind of manners that were not performed. She said hello to his father at the dining room door. She shook his father's hand as if she had shaken many men's hands at many dinners. She said, when his father asked, that her father's posting had brought them from Nairobi to Geneva to here, and, yes, it had been three countries in five years, and yes, it had been hard, and yes, she loved piano, and yes, she had met Ezra in the auditorium, and Ezra, standing in the doorway trying to look casual, watched his father watching Grace, and he could see, in his father's posture, that something small had shifted.

His father was not an effusive man. His father did not approve of people loudly. His father's approval, when he gave it, came in the form of a softening around the eyes, and a slight leaning-in of the shoulders when the person spoke, and, sometimes, a question — a real question — that indicated the person was worth talking to. His father, within twenty minutes of meeting Grace, leaned in.

"Grace," his father said, "you have been here two weeks."

"Yes, sir."

"And before that Geneva, three years."

"Yes, sir."

"And before that Nairobi, five years."

"Yes, sir."

"And in Nairobi, which school."

Ezra's mother, who had been pouring water, paused for exactly half a second. Then she continued pouring.

"Yes," she said.

"Mm," his father said.

"Yes," his mother said.

That, as far as Ezra understood it, was the end of that part of the conversation, and also its whole shape.

Ifeoma, from the other side of the table, said, "Grace. Do you have a pet."

"No."

"Why."

"We move a lot."

"That is a reason."

"Yes."

"I want a dog."

"My brother and I used to want one."

"Used to?"

"We grew up."

"Oh," Ifeoma said, in a tone that indicated she had decided Grace was now a suspect person. Ifeoma had very firm opinions about dogs.

After dinner, his mother said the thing Ezra had been half hoping she would say and half dreading.

"Grace, would you play."

Grace looked at Ezra. Ezra nodded. Grace nodded. She walked, a little slowly, to the old upright piano in the corner of the living room, the piano his mother had bought him when he was ten and which he had mostly abandoned for the guitar two years later but which no one had ever gotten rid of because his mother, privately, loved the look of it.

Grace sat at the piano. She lifted the lid. She played a little arpeggio, like she had at the music room, to feel the instrument. Then she looked at Ezra and said, quietly, "Get the guitar."

He got the guitar.

He tuned. He sat on the arm of the sofa. She began.

She played the piece she had played him in the music room, the one that was not finished. She played it, this time, differently. She played it as if she were leaving room for him. She played the first section through. She looked at him. He came in. He came in low, underneath her, with the Persian progression, which, he had realized on the train ride home on Wednesday, shared a central interval with her piece in a way he had not noticed the first time she had played it. He played under her. She played over him. He did not do anything showy. He did not try. He played what the room needed.

When they were done his father did not speak for a long moment. Then he cleared his throat.

"Again," his father said.

They played it again.

His mother, on the couch, leaned her head against the cushion. Ifeoma, on the floor, stopped drawing in her notebook. Grace, at the piano, did not look at anyone. She only looked at her hands, and when she finished the second time she let the last note ring, and she laid her hands in her lap, and she stayed absolutely still.

His father said, "Thank you, Grace."

"You're welcome, sir."

"It is a beautiful piece."

"Thank you."

"It is not finished."

"It is not, sir."

"Good."

She looked up at him then.

"I like to hear it when it is not finished," his father said. "I like to hear things while they are still being made. I hear many finished things in my work. It is a small pleasure of my life to be a guest at the making of a thing. Thank you for letting me be one."

Grace, for the first time in Ezra's experience of her, blushed.

"Thank you, sir," she said, quietly.

His father nodded, and he stood up, and he went to the kitchen to start the dishes. His mother stood up and followed him. Ifeoma stayed on the floor. Ezra put the guitar down.

"That was good," Ifeoma said, without looking up from her drawing.

"Thank you," Grace said.

"Do you want a brownie," Ifeoma said. "We have brownies. Mommy made them. She only makes them on company nights."

"I would like a brownie."

"Come."

Ifeoma led Grace to the kitchen. Ezra stood in the living room with the guitar still in his hands and did not move for a minute. He thought, in that minute, about the sound of his father's voice saying thank you, Grace. He thought about what his father had said. He thought about his father in his blue shirt thanking a new friend of his son's for a small gift of a piece of music on a Sunday afternoon. He thought, too, and with a kind of quick private sadness, about the possibility that his father might, in a matter of weeks, be doing dishes in a different kitchen on a different continent.

His father came back into the living room.

"Ezra."

"Yes, Papa."

"She is a very good friend."

"She is."

"Keep her."

"I will."

"Do not be a stupid about it."

"Papa."

"I am only saying. As your father."

"Papa, Rana said the same thing to me."

"Then listen to Rana. Rana is wise. Your mother and I have always liked Rana."

"Okay."

"Also."

"Yes."

"The piece you and Grace played."

"Yes."

"It made me think of home."

"Papa."

"Only so you know. I am only telling you that so you know. I am not telling you that to make a thing. I am telling you because it is true, and because you asked me, last week, if I was all right, and I did not answer you then, because I did not know. Tonight I will tell you this. The piece you played tonight made me think of home. I will think about that. All right?"

"All right, Papa."

His father patted his shoulder, once, with his broad warm hand, and went back to the kitchen.

Ezra sat on the sofa. He held the guitar across his knees. He did not play it. He listened to the small sounds of his sister and Grace in the kitchen — Ifeoma explaining, in serious detail, the right way to eat a brownie — and to the rhythm of his mother at the sink and his father drying, and he understood, for the first time, something he had not been able to understand when the consultation had started.

He understood that the music was not a separate thing from the question.

He did not know, yet, what that understanding meant for his answer. But he understood that it was all, in some way, one thing.

Later, in bed, he thought about his father saying, it made me think of home. He thought about what it must have cost his father, a man who did not use sentimental language, to say that out loud on a Sunday night in the living room of an apartment in America, in front of his wife and his son and his daughter and a fifteen-year-old Kenyan-American girl he had met for the first time that afternoon. He thought about the weight of the word home in his father's mouth, and the extra weight of the word me, and how the two of them had stood together in that sentence, and how his father, by saying that sentence out loud, had done the thing he was always telling Ezra to do, which was to not shield his children from the true thing.

He thought, as he fell asleep, that his father was telling him something. Not about the decision. About how to be a person, for the next twenty or thirty years, who carried more than one country in his chest. His father had been doing that, Ezra realized now, for Ezra's entire life. His father had carried it, quietly, without complaint, without a lot of words. His father had carried it in French phone calls in the hallway and in quiet dinners and in long Sunday afternoons on the couch and in the particular shape of his silence at the breakfast table. Ezra had, without noticing, been learning it from him all along.

He slept.

The following Wednesday at ensemble, Bellamy asked to hear what Ezra and Grace had been working on. He had heard, through the small and gossipy network of a music department, that the two of them had been meeting at lunch. He had heard from Coco. Coco had a talent for hearing and a matching talent for repeating.

"No pressure," Bellamy said, in the way that meant pressure. "Just what you have. No performance. Just the shape of it. Are you willing."

Grace looked at Ezra. Ezra looked at Grace. They had not talked about showing the piece. They had not even, really, talked about whether they were writing one piece or two pieces or a pair of linked pieces or something else. They had worked together four times. They had not named the thing.

"Yes," Grace said.

Ezra nodded.

They did what they had done at the Okonkwo apartment. She played. He came in. This time he had more of a sense of where he was going. He had been working on it. He had the three bars he had written in pencil the night of his train ride with Rana. He had the new voicing he had found in his room afterward. He had, quietly, without showing it to anyone, added a short bridge to the middle, four bars of his own, that came out of the maqam and into a more open space and then back again.

When they finished, Bellamy did not speak for a moment. The rest of the ensemble was quiet. Miles, behind his drum kit, had set his sticks down. Coco was looking at Grace with a kind of starstruck admiration she was usually too cool to show. Rana, on her violin, had been listening with her chin resting on the shoulder rest and her eyes closed.

"Well," Bellamy said.

"Don't —" Grace began.

"I won't," Bellamy said. "I won't gush. I won't make a thing. I will only say, for the record, that the ensemble is about to have a very interesting winter. Thank you both. Keep going. Do not feel you have to play it for us every week. Do not feel you have to play it for us ever. It will come when it comes. Meanwhile — Coco, that was not the entrance we agreed on. Explain yourself."

Coco explained herself. Rehearsal continued.

Afterward, in the hallway, Rana caught Grace.

"Grace."

"Yes."

"You are good."

"Thank you."

"I am Rana. I have been — I am a bad violinist. But I have a good ear. You are good."

"You are not a bad violinist."

"I am, a little. It is fine. I know my place. It is at the back of the ensemble carrying a part. I am happy there. Also. The piece."

"Yes."

"Ezra — Ezra told you where the scale came from."

"He did."

"Thank you for using it well."

Grace looked at her. Grace, whom Ezra had begun to understand as a person of very careful words, did not say anything for a long moment. Then she reached and took Rana's hand, and she said, "Thank you for letting us."

Rana nodded. She did not take her hand back right away. She held Grace's hand, and Grace held hers, and they stood in the hallway for a moment like two small islands, and Ezra, watching them, thought something that he did not say out loud, which was that this was a kind of thing that did not happen in most hallways in most schools.

When Rana had gone Grace said, quietly, "Her father."

"Yes."

"You can tell me sometime. When she wants. Not before."

"I will."

"Okay."

"Grace."

"Yes."

"My father got the offer today."

She turned to him.

"The position."

"Yes. It's official. The papers came. We have to decide."

"When."

"Two weeks. Less than."

"Oh, Ezra."

"Yeah."

"Come here."

He came there. She hugged him. She hugged him the way people hug each other in hallways when they are fifteen and do not quite know what they are doing and know only that they are not about to not do it — a short, tight, slightly awkward hug, with his face against her hair for a half-second, and her hand flat between his shoulder blades, and the sense, under all of it, that she knew what it was to be a family that had to decide where to live. She stepped back.

"Whatever you decide," she said, "you do not have to know it today. Or tomorrow. Even if your father needs to know by a date. You do not have to. You can keep not knowing. Sometimes the not-knowing is the most honest place to be."

"Rana said something like that."

"Rana is right."

"Everyone is saying Rana is right this week."

"Because she is."

"I know."

"Ezra."

"Yes."

"I want you to keep writing it. Even if you leave. Especially if you leave."

"Okay."

"Promise."

"Promise."

She did not hug him again. She squeezed his hand once, very briefly, and she turned, and she walked down the hallway to her locker, and he watched her go, and he thought, standing there with his guitar on his back, that a person could have room in their chest for more than one large thing at a time. This surprised him. He had not known.

The offer came in the middle of the third week.

Ezra's father came home at seven and set his briefcase down on the bench by the door and stood, for a moment, in the foyer, with his hand on the bench, looking at nothing. Ezra had just come out of the kitchen. He had a glass of water in his hand. He saw his father, and he stopped.

"Papa."

"Ezra."

"You okay."

"I am," his father said, and then he laughed, a small dry laugh, "I am a man who is all right. Yes. I will sit down now."

He sat down on the bench. He did not take his shoes off. He put his hands flat on his knees. Ezra sat down next to him. His father was quiet for a minute.

"The offer is official," his father said.

"Today."

"This morning. The ministry sent the papers. I picked them up at the mission at lunch. I carried them around all afternoon. They are in my bag. I have not shown them to your mother. I will. I will in ten minutes. I sat with them first."

"Papa."

"Yes."

"Are you going to take it."

His father looked at him. His father's face was tired. His father's face was the face of a man who had, for most of a year, not fully slept.

"Ezra," his father said. "I am going to tell you something I have not told your mother yet, and which I will tell her tonight. Do not repeat it until I have told her. Do you hear me."

"I hear you."

"I think I am going to take it."

Ezra did not say anything. He held his glass of water. The glass had begun to sweat on his palm.

"Papa."

"Yes."

"Okay."

"I will tell you why."

"Okay."

"Not all of it. Some of it is grown-men's-work and I will not put that on you. But the part I can tell you. Do you want to hear it."

"Yes."

"I am fifty-three years old," his father said. "I have spent most of my career working for my country in the rooms of other countries. I have been useful in those rooms. I have made peace, a little, in a few corners. I have moved papers that perhaps could not have been moved if I had not been there. I have been proud of my work. I have also been far from my country, a long time. And now my country is in a hard place. And they have asked me. Specifically me. Not a person who can do this. Me. They have asked me by name."

"Okay."

"It would be a kind of — Ezra. It would be a kind of — how can I say this."

"Try, Papa."

"It would be a kind of refusing of my own history to say no. Do you understand. It would be a refusing of the reason I took up this work to begin with, which was not to live in New York and in Geneva and to speak French to foreign ministers in hotel lobbies. That was a means. This — this would be a return to the end. To the reason."

"I think I understand."

"I think you do."

"But Papa."

"Yes."

"What about us."

His father looked at him. His father did not look away. His father looked at him with the look Ezra had come to recognize, in the last three weeks, as the look of a man who had decided not to spare his children anything but cruelty, and that not even cruelty when necessary.

"That," his father said, "is the question we are still answering. That is your mother and my question. Your mother and I have been talking for many nights. Your mother has concerns, and they are good ones, and some of them are about you and Ifeoma and some of them are about her own work. We will talk more tonight. We will talk tomorrow. We will keep talking. What I have told you tonight is one thing. I am going to take the position. The question your mother and I are still deciding is whether we all go or whether I go alone for a term."

"For how long."

"That part is up to your mother. And you two. I have said to the ministry that my answer on the position is yes. I have not said anything about my family. That part is ours."

Ezra looked at the glass of water. He did not drink from it. He could feel his heart in his throat.

"Papa."

"Yes."

"If we stayed."

"Yes."

"You would be gone."

"I would be gone. Yes. For a year, at least. I would visit. Holidays. Shorter trips, when I could. But I would be in Lagos. We would be — you would be here, with your mother, and your sister, and I would be there. This is a thing that has happened in many families. It has never happened in ours."

"I know."

"I would not like it. But I would do it, if that is what we decided. If your mother and I, after more consultation, decided the best of the imperfect options was that your life here, and Ifeoma's, and your mother's work, did not bend for this."

"And if we went."

"Then we would all go. We would go together. We would sell — we would not sell. We would let someone live in the apartment. Your mother would take a year's leave. I have already asked, quietly. She can take it. You would go to school in Lagos. Ifeoma would go to school in Lagos. We would live in the house of my sister, for the first months, until we found our own. We would be in Lagos, all of us, for at least a year."

"Papa."

"Yes."

"I have to think."

"Yes. Of course."

"I have to think."

"Think, Ezra. Think as long as you need. But not forever. I will tell your mother about the offer tonight. We will have another consultation, this week. You will come to it. Ifeoma will come to it. You will say what you need to say. I will not decide without you."

"Okay."

His father put a hand on his knee. His father's hand was heavy and warm. His father did not squeeze. He just laid his hand there for a moment, and then he stood up, and he took off his shoes, and he picked up his briefcase, and he went to the bedroom to find his mother.

Ezra did not move from the bench for a long time.

From the kitchen, very faintly, he could hear Ifeoma asking their mother something, and their mother answering in that low patient way she had, and Ifeoma asking a follow-up, and the answer again, and the small machinery of a family that was still a family and was still going to be a family through whatever came next. He thought, sitting on the bench, that this was what his father had meant when he said together is the thing. This. The asking and the answering. The ritual of dinner and the ritual of stew and the ritual of his mother setting the pot down on the trivet and saying, let us pray briefly, the short grace she said each evening before the meal. These rituals were not the apartment. They were not the neighborhood. They were the family. They would come with them wherever they went. They would remain here if they stayed. They had survived three moves already in Ezra's life.

He thought, also, about his grandmother. About her funeral, six years ago, which the family had attended on a gray afternoon in Ibadan, in the rain. He had been nine. He remembered the smell of the rain on the red earth. He remembered his grandmother's friend, a tall woman who had worn a white head-wrap and had not cried once, telling him, in the shade of a mango tree, that when you lose a person, you become a house that person lives in. She had tapped her own chest when she had said this. He had not understood her at the time. He understood her now, a little. He thought, sitting on the bench with his glass of water, that his grandmother lived in him, and that his grandfather, whom he had never met, lived in his father, and that to be a person was to be a house that many people lived in. He thought, further, that a person could be a house that lived in more than one place at the same time. He thought that his father was that. His mother was that. He, at fifteen, was becoming that.

After a while he got up and went to his room and shut the door. He sat on the floor, his back against the side of the bed, and he did not take the guitar out of the case. He stared at the case. He stared at the little rubbed place on the corner where the leather had worn away from being carried on his back. He thought about the piece he was writing. He thought about Grace at the piano. He thought about Tobias in the leather chair. He thought about Rana on the train. He thought about Ifeoma, asleep on the dining room table with her head on her arms. He thought, without meaning to, of the way the air smelled at the end of a rainstorm, which he did not know because he had only been to Lagos once as a small child and did not remember. He tried, with a kind of strained imagination, to remember it. He could not. He could only remember, faintly, his father's shoulders in the airport, and his grandmother's hand on his head, and a voice in Igbo that was not his father's saying, welcome home, small one.

He went to dinner that night. His mother had made the stew his father loved. His father was quiet. His mother was quiet. Ifeoma, who sensed such weather without understanding it, was loud, and told a long complicated story about a frog she had drawn in art class. Everybody laughed. Nobody said the word Lagos. Everybody knew it was in the house.

After dinner, in his room, Ezra did finally take out the guitar. He played the piece. He played it more slowly than he had played it for Grace's family on Sunday. He let the last note ring out much longer than comfort wanted. He let it ring into the silence. He sat in the dark and listened to the silence after the note.

Finish it, Tobias had said.

He was closer to finishing it than he had been yesterday. He thought, for the first time, that he might finish it in a week.

He did not know yet what the finishing would mean.

He turned out the light.

The second consultation was two days later, on the following Friday evening. The family sat at the table. His mother had made tea. His father had cleared the table. Ifeoma, who understood the ritual now, had put on her good navy cardigan, which she had put on for the first consultation too, and which she had decided, at some point, was the uniform for the meeting.

"We will not make the decision tonight," his father said, at the start. "We will speak. We will listen. We will sit. We will come back to it, if not tonight, then Sunday. But I will open the matter before us. I have accepted the position. That part is decided. Now the question is the rest."

His mother spoke next. She did not look at any of them when she spoke. She looked at her hands on the table.

"I have made a list," she said. "I have made it privately. I did not want to give you my list before you had spoken your own. I will give it now. It is a list of what I owe, and to whom. I owe my work — this is less important. It can move. I owe my children — I owe you a father at the dinner table, as best as a person can. I owe my husband. I owe him the truth of what I want. I owe him my presence, not only as a wife, but as a partner in the harder kinds of work. I owe, also, a place I have not yet named. I owe a country I have lived in for more than half my life, which is this one, which has become a country to which I owe something. I am telling you that last one because it is the hardest for me to speak. I did not think, twenty years ago, that I would be a woman who, when pressed, would have to admit that a country had become part of her. That is what happened. I am saying it. So that when I also say, in the next sentence, that I will go to Lagos if that is what we decide — you know what I am setting down to go."

Ezra's father did not speak for a long time. He looked at his wife. He looked at her with the soft expression that Ezra knew to be love, and also the other expression that Ezra had not, until that night, known to be something other than love, something more like shared labor, the face of a man who was looking at the woman he had spent more than twenty years building a life with and who was, in that moment, seeing the cost of that building as clearly as she had.

"Chinwe," his father said.

"Tunde."

"Thank you."

"You do not need to thank me."

"I do. Let me."

"All right."

"I hear you. I have heard you. I will hear you again. Go on."

"I am done for the moment."

"All right."

They looked at the children then, both of them at once, across the table. Ifeoma, surprisingly, went first without being asked.

"I drew the apartment," Ifeoma said.

"Yes," his mother said.

"I will draw the new one if we go."

"Yes."

"I will not be happy."

"I know."

"I will not be happy for a long time."

"I know."

"But I will be okay."

His father's hand went very gently to the top of her head.

"Yes."

"I want you at the table, Papa."

"I know."

"That is bigger than the school."

"Ifeoma."

"That is bigger than Ada and Harper."

"Ifeoma, my girl."

"Papa, I am telling you my answer. I think I am choosing the table. I am saying it is sad and I am saying I am choosing it anyway. You told us to say the true thing. That is my true thing."

She looked at Ezra. Ezra, across from her, had his eyes full. He had not expected Ifeoma to be the one to go first. He had not expected her to go clear. He had thought of her as the little sister all his life, and tonight, for the first time, he thought of her as a person who was older than he had allowed her to be.

"Okay, Ifi," he said, softly.

"You now," she said.

He swallowed. He looked at the cup in his hands. He looked at the tea, which was too hot to drink.

"I want to say two things," he said. "They may contradict each other. I am allowed to contradict myself. That's what Mommy said last time."

"Go on," his mother said.

"First. I am choosing the table too. I want Papa at the table. I do not want the kind of year where Papa is a voice on a phone. I have already been a kid whose father is sometimes gone. I do not want to be a kid whose father is always gone. I know what year that would be. I do not want that year."

"Okay."

"Second."

"Yes."

"I am scared of Lagos."

"Okay," his father said.

"Not scared of the place. Not scared of people. Not scared of our family. Not scared of the house. I am scared of something else. I am scared that I will go, and I will find out that I don't fit. I am scared that I will be the kid in the classroom who does not know the slang. I am scared that my Igbo is bad. I am scared that my American accent will make me a joke. I am scared of the heat. I am scared of not knowing where anything is. I am scared of missing this city in a way that I cannot take back."

"These are normal fears," his father said.

"I know."

"They will happen."

"I know."

"They will not break you. But they will happen."

"I know."

"Ezra."

"Yes."

"Are you saying go or stay."

Ezra thought. He thought for a long time. His throat hurt. He did not want to cry at the dining table, not because he was ashamed of crying, but because he did not want his answer, tonight, to feel like something he had cried his way into. He wanted his answer, tonight, to be a thing he had said clearly and without pushing.

"I am saying," he said, "that I am closer to go than I was two weeks ago. I am not at go yet. I am close to it. I want to think a few more days. I want one more Thursday with Tobias. I want one more Sunday to play something I've been writing. Then I will say. But I am telling you, Papa, Mommy, that I am closer than I was."

His father nodded. He did not push. He did not try to move him the last small distance. He sat back in his chair, and he looked at his wife, and they did the thing they did, the small silent exchange that had existed between them since long before Ezra had been old enough to notice it — a look, a tilt of the head, a resettling of posture, a wordless meeting.

"All right," his father said. "Sunday, then. We will speak again Sunday. We will not delay past Sunday. Is that agreed."

"Agreed," his mother said.

"Agreed," Ezra said.

"Agreed," Ifeoma said.

"Then tonight we will finish our tea. Tonight I will not be a diplomat. Tonight I will only be your father."

They drank their tea. His mother, after a while, got up and put on music, something with a quiet guitar in it and a singer whose language Ezra did not know. Ifeoma, without being asked, got the good cookies. His father leaned back in his chair and told, for no reason, a story about the first car he had ever owned, a green Peugeot he had bought in 1992 in Ibadan, which had had a door that would not close and a horn that would not stop. He told the story, which they had all heard before, in the way you tell a story in a house you are possibly about to leave. You tell it as if telling it will keep the house for you a little longer.

Ezra listened. He laughed in the right places. He watched his father's face, and his mother's face, and his sister's face, and the light of the lamp on the sideboard, and he thought, with a kind of steadiness he had not thought he would find this week, that wherever this family went, it would go with these faces, and that was not a small thing. That was not a thing that changed when the apartment changed.

He went to bed. He did not turn on the light in his room. He sat at the edge of his bed in the dark. He took the guitar out of its stand. He played, very quietly, so as not to wake Ifeoma through the wall, the piece. He played it slowly. He played it once through. He laid his hand on the strings at the end.

He thought, in that small silence, that he was, maybe, almost done writing it.

He thought, in the same small silence, that when he was done writing it, he was going to know his answer.

Tobias had been right.

The days between the first consultation and the Friday meeting and the Sunday after had a quality of time Ezra had never experienced before. Time, in those days, was thick. Every hour had its own weight. He woke, and he noticed waking. He got on the train, and he noticed getting on the train. He looked at the other commuters, and he wondered, with a new kind of attention, about their families, about whether any of them had been, at fifteen, the child of a man being recalled to a country they barely knew. He thought, probably yes. He thought, looking at the tired faces on the morning train, that many of these adults had, at some point, been the version of himself he was now, and had made the decision, or watched it be made for them, and had become the person who, thirty years later, stared into their phones on a commuter train in September. He thought this without sadness. He thought, a little, with wonder.

At ensemble he played well. Grace played well. Bellamy did not ask them again for the piece, but Bellamy, in his way, kept looking at the two of them as if they were a pair of instruments he was just learning to hear. Coco, in whispered asides to Miles, kept calling them Ezgrace, which was a terrible portmanteau, which Miles thought was hilarious, which Aditi pretended not to find funny but laughed at when she thought no one was looking. Rana, from the back of the ensemble, did not use the portmanteau. Rana simply watched, and smiled her small private smile, and said nothing.

On Wednesday evening he had another lesson with Tobias. Tobias had, in the two weeks since the doctor's appointment, found a rhythm. He sat in the leather chair. He drank his tea. He taught the lesson. The tremble in his hand was more visible now than it had been, and he did not try to hide it, and he did not apologize for it, and he did not speak of it. When Ezra offered, once, to pour for both of them, Tobias simply said, "Thank you, stubborn boy," and let him. The small acceptance had moved something inside Ezra that he did not try to examine.

At that lesson Tobias said, near the end, "I have been thinking about your piece."

"Yes."

"The thing I told you. About finishing it before you decided."

"Yes."

"I take it back."

"What."

"I take it back. That was a heavy thing to put on a piece. A piece is not a lightning rod. You should not use it to resolve your life. The piece has its own work. You should not ask it to do other work too. Do you understand what I am saying."

"I think so."

"Finish the piece because it is a piece, and it is ready to be finished. Do not finish the piece because you need it to tell you what to do about Lagos. The piece will not tell you what to do about Lagos. The piece will tell you about the piece. That is all. That is not small, but it is not large. Do you understand."

"I understand."

"Good. I wanted to correct that. I have been embarrassed about that for two weeks."

"Tobias."

"Yes."

"You are never embarrassed."

"I am embarrassed often. You only do not see it."

"Oh."

"Also, stubborn boy, while we are saying correcting things."

"Yes."

"I will be embarrassed for the rest of my life about one or two things I did in 1983. So you see. I am a whole man."

"I see."

"Now play the scale."

He played the scale. Tobias, in the leather chair, with his tea going cool on the coffee table, listened with the same still attention he had listened with since Ezra was ten.

The Thursday after the offer, Ezra did not go straight home from school.

Thursday was not a lesson day; lessons that week had shifted to Wednesday because Tobias had a doctor's appointment on Thursday afternoon and had texted Ezra on Tuesday, in his careful old-man way, to say that he would not be able to receive him at the usual hour. Ezra had said okay. Wednesday's lesson had been quiet. Tobias had been a little slower than usual, a little grayer in the face, but he had sat in the leather chair and he had taught the lesson and he had drunk his tea and he had made a joke, as Ezra was leaving, about how the stairs were going to outlive him.

"Not funny, Tobias."

"It was a little funny."

"No."

"A little."

"No."

"Go home, Ezra. I will see you Tuesday."

On Thursday, after ensemble, Ezra walked out of Northgate with Grace. They walked three blocks together before she turned for her train, and they did not say anything important. They talked about a piece Bellamy had assigned. They talked about how Coco had been, at rehearsal, more Coco than usual. They talked about whether Grace's family would be in the country for Thanksgiving. They talked about small things. They walked close enough together that the backs of their hands, once, brushed, and she did not move her hand away, and he did not either, and then her train came and she got on it and he kept walking.

He walked north. He did not walk toward his own train. He walked, instead, toward Tobias's apartment.

He did not mean to. He realized, at a corner, that he was walking toward Tobias's apartment. He did not turn back.

It was dark by the time he got to the building. The tree-lined avenue was dark. The wind had come up. The sycamores were throwing down their dry leaves in brittle slow spirals, and the lights in the old walk-up windows were on one by one like small yellow squares cut out of the night. Ezra stood on the sidewalk across the street from Tobias's building. He looked up.

The fourth-floor window. Tobias's window.

It was dark.

He stood there, the guitar on his back. He felt the cold through his jacket. He looked at the dark window, and he made himself look, and he thought about Tobias in the dark behind that window, sitting in the leather chair, maybe, or already in bed, worn out from the doctor, worn out from the day, alone.

He did not have to do anything. He did not have to knock. Tobias had said, on Wednesday, see you Tuesday. Tuesday was four days away. He could go home. He could eat dinner with his family. He could lie on his bed. He could play. He could see Tobias on Tuesday.

He started to walk.

He walked a quarter of a block. He stopped.

He turned around.

He walked back.

He crossed the street. He went up to the door. He looked at the buttons. He pressed Tobias's. He waited. He was not sure if Tobias was going to answer. He thought, very quickly, about what he would do if Tobias did not answer. He thought he would go home.

The little speaker crackled.

"Yes," Tobias said.

"It's Ezra."

There was a pause.

"Ezra."

"Yes."

"Come up."

The buzzer went. Ezra pushed through the door. He climbed the four flights. He climbed them slowly. He did not know why he was there. He had not made a plan. He climbed the stairs and at the top he stopped and caught his breath and he knocked on Tobias's door.

Tobias opened the door.

Tobias looked older than he had looked yesterday. He was in a dark brown cardigan he wore around the house, and there were slippers on his feet, and his glasses were on the bridge of his nose and not up on his hair where he kept them when he was teaching. He had not shaved. His face, in the light of the hallway, was tired in a way Ezra had not seen it tired before. He was not surprised.

"Come in," Tobias said.

"I'm sorry."

"No."

"I —"

"No."

He came in. The apartment was dim. Tobias had not turned on the overhead light. There was only the lamp by the leather chair, and the lamp on the music stand, and the small light over the kitchen counter. The kettle was not on. The tea tin was not out. The apartment, for the first time in Ezra's life, looked like a place where the ritual had not been performed that day.

Tobias sat in the leather chair. He did not stand up again. He gestured with one hand at the hard wooden chair, which was already there, across from him, where it had always been.

"Sit."

"Okay."

Ezra set the guitar case down. He sat.

"Tea," Tobias said. "I am sorry. I have not made any. I could make some."

"Don't."

"Are you sure."

"I'm sure."

"I will not make you any."

"Thank you."

"How was the appointment," Ezra said, before he could stop himself.

Tobias looked at him. He did not answer. He did not answer for a long moment. Then he said, quietly, "Long."

"Okay."

"Long, and bureaucratic, and I am tired in a way I was not tired yesterday. That is all I will say tonight, Ezra. That is all I have in me tonight. I am sorry."

"You don't have to be."

"Thank you."

"Tobias."

"Yes."

"I came because I didn't want to go home yet."

"Okay."

"I don't know why."

"That is fine. You do not have to know why. You are here now. That is a thing."

Ezra looked at the apartment. He looked at the poster of Segovia. He looked at the chess board. He looked at Tobias's hand on the arm of the leather chair. He looked at the lamp on the music stand. He looked at Tobias, who was looking at him, not kindly, not unkindly, only with the look of a man who had been a teacher for forty years and knew when a student was in the room with nothing to say.

"Do you want me to play."

"Yes."

He got the guitar out. He tuned. He set it across his knees. He did not play the wrinkle. He did not play the etude. He played the piece.

He played it in the way he had been playing it for the last few days, slow, with the low phrase even slower than before, with the middle soft, with the end long. He played it as if he were not in the room, as if the music were a thing he was delivering into a room he did not have to be in, and he let the last note ring out, and he did not play anything after.

Tobias closed his eyes.

He kept them closed.

He kept them closed for a long time.

Ezra did not speak. He did not play anything else. He laid the guitar flat across his thighs. He watched Tobias's chest rise and fall, and he thought, with a pain in his throat that was not exactly a pain of tears, that he had never noticed, in five years of lessons, the shape of Tobias's breathing, and now it was the only thing in the apartment.

A long minute passed. Another one.

"Thank you, Ezra," Tobias said, without opening his eyes.

"Thank you, Tobias."

"Go home."

"Okay."

"Your mother will worry."

"Okay."

"And Ezra."

"Yes."

"Finish it."

"Yes."

"Soon."

"Yes."

He stood up. He put the guitar in the case. He carried the case to the door. At the door he paused. He looked back. Tobias was still in the leather chair with his eyes closed. The lamp on the music stand made a small pool of light in the corner of the room. The chess board sat untouched on the coffee table. The apartment was very quiet. Ezra thought, for a moment, that he could hear his teacher's breath, and then he thought, no, he could not, the apartment was only quiet, and quiet was what he was hearing.

He opened the door, very gently. He stepped out. He closed it behind him with the smallest click he had ever made with a door in his life.

He walked down the four flights of stairs. He did not hurry. At the bottom he pushed open the heavy door and stepped out onto the tree-lined avenue and the wind came up and lifted a drift of dry leaves from the curb and carried them around his feet and dropped them again.

He stood on the sidewalk. He looked up at the fourth-floor window.

The light was on now. The small lamp by the leather chair, through the curtain. A pale yellow square, high up, in the dark.

Ezra looked at it for a moment.

Then he shouldered the guitar, and he turned, and he walked home.

The walk was long. He did not take the train. He did not know why. He had the guitar on his back and he had his hands in his jacket pockets and the wind kept coming around the corners of the buildings and tugging at him, and he kept walking. He passed a bakery that had already closed for the night. He passed a laundromat with a man sitting inside watching a soccer game on a mounted television. He passed a small church with a hand-painted sign on the door that said ALL WELCOME, in English and in Spanish. He passed a boy his own age walking a dog that was too small for the leash the boy was holding. He passed the school, from the far side of the avenue, and the school was dark. The sign over the main entrance, the one that said NORTHGATE INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL in the letters chosen by a committee forty years ago, had been lit, earlier in the evening, and was still lit, faintly, in the overnight mode the custodians set it to. Ezra stopped on the corner across from the school for a moment and looked up at it. He thought about every door he had walked through to get here — the door of the music room, the door of the auditorium, the door of Ms. Aboah's English classroom, the door of the locker room, the door of the cafeteria. He had been walking through those doors for four years. He could walk through them, in his mind, with his eyes closed. He was about to find out whether he would walk through them again for another three.

He thought about Grace. He thought about her hands in the clean north light of the music room. He thought about her piece, and his piece, and the thing the two of them were making between them, which was, as far as he could tell, neither of theirs alone, and also fully his, and also fully hers, both things at once. He thought about the small hug in the hallway. He thought about the steady eyes.

He thought about Rana. He thought about the train. He thought about a kitchen in Shiraz in 2013. He thought about the way Rana had said, I will be there when you decide it. Wherever there is. He thought, with a small ache, about what it would be to tell her, on a Wednesday at ensemble or a Monday in homeroom, that there was going to be, in January, on the other side of an ocean.

He thought about his family. He thought about Ifeoma's cardigan. He thought about his mother's list. He thought about his father at the counter at one in the morning with two mugs.

He thought, as he turned onto his own street, about the small phrase from the piece, the one that dropped low and did not want to come back up, and he heard, in his head, walking, the exact note that the piece needed to end on. He had been looking for that note for six weeks. He had tried a dozen notes. None of them had been right. They had each been close. None of them had been right.

Tonight, walking home in the cold September air, with the sound of his own footsteps on the sidewalk and the memory of Tobias's breathing in the leather chair and the memory of the lamp coming on in the window above, he heard the right note.

He stopped walking. He laughed once, quietly, at himself, at the absurdity of hearing a note on a sidewalk when you had been looking for it for six weeks at a desk. He said the note out loud. He said the name of the note out loud. A woman walking her dog past him looked at him, a little concerned. He said, "Sorry, ma'am," and she said, "That's all right, honey," and she kept walking. He kept walking.

He played it.

The piece was not long. It had grown, over the summer and the autumn, into something about three and a half minutes in length. He played it from the beginning. He played it slowly. He played the middle soft. He played the last phrase. He let the drop drop. He hit the note he had heard on the sidewalk. He let it ring. He did not touch the strings. He let the note go out into the room and out of the room and into the hallway and under his door and out into the apartment and, he hoped, into the rest of the house, where his father was maybe still awake at the kitchen counter with tea, and where his mother was maybe on the sofa with her book, and where Ifeoma was definitely asleep but where, in her sleep, some small listening part of her might be open enough that the note might find her too.

He put the guitar down.

He sat in the quiet.

He knew his answer.

He was not going to write it down tonight. He was not going to say it at breakfast. He was going to hold it in himself, through Friday, and through Saturday morning, and into Saturday afternoon, when the family, at Ifeoma's insistence, was planning to go for a walk in the park together, and he would hold it then too, and at dinner he might say it, or he might not, and on Sunday at the consultation he would say it for certain.

But he knew.

He knew the way you know a note is right after six weeks of the wrong ones.

He would not say it tonight. He would only write, in the notebook, very small, one word, and underline it twice, the way his father had taught him to underline the things that he meant.

He wrote it.

He turned out the light.

The note, in his head, was still ringing.

In the morning he woke to the ordinary small sounds of the apartment — the kettle, the bathroom faucet, his mother's slippers on the hallway floor, Ifeoma, already singing the boat-on-the-river song, which had become her song now, a fact about her that he suspected would last at least another month and possibly the rest of her life. He lay in bed for a long moment, listening to these sounds. He had not said his answer yet. He would say it on Sunday. But he had it, now, the way a person has a small round stone in their pocket, worn smooth, warmed by the hand.

He thought, in that first morning light, about the piece. He thought about Tobias sitting in the leather chair last night with his eyes closed. He thought about the lamp coming on in the fourth-floor window after he had left. He thought about whether Tobias had played something himself, after Ezra had gone — a small private phrase on one of his own guitars, or maybe only a bar of it, for his own ear, in the dim apartment. He thought it was likely.

He got up. He went to the bathroom. He brushed his teeth. He looked at his face in the mirror. His face was the same face it had been in August, before the dinner, before Grace, before Tobias's news, before the consultations. It was also a different face. He could not have said, if you had asked him, what the difference was. He thought, washing his hands, that it was the kind of difference that would be more visible to other people than to him. He thought, rinsing the last of the toothpaste out of his mouth, that his mother had probably already seen it, and had not said anything, because his mother, in her way, knew when a thing should be named and when it should only be noticed.

He went to breakfast. His father was at the table in his weekend clothes, reading the paper on his tablet, and he looked up when Ezra came in and gave him a very small nod, which was his father's morning greeting, which meant I am here, I see you, I love you. Ezra nodded back. Ifeoma, at the table, had already eaten half a bowl of cereal and was drawing on the inside of the cereal box with a blue pen. His mother came in with the teapot.

"What are you drawing," Ezra said to Ifeoma.

"A map," Ifeoma said.

"Of what."

"Of where we live."

"Here or Lagos."

Ifeoma looked up at him. She looked, for a moment, like the small serious version of their father she sometimes became when a question caught her off guard.

"Both," she said.

He sat down at the table. He looked at the map. She had drawn, on one side of the box, the apartment and the school and the park and Tobias's building, with little labels. On the other side of the box, in the same pen, she had drawn a bigger map, with the airport and a house and a school and an arrow pointing off the edge of the cardboard that said GRANDMA'S VILLAGE. Between the two maps, on the fold of the box, she had drawn a plane.

"Ifi."

"Yes."

“Rebuking the friends for the love they bear Bahá’u’lláh and ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, they will consider justified their denunciations, their scorn and malice, and spare no effort to do the friends whatever injury it lieth within their power to inflict.”

"I know."

“Ye are all created out of water, and unto dust shall ye return.”

“Thus hath it been decreed by Him Who is the Source of Divine inspiration.”

"Deal."

His father, behind the tablet, was not reading the paper anymore. His father was looking at Ifeoma's map. Ezra saw his father's face, and he saw in it, very briefly, the same thing he had seen on Sunday night when Grace had played — the softening around the eyes, the slight leaning-in. Then his father looked back at his tablet, and his mother poured the tea, and breakfast continued in the ordinary Saturday way it always continued.

Ezra ate his breakfast. He ate it slowly. He tasted it, for the first time in weeks, all the way down. The tea was hot. The toast was perfect. Ifeoma was singing her boat song under her breath. His mother was turning the page of her own paper. His father was finishing his tea.

Together, Ezra thought, is the thing.

He would say it on Sunday. He knew what he was going to say.

For today, it was Saturday. For today, he had tea, and toast, and his sister's cereal-box map, and his mother's newspaper, and his father at the end of the table, and the morning light coming in the window the way it had come in every Saturday for three years.

He let himself have the morning. He let the morning be enough.

Later, he would go to his room, and he would play the piece once, all the way through, and he would write, at the bottom of the last page of the notebook, in pencil, in careful letters, the single word — go — and he would underline it twice, the way his father had taught him. But that would be later. For now, he ate his toast, and the sun came in, and the apartment was his family's apartment, and the morning was a good one.

[END OF PART 1 — TO BE COMBINED WITH PART 2]

[CONTINUING FROM PART 1]

Ezra walked down the five flights because the elevator in Tobias's building had always been unreliable, and because he needed the stairs. He needed the way they made his body do something while his mind did nothing. Each landing had its own smell — the second floor was paprika and onions, a Hungarian family he had never seen; the third was the dusty warm scent of radiators; the fourth was nothing at all, which was somehow the loudest. On the first floor an old woman was sorting mail at the bank of brass boxes. She did not look up. He pushed through the double doors into the October night, and the cold hit him the way cold water hits you when you dive, not gentle, not a question, a fact.

He had left his guitar inside. He realized it a block later, at the corner of 86th and Lexington, where the crosswalk sign was blinking orange. He stopped on the curb and considered whether to go back. His breath made a small cloud. No, he thought. No, Tobias has it. Tobias will have it for a night. That seemed right somehow, the guitar resting against the wall of that dim room where the ALS had begun its slow erasure of a man who had taught Ezra how to bend a note, how to let a string ring past when it was supposed to die.

He walked. Manhattan was not empty, even at this hour. A taxi idled outside a Duane Reade. Two women in scrubs were waiting for the bus. A man in a long coat was arguing softly with someone on his phone in what might have been Russian. Ezra thought of how, when he was small, his father used to say that a city is a body, and every person in it is a cell, and at night the cells sleep but the body does not. You only feel the city holding you, his father had said, at night.

Tunde Okonkwo said many things like that. It was one of the ways Ezra loved him.

He did not cry. He had thought, coming out of the building, that he might, and had been preparing for it the way you prepare for a wave at the shore — bracing shoulders, a breath. But the wave did not come. Instead there was this small hard clarity, like a stone in his pocket. He walked with it.

The wind found him at the park, on the path where the ginkgo leaves were falling in their deliberate, stupid, beautiful way. He had always thought ginkgo leaves fell like musical notation — suspended for a long second, rotating, landing. Each one a half note. The trees were half-bare now, with yellow pooled at their bases. He stood for a moment under one of them and let a leaf land on his jacket. He did not brush it off. He kept walking.

He was thinking, underneath everything, about what Tobias had said. Or had not said. Tobias had said almost nothing. He had opened the door, which took a long time. Ezra had seen him and had seen, immediately, without wanting to, the change — the way his left arm hung against his side like something borrowed, the way his head was carried slightly tilted as if listening for a sound nobody else could hear. Tobias had looked at him and had not smiled but also had not refused. He had stepped back in the doorway to let him in. He had gestured toward the old armchair near the bookshelf and Ezra had gone and sat. Without asking, Ezra had taken the guitar from its case. Without asking, he had begun to play.

He had played the Villa-Lobos Prelude No. 1. Not the whole of it, not perfectly — Ezra was fifteen and Villa-Lobos had been sixty when he wrote the preludes, and there was a certain grief in that music that Ezra could only approach, not enter. But he had played what he had. He had played the melody that rose like a voice out of the lower strings, the dark weight of the E minor chord, the long slow descent. He had not looked up. When he finished he had sat with the guitar in his lap and the last note fading and had still not looked up, because he had known, with a fifteen-year-old's terrible accuracy, that Tobias was not looking at him either.

Ezra had played it again.

That was all.

Ezra reached his building a little after ten. The doorman, Miguel, nodded at him and did not ask where his guitar was, because Miguel had been trained long ago by the co-op board not to ask guests or residents anything they had not volunteered, and Ezra, though a resident, fell under the same training. The elevator smelled of someone's perfume. On the eleventh floor he let himself in quietly.

He shook his head.

He laughed, a little. A sound that surprised him.

Villa-Lobos, he said. Prelude One.

She nodded. She did not say anything more. She picked her book back up after a moment and he stayed beside her for another minute, then he got up and went to his room.

His room was on the east side. It had one window, a narrow one, and a small desk, and the bed with the dark blue blanket his grandmother had sent from Lagos when he was twelve, embroidered along the edges with a pattern he had once asked about and had been told meant "the river has many paths." On the desk was the music notebook. Black cover, red ribbon marker, half-full. He had not written in it in almost two weeks. Too many things had been happening and he did not know yet how to write any of them down.

He sat at the desk. He opened the notebook. He stared at the open page for a long time. Then he picked up the pencil he kept in the cup with three others, all sharpened, all the same yellow Ticonderoga because he had inherited that particular snobbery from Tobias, who insisted that any pencil not a Ticonderoga was a toy.

He paused again. The pencil hovered.

He closed the notebook.

He put the book back. He took off his jacket. He was still wearing it; he had not noticed.

He sat on the bed. He thought about the guitar, sitting in Tobias's apartment, leaning against the wall. He thought about how, in the morning, he would have to go get it. How he had left it behind on purpose, without knowing at the time that he had, because he had wanted something of his to stay in that room overnight. A hostage, maybe. An anchor. Or a gift.

He lay back. The ceiling of his room had a small crack near the light fixture that he had looked at every night for as long as he could remember. The crack was shaped, he had decided at eight, like the coast of Africa. His sister Ifeoma had once said it was shaped like a bad noodle. They had argued about this for several years. It was the longest-running argument of his life.

Ifeoma was asleep now, in the next room. He could hear, faintly, the sound of her small humidifier, which she insisted on running because the radiator dried out the air. His parents were still in the living room. He could hear the low murmur of their voices, in English now, not Igbo, which meant they were not fighting or discussing anything heavy. They were just talking. His father had come back from the UN an hour before Ezra had gone to Tobias's, and he was probably telling Chinwe about some colleague's daughter who had gotten into some school.

Ezra listened, and slowly the weight on his chest moved. It did not lift. It moved. It was a small difference but it was a difference, and he thought — I am fifteen, and I do not know what to do with most of this, but I know that. That something can move without lifting. That is a thing I know now.

He closed his eyes. He did not sleep yet but he did not try to. He stayed very still and let the sounds of the apartment pass over him like weather. And at some point he became aware that he was rehearsing, in his head, a new melody. Not anything he had played before. It was coming up out of him as if it had been waiting. A phrase in D minor, moving up the fretboard, and then a turn, a small unexpected shift to a B-flat, and a long held note. He played it inside himself twice, three times, until he was sure he would remember it in the morning.

Then he let it go, and he slept.

He dreamed, that night, of an apartment he had never been in — not his own, not Tobias's, but a third apartment, with a piano in the corner and windows that opened onto a street he did not recognize. In the dream he was playing something on the piano, which was strange, because in life he did not play the piano. Grace was somewhere in the next room. He could hear her. She was saying something in a language he did not speak but understood. When he woke in the morning he could not remember what the language was. He lay in bed for some minutes trying to remember. He could not. But he could remember that he had understood, and that seemed important.

At breakfast his sister said, "Why are you looking at your eggs like that."

He said, "I had a dream."

"About what."

"I can't remember. Something good."

"That's a waste."

"Maybe it was good enough to just be in."

He ate his eggs.

Later that morning, when he walked back to Tobias's to retrieve the guitar, the sidewalks were still wet with last night's rain and the city smelled cleaner than it usually did. He buzzed the apartment. Marta came to the door. She had the guitar in its case, already standing by the door.

"You left it," she said, handing it over. She was not smiling, but her face was gentle. "He told me you would come. He said, he will come in the morning."

"He's —"

"Yes."

"All right."

"Thank you, Marta."

"Come next Saturday."

"I will."

She closed the door. Ezra stood in the hallway for a moment with the guitar. Then he took the elevator down and walked home with it over his shoulder, and the weight of it was a familiar weight, and that was its own comfort.

The Saturday after Ezra went to Tobias's apartment, his father made jollof rice.

This was not unusual and it was not a signal. His father made jollof maybe once a month, on Saturdays, because it took hours and he enjoyed it, and because he said it was the one dish in the world he would refuse, at gunpoint, to eat from a restaurant. The recipe was his mother's, which is to say Ezra's grandmother's, and Tunde Okonkwo had been cooking it the same way for twenty-five years — first in Lagos, then in London during graduate school, then in Abuja during his first diplomatic posting, and now in this narrow Upper East Side kitchen where he had to stack the tomato cans on the windowsill because the cabinet was full.

But on this particular Saturday, Ezra came out of his room just before noon and he saw his father already at the stove, in the gray T-shirt he only wore in the apartment, stirring the base paste of onion and pepper and ginger with a wooden spoon that had been his mother's, and he knew. He knew the way you know that a test is coming because the teacher has arranged the chairs differently.

His mother was in the dining room. The dining room was a rectangle off the kitchen with a round table of dark wood that his parents had bought at an auction a decade ago, and six chairs that did not quite match. She was reading the Saturday Times, but she was not, really — the paper was open in front of her but she was turning the pages too fast. She looked up when Ezra came in. She smiled. It was the smile she used for committee meetings.

Ifeoma was on the couch in the living room with a book and a small bowl of plantain chips. She was pretending to read but Ezra had seen her this morning in the hallway, and she had given him a look, and he knew she knew too.

"Dad's making jollof," he said, neutrally, to his mother.

"Yes," she said.

"On a Saturday."

"It is a Saturday."

"Mom."

She looked at him over the top of her reading glasses. "Your father and I want to talk to the two of you after lunch. That is all. It is nothing dramatic."

"You made him make jollof."

"I did not make him do anything. Your father is a grown man and he cooks when he wants to cook."

"Mom."

"Ezra." She took her glasses off. "Go help your father. He needs the tomatoes."

Ezra went.

"Your teacher," his father said, stirring. "How is he."

"I was going to go see him again tomorrow."

"Good. Good." His father stirred. "I know a man in Lagos. A neurologist. If there were —" and then he stopped himself. "Well. There is not much, with this disease. I know. I asked, after you told us."

"You asked."

"I asked a friend who knows. I wanted to know what you were facing."

Ezra said nothing. He was holding the empty tomato cans in his hands. He put them in the recycling. His father stirred.

"Ezra."

"Yes."

"You know we are going to talk, later."

"I know."

"I do not want you to be surprised. I want you to have time to feel what you feel, before we sit. Do you understand me."

Ezra put his hand flat on the counter.

"Ezra."

"I am fine."

"Come here."

Ezra came. His father put one arm around his shoulders without turning off the stove, without stopping his stirring. He smelled of soap and of onions and of the particular cologne he had been wearing for as long as Ezra had been alive — something called Vetiver, in a green bottle, that Chinwe bought him every Christmas.

"It is a hard arrangement," his father said. "I want you to understand that. For all of us. But your mother and I talked and talked. And this is what we have decided. For one year. And we will look at it again next October. Does that sound all right to you, my son."

"Yes."

"Yes, what."

"Yes, Dad."

"Go tell your sister that the food will be ready in thirty minutes, and that she is to come set the table. Do not tell her about the commute. Your mother and I will tell both of you together. It is important to your mother that we do it properly. You understand."

"I understand."

Ezra went back out to the living room. Ifeoma was still on the couch. She looked up.

"Thirty minutes," he said. "Come set the table."

"What are they telling us."

"I can't."

"Ezra."

"Ifeoma. I can't. Mom wants to do it properly. Come on."

She got up. She was small for eleven, built like their mother — narrow-shouldered, serious eyes. She came over and set the table, and did it very carefully, which was how she did everything when she was scared. She lined the knives up exactly. She folded the napkins into triangles. She put out four glasses of water and filled them without spilling.

The jollof was good. His father's jollof was always good, but this one was particularly good, or perhaps it was only that Ezra was eating more slowly than usual. There was also fried plantain and a simple salad of cucumber and tomato and a little vinegar. Chinwe talked during the meal about a case she had read that morning, a ruling from the European Court of Human Rights about linguistic minorities. She was a legal scholar by training; she had written three books. The case interested her and she talked about it for some minutes. Tunde asked questions. Ifeoma poked at her plantain.

Ifeoma froze. Chinwe put her hand over Ifeoma's on the table.

"We are not going," Tunde said. "Not this year. I will accept a limited version of the post. I will be in Lagos most weekdays and home on the weekends, for one year. We will reassess next October."

Ifeoma burst into tears.

Ezra said nothing. He was looking at his father.

His father was looking back.

"Ezra," his father said quietly.

"I am —" Ezra began, and then he did not finish the sentence, because he did not know what he was. He was relieved. He was grateful. He was also something else that he could not name, something small and uncomfortable lodged under the relief. He thought it might be guilt. He did not know guilt about what yet.

"Say it," his father said. "Whatever it is."

"I don't know what it is."

"Say the part you know."

"I am —" He tried again. "I am glad. I am very glad. Thank you."

His father nodded.

"But," Ezra said. He was not sure the but was coming until it came. "But. You wanted to take the full post. You wanted it. It would have been — it would have been important work."

"Yes, Dad."

"Ezra."

"Yes."

"Do not carry this. This is not yours to carry."

"Okay."

"Eat your plantain."

Ezra ate his plantain. Ifeoma had stopped crying and was wiping her face with the folded triangle of her napkin. Chinwe was looking at Tunde with the expression she wore only in their private moments, and Ezra looked away from it because it was not for him.

Later, after the dishes, Ezra went to his room. He closed the door. He stood at the window a long time, looking out at the brick wall of the building across the courtyard, which was a wall he had looked at for six years. He thought about the apartment in Lagos he had half-imagined moving to — its unfamiliar tile floors, its ceiling fan, its windows that would have opened onto a street he did not know. He thought about Grace. He thought about Tobias. He thought about the school auditorium and the practice rooms, and about Aditi's cello, and about Rana, sitting in the cafeteria with her coat on.

He stared at it.

He closed the notebook.

That evening, while his mother was in the bath and his father was on a phone call with someone in Lagos and Ifeoma had gone to her friend Mercy's apartment in the building, Ezra sat alone in the living room with the guitar — he had gone back to Tobias's that morning and retrieved it; Tobias had been a little better, or had been wearing the face that said he was a little better — and he played, very quietly, the melody that had come to him the night of the walk home. The D minor phrase. The shift to B-flat. The long held note. He played it slowly and he played it several times. And he thought — this is a piece about staying. I did not know that yet. But it is. It is about choosing to stay, and the strange weight of the chosen thing, and the way a held note sounds different from a note you are afraid to let go of.

He did not write it down yet. He was not ready.

He played it once more. Then he put the guitar on its stand and went to find his sister at Mercy's apartment and walked her home, and neither of them said anything about the decision. They did not need to.

Outside, the October light had gone soft and slanted, the way it does in New York in late afternoon in fall, when the city's own stones seem to glow. At the elevator Ifeoma reached up and took his hand, the way she had when she was five, and they rode up in silence, hand in hand, to the eleventh floor.

The first time Ezra asked Grace to come meet Tobias, she said no.

She said no very politely and very firmly, in the way Ezra was beginning to understand Grace said most things. They were in the practice room off the choir room, the small one with the upright piano that nobody used because one of its low E-flats stuck. Grace was playing anyway. She had her hair in two braids that day and she was wearing the sea-green sweater Ezra had already mentally filed as the sea-green sweater, as if it were a mode the piano was in.

"No," she said, not looking up from the keys. "Ezra. I'm not a show pony."

"I didn't mean —"

"I know you didn't. But no."

"He wants to meet you."

"He said that?"

"In so many words."

"Which in so many words?"

"He said — he said, 'This girl you keep not talking about. You should bring her by.'"

"He said that."

"He did."

"And you interpret that as him wanting to meet me."

"I interpret that as him wanting to meet you, yes."

"Yes."

"And you want me to go play for a man who is dying."

"He doesn't think of himself that way."

"No one does, Ezra." She finally looked up. Her eyes were the specific kind of brown that had gold in it when the light came from a particular angle. "That is the point. No one does. But he is, and I am fifteen, and I do not know how to do it."

"You do not have to do it a particular way. You have to play."

"Play what."

"Anything. Anything. Chopin. Whatever. You always play Chopin."

"I do not always play Chopin."

"You always play Chopin when you are happy."

"That is not true."

"Grace."

She was smiling a little now, even while shaking her head. She closed the piano lid. "Ezra. I am going to think about it. I am not saying no forever. I am saying, give me some time. You cannot just — this is a large thing, what you are asking."

"I know."

"Do you."

"I think I do."

"Okay?"

"Okay. I will come. When."

"Saturday."

"This Saturday."

"Yes."

"All right."

That was all. She picked up her cup again.

"Hi."

They walked the half block to Tobias's building in silence. The doorman, who had known Ezra for three years and had seen him come and go so many times he no longer looked up, looked up this time, because Ezra was not alone, and nodded at Grace once. She nodded back. The elevator carried them up. Ezra pressed the buzzer. A long pause, longer than it used to be. Then the door opened.

Marta opened it. Tobias's wife. Ezra had met Marta before but only a few times; she was a translator of German poetry and she spent a lot of time at a small desk in the bedroom that he had only glimpsed. She was tall, with silver hair cut short, and she was wearing a dark green apron. She looked at Ezra, and then at Grace, and her face did a thing that was almost a smile.

"Come in, come in. He has been waiting. He has been —" she let the sentence go. "I am making tea. Please take off your shoes, if you do not mind. The floors are cold."

They took off their shoes. Marta led them down the hall to the living room, which Ezra had been in many times but which he saw now, somehow, through Grace's eyes — the high bookshelves that went up to the molded ceiling, the heavy burgundy drapes that were never quite all the way open, the small framed prints of German and Austrian cities on the wall opposite the windows, Vienna, Salzburg, Prague. The air smelled of old paper and of something cooking, something with rosemary.

Grace went to him. She did not know what to do with her hand, and neither did he, and so she simply laid her hand very briefly on the arm of his chair. Tobias nodded.

"You brought music," Tobias said.

"Yes."

"What have you brought."

"Chopin." A small pause. "And also a little Schumann, but I did not know —"

"Schumann is welcome here," Tobias said. "Marta loves Schumann."

"I love Schumann," Marta called, from the kitchen.

"Yes."

"Thank you."

The piano was the upright in the corner. It was a Blüthner, dark brown, older than anyone in the room. Ezra had never heard Tobias play it — Tobias did not play the piano, really; he was a guitarist — but he had heard once that it had belonged to Marta's grandmother and had come from Leipzig through many uncertain years. Grace went to it. She sat down. She did not play scales first. She did not play any preparatory thing. She simply put her hands on the keys and played.

She played the Chopin Nocturne in E-flat, Opus 9 Number 2, which was a piece Ezra did not associate with Grace at all because it was a piece most fifteen-year-olds learned too early and played badly. But Grace did not play it badly. She played it as if it had been waiting for her. She played it as if she had found a way, somewhere in the last month, to make the left hand not merely accompany the right but hold the right the way a hand holds another hand in a dark place. The rubato was not young. The dynamics were not young. There was nothing about it that was young except the fact of her, the straight back and the slight forward lean and the braids she had tied that morning, which swung a little now as her head moved.

Ezra watched Tobias.

Tobias was watching Grace. His right hand was on the arm of the chair. His left hand was still on the blanket. At a certain point in the middle of the piece — the moment where Chopin does that thing where he lets the right-hand line climb up a scale and then falls back — Tobias's eyes filled. He did not cry. The tears sat in his eyes and did not fall. He did not lift his hand to his face because his hand was where it had to be. He just sat there, with his eyes wet, listening.

Grace did not see this. She was looking at the keys.

Marta came in from the kitchen with a tray. Tea, and a small plate of butter cookies. She set it down on the low table without a sound and stood in the doorway and listened too. She had the same face Tobias had. Ezra thought, in that moment, that he understood for the first time that Marta was going to lose her husband. He had been thinking of it as something that was happening to Tobias and something that was happening to him, Ezra, and he had not thought enough about Marta. He thought about her now.

Grace finished the Nocturne. The last chord hung. Nobody moved.

She played the Kinderszenen. Not the whole thing, she played four of the thirteen — "Träumerei," of course, but also "Von fremden Ländern und Menschen," and "Wichtige Begebenheit," and at the end, "Der Dichter spricht." Ezra closed his eyes for some of it. The room was very warm and the radiator ticked and Marta sat now on the sofa with her hands folded in her lap. When Grace finished the last piece, she did not turn around for a moment. She sat with her hands still on the keys.

"Yes."

"And you." He looked at Ezra. "You were right to bring her."

"Yes, sir."

"Come sit."

They sat. They had tea. Marta poured. Tobias managed his cup with his right hand, slowly. The cookies were good. Grace talked, which Ezra had not expected; she talked about Nairobi, about her grandmother's piano, about how she had first started playing because her aunt was a nun in a convent school and the convent had a spinet that was out of tune and she had loved it anyway. She talked for fifteen minutes. Tobias asked one question, about the tuning of the convent spinet, and Grace laughed and said, "Oh, it was terrible, it was a quarter tone flat in the middle octave," and Tobias said, "That is very bad," and Grace said, "I did not know it was bad, I thought it was how pianos sounded, for years," and Tobias said, "You were fortunate. It is good for the ear, to hear wrongness first. The right sounds all the more right." Marta rolled her eyes gently at her husband.

"I will."

"Bring Schumann. Always Schumann."

"I will."

In the elevator going down, Grace did not cry, but she was quiet. She leaned against the wall of the elevator with her eyes closed. Ezra did not speak. On the street the light was gray and soft and it had started to actually snow now, small flakes, the first real snow of the year.

"Yes."

"He loves you very much."

"He is my teacher."

"Yes. And he loves you very much. You should know."

"I know."

"Do you, though."

"Remember," she said. "Remember harder."

They walked down Lexington together. At the corner of 77th she took his hand, without saying anything, and he held it, and they walked four more blocks before she let go, at the entrance to her subway, and she kissed him on the cheek, quickly, and went down the stairs.

Then he walked home.

November came in like a different country.

That was the phrase his mother used, November. She liked to say it in a Russian accent, because her favorite professor at Oxford had been a Russian woman who used to say it about winter. November, Ezra, is a different country. And it was. The trees went from yellow to brown to bare in what felt like a week. The light at four p.m. had a new metal in it. People put up their coat hoods even when it was not raining. The Central Park reservoir had a skin on it some mornings that was not ice yet but was thinking about it.

They worked on the piece every day after school, either in the auditorium or in the small practice room. Sometimes both. Sometimes they worked until the janitor came by and told them the school closed at six, and they would carry their things out into the dark blue evening and walk to the coffee shop and work there with pencils on staff paper, elbows touching, chai getting cold.

The piece had a shape now. They had agreed on the shape. Three movements. The first movement was in D minor and it was fast and searching, and it was the part Ezra had been hearing in his head since the night he walked home from Tobias's apartment. They called it "Departure." The second movement was slower, in B-flat, quiet, with long held notes on the guitar and a piano part that drifted over the guitar like weather; they called it "The Weight of Staying." The third movement was in G major, which surprised Ezra — he had not thought the piece would end in a major key — but Grace had insisted, one afternoon, on the train back from the Brooklyn music library where they had gone to look at a rare Falla score, and when Grace insisted on something she was generally right. They had not named the third movement yet. Ezra thought it should be called "Together," but Grace thought that was too simple. Grace thought it should be called "What Remains." They had been arguing about this for a week.

They were not just arguing about the title. They were arguing about the piece.

"You want it to end in reconciliation," Grace said one afternoon. They were in the small practice room. She was at the piano; he was on a folding chair with his guitar.

"Yes. It's supposed to end in reconciliation. That's the point of the piece."

"No. The point of the piece is that the reconciliation is incomplete. That is why it's in G major and not D major. D major would be home. G major is — G is — it is four steps away. You hear?"

He played a D major chord. Then a G major chord. "I hear."

"It's almost home. It's a home you can see, from the hill. You are not in it yet."

"Okay."

"So the third movement is not 'Together.'"

"So what is it."

"I said. 'What Remains.'"

"That sounds like somebody died."

Grace was quiet. She did not look at him for a second. Then she looked at him. "Ezra."

"Yeah. I know. I know what I said."

He nodded.

"So," Grace said, softly, "what remains is not the wrong name."

"All right what."

"All right, we call it 'What Remains.'"

"Okay."

"Can I argue with you about something else now."

"What."

"I don't think the second movement should have the piano playing the main line for the whole of the middle section. I think I should take the line. Just for four bars. Then hand it back."

Grace tilted her head. She considered. Then she said, slowly, "Yes. Actually yes. You are right. I will move it."

He watched her write it in pencil on the score. He watched her hand, which had its own grace, no pun intended, the way it moved above the staff. He thought — this is a thing I have never done. I have never made something with another person. The guitar had always been a solitude for him. A single chair. A pool of lamplight. Now it was two chairs. A piano. Another pencil. And the music that came out was larger than either of them alone, and it was strange, and it was the best thing he had ever done.

"Thank you."

"Do not thank me. I did not write it. I am saying it is a real piece. There are very few real pieces. There are many pieces, and most are not real. Yours is real. Keep going."

"Yes, sir."

"Show me the second movement when you have it."

"Yes."

"Who made that decision."

"I did. Well — Grace and I. I suggested it."

"You were right."

"Thank you."

"Keep going."

He kept going.

There were nights that November when Ezra did not sleep well, because he was so close to the piece, because the piece was so close to him. He would lie awake and hear the piano part move under the guitar part, and he would hear, sometimes, a place where the voicing was wrong, where a chord was too thick, and he would get up at one a.m. and write it in pencil in his manuscript book and then go back to bed and still not sleep, because now he had fixed one thing and he could hear another thing, a passage in the first movement where the modulation was too sudden, and he would get up again.

"Okay."

"Yes."

"How is it coming."

"It is coming."

"Good. May I hear it sometime."

"At the recital. In December."

"Ah. The recital." Tunde smiled in the lamplight. "I will be there. If I have to charter a plane I will be there."

"Thank you, Dad."

"Your teacher. He will also be there."

"I hope so."

"Ezra."

"Yes."

"A thing I want to say. Because I am your father, and because I am awake, and because the hour allows certain kinds of honesty. You understand?"

"Yes."

"I see you making this piece. I see how seriously you are taking it. I am saying to you now, tonight, that I am very proud of the seriousness. In my profession there are men who are not serious about anything. It is an occupational hazard, I think. You have to be serious about what you do. The people who are not serious end up producing only words. You are producing something. A thing that will exist. That is a real thing and I am proud of you."

"Dad."

"That is all. Drink your tea. Go to sleep eventually. I love you, my son."

His father got up. He put his cup in the sink. He went back to bed.

Ezra sat for a long time with his tea. He did not cry. He just sat. The lamplight made a small warm circle around him and the guitar lay across his knees like a cat. At some point he did go back to sleep, on the couch, still holding the guitar, and when his mother got up at six to make coffee she found him like that, and she did not wake him, and she took the guitar very gently out of his arms and set it on the armchair and put the blanket over him.

He woke an hour later, with the smell of coffee in the room, and he knew she had done it.

"You hate me," Grace said, after he admitted it.

"I do not hate you."

"You hate that I am always right."

"I do not hate that either."

"What do you feel about it."

He looked at her. They were in the auditorium, alone, the stage lights half on. It was a Thursday afternoon. Outside it was almost dark already.

"I feel lucky," he said.

She said nothing. She just played a G major chord, very softly, as if testing it, or saluting it. Then she closed the piano and they packed up.

Walking home that night alone — Grace had gone the other way, to a friend's birthday dinner — Ezra realized that he had started to measure his life by the piece. The days were practice days; the nights were revision nights; the weekends were Tobias days. Everything else, school, homework, meals, was the connective tissue between the real things. This was not entirely healthy. He knew it was not. His mother had noticed; she had said one night at dinner, gently, "Ezra. You are not eating. Eat." And he had eaten.

November 19. The piece is twenty-one minutes. Grace was right. Mom is worried I am not eating. I am eating, just not enough. Ifeoma has started learning recorder at school and she wants me to teach her. I should teach her. I will teach her this weekend. Tobias is — Tobias today could not button the top button of his shirt and Marta did it for him and he said "thank you, my love" in a voice I have not heard before. Like a voice for the first time acknowledging a debt. I do not know what to do with that yet.

He closed the notebook.

"Yes."

"How is the piece."

"It is twenty-one minutes now. Grace was right, it should be twenty-one and not twenty-three."

"Grace is often right."

"She is."

"Do you want pancakes."

"Yes."

Ezra laughed. "Now?"

"Now is a good time."

"Let me eat first."

"While you eat."

"Ifeoma."

"Fine. After breakfast."

After breakfast Ezra took his sister into his room with the guitar. He showed her a D minor chord. He had to adjust her left hand three times before her thumb sat behind the neck correctly and her fingers came down on the strings cleanly. The first time she tried to play the chord it sounded like someone dropping a drawer of forks. The second time it sounded less bad. The third time it sounded, almost, like a D minor chord.

"There," Ezra said.

"That's a chord."

"That's a chord."

"It sounded bad."

"It sounded like a D minor chord. A D minor chord is supposed to sound a little sad. That's the job of a D minor chord."

"Oh."

"Keep your fingers there. Don't move them. Now play each string, one at a time. Slowly. Listen to each one."

She played each string, slowly. She listened. Her forehead was furrowed in a way that reminded Ezra, suddenly and specifically, of their mother. He did not say anything about it.

"Okay," he said, "now play them all together. A strum. One strum. Down."

She strummed. The chord rang. Her whole face changed.

"Did I do it."

"You did it."

"Ezra. I did it."

"You did it. Now practice. Hold the shape. Let go. Hold the shape again. Ten times. I'll be back."

"I can hear."

"She is going to keep practicing, I think."

His mother smiled. "Well. Another one. We will be outnumbered soon, your father and I."

"You and Dad are the ones who started all of this."

"We did no such thing. We played no instruments. We listened to jazz and read books. We only made room for you. You did it."

"I did it with Tobias's help."

"Yes. And with Tobias's help. But Ezra." She looked at him over her coffee. "You did it. The piece, the discipline, the three hours a day — that is you. Do not give all the credit away. Some of it is yours."

"Okay."

She reached across the counter and touched his cheek once, very briefly.

"The chord?"

"The whole thing. Playing."

Ezra thought about it. He thought about Tobias in the armchair with his cane. He thought about the passage in the second movement that had taken three weeks. He thought about the Sor study that he still could not play as cleanly as he wanted to.

"That sounds terrible."

"It is not terrible. It is just the shape of it."

"Oh."

"Keep practicing."

He left her and went out into the hall. He walked toward the living room and stood at the window and looked down at the street. A man was walking a brown dog. A taxi was idling. Another November day was starting without him having done anything. He had the feeling, which he sometimes had now, of time being both enormous and small — enormous because he knew he was going to be alive for a long time, small because specific people in his life were not. He stood at the window and felt both.

Then he went back to his sister and helped her with the chord for another fifteen minutes.

Ezra came in. He took off his shoes. He did not know what to do with his guitar; Marta took it from him without asking and set it against the wall. She said, low, "He does not want to talk about the fall, please. Follow his lead."

Ezra nodded. He went into the living room.

Tobias was in the armchair. He looked the way he always looked now, which was smaller than Ezra could ever quite get used to. But his face had a scrape on it — a red line along the cheekbone, recent, cleaned — and Ezra had to look at something else for a second. He looked at the bookshelf. Then he looked back.

"Ezra."

"Tobias."

"Come sit."

Ezra sat on the footstool, not the sofa. This had become his habit. The footstool was lower and it put him at about the height of Tobias's face, and also it meant he was close.

"Today," Tobias said, "I am not going to touch the instrument."

"Okay."

"I am going to talk. You are going to play. This is how we will do it now. Is that all right."

"That is all right."

"Also there is coffee. Marta. Marta?"

"Coming."

Marta brought coffee. It was very strong and it had a thin foam on top and it came in the small cups with the gold rim that she had brought from Vienna in 1974. Ezra had been told that story once. He sipped his coffee.

"Play the first movement of the new piece," Tobias said. "The opening. Just the opening. The first twenty measures."

Ezra got the guitar. He played the first twenty measures.

"Stop," Tobias said. "Go back. Measure five. The triplet figure. You are rushing it."

Ezra played measure five.

"No. You are making the triplet land on the beat. That is not what you wrote. You wrote a triplet that falls just before the beat. Read it."

Ezra looked at the score. He looked at the triplet. He played it again, trying to make it land before the beat.

"Closer. Again."

Again.

"Closer. Listen. I will count for you. Ready. One, two, three, four —"

Tobias counted with his voice. His voice was not as strong as it had been, but it had a fixed clarity in it, like the tone of a small bell. He counted measure five and measure six and he said "there, yes, there," and Ezra played it again and felt the triplet fall in the place it should have fallen for the last three weeks, and he understood, in a sudden clean way, something about his own composition that he had not understood.

"You heard it," Tobias said.

"Yes."

"Good. Now measure fourteen. The chord."

"D minor ninth."

"Yes. You are voicing it with the ninth on top."

"Yes."

"Why."

"Because —" Ezra thought. "Because I like how it sounds."

"Not good enough. Why."

"Because — because the melody line in the piano is going to rest there for two beats, and the ninth will give it something to lean against. A little tension, not a lot."

"Yes. That is a real reason. Play it."

Ezra played it.

"Good. Now move the ninth down an octave. Play it."

Ezra moved it down an octave and played.

"What is different."

"The tension is lower. It's — it's less floating."

"Yes. Which is better."

"The original is better. The first way."

"Yes. But now you know why. Now you have heard the other way. This is how you must work, Ezra. You must always also hear the way it is not. Only then do you truly know why it is the way it is. You hear me."

"Yes."

"Play me measure twenty-two through measure thirty-five."

Ezra played.

This was how the lesson went. Tobias did not touch the guitar. He did not get up from the chair. He counted. He pointed with his right hand. He asked questions. He sent Ezra back to the beginning of a phrase three times. He was, if anything, a more exacting teacher than he had been when he had a left hand that worked. Ezra thought — Tobias has been making himself less necessary for a long time. This is not new. He has been teaching me to work without him since the beginning. Now I am finally noticing.

Ezra scooted the footstool closer.

"Okay."

"I was in the kitchen with Marta. I was trying to open a jar of honey. I could not do it. With either hand. My right hand is still working but it is also getting tired, Ezra, it is getting tired. I was standing there, and Marta was at the sink, and I was looking at this jar of honey, and I started to laugh. I laughed very hard. It was not a sad laugh. It was a pure laugh. I was laughing at the — at the absolute comedy of a man who cannot open a jar of honey. Marta came over and she took the jar and she opened it and she said, in German, 'You were never very good at jars, you know.' And she put the jar down and she took my face in her hands and she kissed me. And I thought — I thought, the honey will still be eaten. Someone will still eat the honey."

Ezra did not speak.

"I tell you this, Ezra, because I want you to know something. I am not afraid. I am annoyed, often. I am tired, often. I am occasionally sad. But I am not afraid. I want you to know this because I think you are afraid for me, and there is no need. Do you hear me."

"Yes."

"I have had a very good life. I played music. I married Marta. I taught several students who became real musicians, and one who did not become a professional musician but who became a very good human being, which is almost rarer. I have been loved. I have loved. I am finishing now. It is not a tragedy. It is a — it is a rounding. You understand. A rounding."

Ezra nodded.

"All right."

"All right."

"Play me the last two measures of the first movement. The ending. I want to hear how it ends."

Ezra played it. The first movement ended with a kind of question — not a resolution, the D minor never fully settling, a long held open B-flat in the guitar over a slowly decaying bass note in the piano. The ending had been Grace's suggestion. Ezra had agreed because she was right. He played it now in the bright small room.

"Yes."

"Good. Leave it."

"Next Saturday."

"Bring the second movement."

"Yes."

"And Ezra."

"Yes."

"Tell Grace I said hello. Tell her my Blüthner is not the same since she played it. It thinks it is a concert piano now."

Ezra smiled. "I will tell her."

"Go."

He went.

On the street it was beginning to snow again, small hard flakes this time, and Ezra walked the long way home — down Park, across to Fifth, then west on 79th — because he needed the walk. He thought about the honey jar. He thought about what Tobias had said. A rounding. He thought about the word. He thought about it as a musical term, too — how a phrase rounds, how a piece rounds back on itself in a coda. He thought that maybe Tobias had chosen the word on purpose.

He closed the notebook. His father was in Lagos this week. His mother was at a conference at NYU on Saturday afternoons this month. Ifeoma was at a friend's. He was alone in the apartment, which was unusual, and he sat for a while in the silence and let himself miss all four of them — the three who were real and one who was his teacher — in different specific ways.

Then he got the guitar out and played scales for forty minutes without stopping. He paid the instrument. He felt better afterward. This was a thing Tobias had taught him, too, that there is no mood that forty minutes of scales cannot at least slightly soften. He had not understood it at twelve. He understood it now.

They were working late in the auditorium on a Tuesday.

It was December by then, the first week. The stage was lit only by the work lights, two fluorescent bars overhead that made everything look slightly gray, the way things look in bad dreams. The audience was rows of empty seats receding into darkness. Grace was at the Steinway, in her gray sweater with the small hole at the elbow that she had refused to get fixed because she said the sweater had earned the hole. Ezra was on the folding chair with his guitar.

They had been working on a passage in the second movement where the piano part crossed below the guitar part — an odd texture, the piano low and resonant, the guitar playing above it in higher positions — and the passage had been giving them trouble. Grace kept pulling ahead. Ezra kept pulling back. The timing, which should have been simple because it was marked in straight eighth notes, kept slipping.

"Again," Grace said.

They played it again. It slipped again.

"Again."

Again. Worse.

"Grace. We have been doing this for forty minutes."

"I know."

"Maybe the passage is the problem."

"The passage is not the problem."

"Maybe it is."

"Ezra. Look at me."

"Just play."

"Just play."

"All right."

They played it. It worked. It worked exactly. The piano went down and the guitar went up and the lines crossed and uncrossed and it was the way they had written it.

"There," Grace said.

"There."

She smiled. It was a small, tired, true smile. Ezra looked at her in the gray light and something inside him did a small quiet thing. He did not know what to call it. He had been noticing, for a long time, that Grace was beautiful. He had been noticing, for a long time, that when he walked into a room and she was in it, some of the noise in his head stopped. He had been noticing, for a long time, that he wanted to know what her laugh sounded like in the morning.

He set the guitar on the floor carefully, leaning it against the chair.

"Grace."

"Yes."

"Come here a minute."

She hesitated. Then she got up from the piano bench and walked, in the gray light, across the stage to where he was sitting. She stood in front of him. He stood up. They were the same height, or very nearly — she was perhaps an inch shorter.

He did not know how to do any of this. He had never done any of this. He had read about it in novels. He had seen it in films. But he had no protocol. He looked at her. She looked at him. Her eyes in the gray light had lost the gold and were a deep warm brown.

"Ezra," she said.

"Yes."

"Are you going to kiss me."

"I think so. Yes."

"Okay."

He kissed her.

He had meant to kiss her on the mouth, and he did, but only after first accidentally kissing the corner of her mouth, because he had misjudged the angle. She laughed, very softly, against his face, which was both embarrassing and wonderful, and then she turned her head a little, and he kissed her properly, on the mouth, and her hand came up and rested on the side of his neck and her fingers were cold and he could feel her breathing.

It was a very short kiss. It lasted maybe three seconds.

"Hi."

"That was —"

"I know."

"We missed the first time. The angle."

"I know."

"That was because of my braids. My head is an unusual shape with braids. I tilt wrong."

"Your head is exactly the right shape."

"Ezra."

"What."

"You have to say something less poetic right now or I am going to cry."

"Okay." He thought. "I left my water bottle in the practice room."

She laughed again. "Better."

They played the crossover passage. It worked.

"Yes."

"Yes."

"I like it here."

"Me too."

They walked out together through the dim hallway of the school, past the lockers and the cork board with the flyers for tutoring and for the model UN meeting next Thursday and for the winter recital the weekend after next, which was the recital they were playing in. They did not hold hands in the hallway; it did not seem right to hold hands in the hallway. But they walked close.

"Yes."

"I never see any. This is a big night."

"Yes."

"Okay."

"I think I am going to love you. I do not know how long. I do not know what shape. But I think I am."

"You do not have to say anything back."

"I want to say something back."

"Okay."

"I think I am too. I think I am."

"I will."

"Text me when you get home."

"I will."

"Ezra."

"Yes."

"Do not tell Aditi. I will tell Aditi. She will have opinions. I want to be the one who has to hear them."

"Okay."

"Good practice."

"You look happy."

"I am happy."

"Mom."

"All right. Never mind. Don't tell me. Good night, my Ezra."

"Good night."

He closed the notebook. He got into bed. He turned out the light. He fell asleep in about six minutes, which was a record for him that fall.

The next morning Aditi was waiting for him at his locker.

She was standing with her arms crossed and her head tilted in a way he recognized. She said, "I know."

"Know what."

"I know. Grace told me. She could not wait. She called me at seven-thirty this morning."

"Aditi."

"I have been waiting for this since October. Do you know how long that is in high-school time."

"I know how long it is."

"I am going to say three things and then I am going to stop. First. Congratulations. Second. If you hurt her I will kill you, and I am saying this with love. Third." She paused. She looked at him. "Third, I am happy for you. Genuinely. You are a good pair. I have thought so for a while."

"Thank you, Aditi."

"That is all."

"That is all."

"Go to class."

He went to class.

At lunch, Grace met him at the cafeteria door, and she was wearing, not the sea-green sweater today but a cream-colored one that was new, and she looked at him, and the room around them got a little smaller in the specific way the world does when you are fifteen and the person you are in love with is walking across the cafeteria toward you in a new sweater. They ate lunch together. They did not sit with anyone else. They did not need to. They talked about everything and nothing, about Grace's piano teacher, about a book Ezra had been reading, about a bird that had flown into Grace's window that morning and had stunned itself and then recovered and flown away. They did not talk about the kiss. It sat between them like something they both knew was there and did not need to mention.

"Tomorrow."

It was the pattern, for the next week. Working. Walking. A small kiss at the subway. Texts at night. It was a pattern that felt, to Ezra, both brand new and ancient, as if it had always been the way things were supposed to be. He did not tell his parents. He did not know how, yet. He thought they probably already knew.

One evening his mother said, at dinner, "Bring Grace over for a real meal sometime. A sit-down. Not a drop-by. I would like to talk to her."

"Okay."

"Soon."

"Okay, Mom."

"Before January."

"Okay."

She did not press. She did not smirk. She simply asked, and moved on to the story she was telling about a cat that had apparently been living in the faculty lounge at NYU for two weeks. His father laughed at the cat story. Ifeoma asked if they could get a cat. His mother said no.

The dinner with Grace happened the following Saturday, after Ezra's visit to Tobias. Grace came over at seven. She wore black pants and a red sweater and brought, unprompted, a small bouquet of cream roses for Ezra's mother. His mother's face, receiving them, did a thing Ezra had rarely seen — a slight startled pleasure, as if she had been given a gift she had not known she wanted. His mother said, "Oh, Grace. Thank you."

Grace said, "Thank you for having me."

His father shook Grace's hand warmly. Ifeoma, when introduced, said, "You are even prettier than the first time," and Grace laughed and said, "That is because today is a different day." Ifeoma thought about this for a full minute and then seemed to accept it.

Dinner was rice and stewed chicken and greens. His father had cooked; Ezra had told Grace in advance that when his father cooked it meant the meal had been thought about. Grace took two helpings of the greens. His mother asked Grace about Kenya, about Nairobi specifically, about the school Grace had attended before Northgate. Grace answered carefully but not stiffly. She talked about her piano teacher at home, a woman who had trained in Paris. She talked about her grandmother. She did not talk about her mother or father much, which Ezra noticed, and his mother noticed, and his mother did not push.

After dinner Grace helped with the dishes, which Ezra's mother allowed for about two minutes and then insisted she stop. They sat in the living room. His father asked Grace about music school; was she considering it, what conservatories, what about the Juilliard pre-college program. Grace answered. She was thoughtful about it. She said she had not yet decided whether she wanted to be a professional pianist, or whether she wanted something that had music in it but was not only that. She said, "I have seen, I think, what a life of only music does to a person. I am not sure I want that life. I want a life with music. That is a different thing."

His father nodded slowly. He said, "That is a very wise distinction. I hope you find what you are looking for."

Grace said, "Thank you."

"I know."

"Your father in particular. I did not expect — I did not expect him to be so — gentle."

"He is a gentle person. Most people meet the diplomat first."

"I can see that now."

"I am glad you came."

"I am glad you asked me."

"Grace."

"Yes."

"Thank you for the flowers."

"I was nervous. Flowers are a thing to do with your hands when you are nervous."

"I didn't know you got nervous."

"Ezra. Ezra. Of course I get nervous. What do you think I am."

"A Kenyan girl who is never nervous."

"That is a cartoon of a Kenyan girl."

"I know. I know."

"Go home. Call me tomorrow."

"I will."

He thought about how much of any person is what you cannot see, the Nairobi that was still inside Grace, the piano teacher who trained in Paris, the grandmother's piano, the weight she was carrying that she was not showing him yet. He thought about the tenderness of what a person chooses to reveal, and when.

Grace was nervous. I did not know she got nervous.

There is a lot about Grace I do not know. I am going to learn. Slowly. We have time. We are fifteen. We have so much time.

He closed the notebook.

The news came on a Thursday, in the middle of the school day, during seventh period physics.

Ezra was at his lab bench trying to get a small electric circuit to light a small bulb, and failing, because the wire had a break in it somewhere that he had not found yet, when he saw Rana Mehdizadeh stand up in the middle of the class and walk, without asking, to the door. She did not take her bag. She did not look at anyone. Her phone was still in her hand. She opened the door and walked out into the hall and the door swung closed behind her.

Ms. Abramowitz paused. She looked at the empty seat. Then she said, quietly, to the class, "Keep working, please. I will be right back," and she followed Rana out.

"I know."

"I hope it's not bad."

"Yeah."

Rana Mehdizadeh had been at Northgate for two years. Her father was a journalist; he had been arrested in Iran the previous summer and had been in prison since then. The family lived in New York because Rana's mother had relatives here and because Rana's father had, before his arrest, worked for a time at the UN covering the Security Council. Ezra knew Rana in the way he knew a number of his classmates — she was not one of his close friends. But he liked her, in a specific careful way, the way you like people whose lives are going through something and who are carrying it with dignity. She did not talk about her father. She had come back in September thinner and more silent than she had been, and she had made it very clear, without saying so, that she did not want to be asked questions. People had respected this. Ezra had respected it. He had smiled at her in the hallways and said hi and not tried to turn it into a conversation.

They continued.

At lunch Ezra heard the rumor. Aditi heard it first, from a girl named Sofia who was friends with Rana, and Sofia had heard it from Rana's older cousin, and Aditi came to find Ezra in the cafeteria and she said, a little breathless, "Ezra. They released him. They let him out. They released her father."

"What."

"On medical grounds. This morning. Iran time, I mean. He is out. They are sending him to a hospital in Tehran but he is out."

Ezra put down his sandwich.

"Is he okay."

"I don't know. Sofia said — Sofia said not great, but stable. He had been refusing food."

"Okay."

"Yeah."

"Okay."

"Yeah."

"You should write her something."

"Write her what."

"A piece. Something small. For guitar. Something she can just hear. You do not have to perform it. Just — give it to her."

"I know it is a good idea."

"I should write it now. Tonight."

"Tonight. Yes."

He went home. He did his homework very quickly, which for Ezra meant only moderately well. He had dinner. His mother was distracted; she was on a call with his father, who was in Lagos, about something in his father's office that was going wrong. Ifeoma was watching something on a tablet with headphones. Ezra finished his rice and went to his room.

He sat on the bed with the guitar.

He thought about Rana. He thought about what he knew. She was fifteen. She was half-Iranian, half-something else Ezra did not actually know — he thought her mother might be French, but he was not sure. She was a painter. She had been in a show at the Brooklyn Museum for teen artists last year and Ezra had gone to see it, because Aditi had asked him to go. Rana's paintings had been small and strange — a series of rooms with a window in each of them and a kind of soft blue light coming through each window, but with something different happening in each room. In one of them there had been a chair. In another, a pair of shoes. In another, nothing at all. He had looked at them for a long time. He had not told Rana he had gone. He had not told her because he was fifteen and because he was shy and because he had not known what to say.

He thought about the rooms with the windows.

He picked up his guitar. He played a few things. He played a D minor arpeggio. He played an F major chord. He was not finding it yet. He put the guitar down. He got up. He walked around his room. He sat back down. He picked up the guitar again.

What if, he thought, the piece is a room. Not a whole house. A room. A single room with one window. The kind of window that lets in the kind of soft blue light that is in Rana's paintings. What if the piece is a room and the light is the music.

He played a chord. E minor, first position, but with an added ninth on top. He let it ring. It sounded like light.

He wrote a small phrase. Four bars. The left-hand finger-picking stayed on the low strings, slow, even, a kind of walking. The top voice moved up and down like the tilt of the light on a wall when the sun is coming up. He played it twice. It was too simple. It needed one more thing.

He added a slight harmonic at the end. A small chime, on the twelfth fret of the B string. It sounded like a bell heard from far away, through a window.

He played the whole thing. It was about a minute and a half. It was called, he decided, "For Rana." Nothing more elaborate. Just that.

"What is it."

"A thing I wrote for her."

"A thing."

"A piece. For guitar. I wrote it last night."

"It's nothing."

"It is not nothing."

"Just give it to her."

"I will."

"Yes."

"I do not play guitar."

"I know. I — I figured somebody could play it for you. If you wanted to hear it. Or I could."

"I asked my cousin. He plays. He played it for me last night. On the phone. He is in Vancouver."

"Okay."

"Ezra."

"Yes."

"It is a very kind thing. I am not able to say more about it right now. My feelings are very — very odd, right now. I have a lot of them. But the piece is very kind."

"Okay."

"I looked at the note. About the painting. You saw the paintings."

"Yes. Last spring. I didn't tell you."

"Why didn't you tell me."

"Because I didn't know what to say."

"What do you want to say now."

"Yeah."

"My father was arrested a week after that show closed."

"I know. I'm sorry."

"He is coming here. In January. They are letting him come. Or — I should not say letting. He is being allowed to come. He is being sent to a hospital here for treatment. He will be here, Ezra. He will be here in the city. In January."

"That's — that's so good."

"Yes."

"Yes."

"Do you promise."

"I promise."

"Good."

"I know."

"It is the best thing you have written, I think. Other than the big piece."

"Grace."

"It is."

"Do you think I should put it inside the big piece. As a — a kind of quotation. In the third movement."

"No?"

"No. The piece belongs to Rana. You do not take back a gift, Ezra. Even a gift of music. Especially a gift of music. The big piece has its own things to do. Let the small piece be small."

He nodded. "Okay."

"You're going to let it be small."

"Yes."

"Good."

He closed the notebook. He sat for a moment with the guitar. He thought about Rana's father, in whatever hospital he was in, in Tehran. He thought about the flight he would take in January. He thought about all the fathers who had not been released. He thought about his own father, who was in Lagos right now, asleep probably, in an apartment Ezra had never seen. He thought — I am very lucky. The luck is staggering and it has nothing to do with me. The luck is accidental. The least I can do is not waste it.

"Okay."

"So he is not coming to New York, after all."

"Ah."

"I might go. I might go to see him. Over the school winter break. My mother is arranging it. I wanted you to know. I do not know when I will be back."

"Okay."

"When I am back, the promise still stands. You will play the piece for him. When he is well enough to travel here."

"Yes."

"Or if he is not, you will play it for me again. As a kind of letter I can send to him."

"Yes."

"Thank you, Ezra."

"Thank you for telling me."

"Which part."

"The last piece. Some of it."

"Okay."

"It was very good. That is what I wanted to say. That was all."

He thought about what it cost Rana to come at all — the simple act of walking into a building full of happy fifteen-year-olds in dresses and suits, with her own father just out of prison and about to be moved to Vienna. He thought about how much people carry that he does not see. He thought about the wordless courtesies of the teenage world, the way Rana had come and then left without making anyone fuss over her, the way Grace had not cried at Tobias's apartment even though she wanted to, the way Aditi had made her Dvořák look easy.

He thought — this is what diaspora is. Or part of it. People in a city carrying many specific things, many heavy things, and still showing up to each other's recitals, and still coming into a hallway to say thank you, and still giving each other flowers, and still cooking jollof on Saturdays. This is the lived version of the grand word diaspora. It is not a theory. It is the actual walking around and the actual staying in touch.

He closed the notebook.

The winter recital was held on the second Friday of December, which that year was the eleventh, and which that year was a night Ezra would remember with a particular clarity for the rest of his life.

The recital was traditionally held in the auditorium, starting at seven, with an intermission, and running until about nine. It was not a competitive recital. There were no winners. It was simply a night when a selection of Northgate's music students performed for the school community and for their families and for whoever else came, which was usually, in addition to parents, a handful of alumni and a handful of teachers and sometimes a scout or two from one of the city conservatories.

At five-thirty he was in the green room with Grace. The green room was not actually green; it was beige, and it had a long table with a mirror and a coffee urn and a small tray of cookies and a water cooler. Grace was in a dark blue dress she had not told him she was going to wear. He had, in fact, never seen her in a dress before. She had her hair pinned up, which was also a first. She looked so different that for a moment when he came in he did not recognize her, and this startled him, because it meant his idea of Grace was something he had made and not the whole of her.

He was wearing a charcoal suit his mother had bought him in October, for exactly this event, and a pale blue shirt, and no tie because Grace had said, over text, that he should not wear a tie because a tie would make him look like a junior congressman. He had laughed at that and complied.

"Hey," Grace said.

"Hey."

"You look nervous."

"I don't think I am."

"You look nervous."

"Maybe I am a little."

"Good. Nervous is all right. Nervous means we care."

"Yeah."

"Come here."

"Okay."

They sat on the two folding chairs. They closed their eyes. Grace began, very softly, to count, and to hum the piano line. Ezra heard the guitar part in his head, running against her voice. They went through the whole second movement, three and a half minutes, both of them with their eyes closed. At the end Grace opened her eyes.

"Good," she said.

"Good."

"Now the third."

They went through the third.

"Good."

"The first."

They went through the first.

"Good."

"Now we stop thinking about it."

"Now we stop thinking about it."

"Yes."

They followed him into the hall.

"Your teacher is here," Mr. Karam said to Ezra.

"Tobias."

"Yes. He came in a wheelchair. His wife is with him. They are in the second row, on the left."

"Okay."

"I just thought you would want to know. He said to tell you not to look for him. He said he did not want you to see him before you played. He wants you to have a clean stage in your head."

"Okay."

"Is that all right. The wheelchair — "

"It's all right. It's — he wanted to come. I did not ask him to."

"I know. I spoke to him last week about it. He was certain."

"Okay. Thank you for telling me."

"Break a leg, the two of you."

Mr. Karam went back into the auditorium. Ezra stood in the hallway for a moment. Grace was next to him. She said nothing. He said nothing. After a moment she took his hand.

"I'm fine," he said.

"I know."

"I am just — I am going to play now and I am not going to look at him. But I am going to know he is there."

"Yes."

"And that is — that is the thing."

"Yes."

"Okay."

It was the intermission. People went out to the lobby. Ezra did not go out. Grace did not go out. They stayed in the green room. She sat on a folding chair and put her hands flat on her thighs and breathed. He sat on the other folding chair and held his guitar across his lap and breathed with her.

The audience applauded.

Ezra and Grace walked onstage. The stage lights were on, fully, not the dim work lights of their rehearsals. The audience was dark beyond them. Ezra did not look at the second row on the left. He looked at his chair. He sat. He adjusted his footstool. Grace sat at the piano. They looked at each other. Grace nodded. Ezra nodded.

He played the first note.

What happened during the twenty-one minutes of the concerto, Ezra would later struggle to describe. Later in his life, at twenty, at thirty, he would try to tell people about it, and he would find that he could not. The piece happened. The D minor searching of the first movement happened — the rushing, the slowing, the modulation to F major that Tobias had said was the center of the movement. The long quiet of the second movement happened, with its crossing lines, the piano going low, the guitar going high, the handoff at the middle where the guitar took the melody for four bars and then gave it back. The third movement, the G major, the not-quite-home that was the home available to them, happened. He was aware of Grace beside him the whole time. He was aware of the piano as if it were another voice in his own body. At one point, in the middle of the third movement, she laughed — actually laughed, a small quiet laugh, while playing — because they hit a passage they had worked on for three weeks exactly the way they had wanted it, and the relief of that made her laugh, and Ezra almost laughed too, but he was playing a fast passage so he just smiled into the fingerboard.

The last chord was a G major with an added sixth in the piano, over a low E on the guitar, held until it died. He let it die. He held it until he could not hear it anymore. Grace held it until she could not hear it anymore. They were two or three seconds off from each other, the two dyings, which was maybe a mistake and maybe not. Ezra preferred to think it was not.

Silence.

Then the audience came in. It came in slowly at first — a single pair of hands — and then it came in all at once, and Ezra heard it without looking up. He heard it with his eyes closed. He let it come. When he finally looked up, Grace was looking at him. She was smiling. Her eyes were wet. Neither of them stood yet.

They stood finally. They bowed. Ezra looked, now, at the second row on the left.

Tobias was in the wheelchair, in the aisle at the end of the row. Marta was beside him, in the aisle seat. Tobias's right hand was raised, palm out, not clapping, just raised. It was a gesture Ezra had never seen from him before. It was a gesture that was, Ezra understood later, the gesture of a conductor at the end of a performance — the still hand that means, the work is finished, do not add to it. It was also the gesture of a man who could not clap because his left hand no longer worked and clapping requires two hands. But it was not a gesture of lack. It was a gesture of wholeness in a different form.

Ezra raised his hand back, briefly, to Tobias. Then he lowered it. Then he and Grace bowed again, and walked off the stage.

In the green room they hugged. They hugged for a long time. Then they separated and Grace wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and said, "You can go see your teacher. Go."

He went.

The lobby was crowded. Parents and students and alumni. He saw his mother immediately; she was in a dark green dress and had her arm around Ifeoma, and his father, who had flown in that morning from Lagos and who Ezra had barely seen because he had come straight from the airport with a suit in his bag, was behind them. His father caught his eye and made a small formal nod of the head and Ezra nodded back. But he did not go to them first. He went to Tobias.

The people parted. Ezra came up to him. He did not know what to do. He knelt down, one knee, so that he was at the height of Tobias's face.

"Tobias."

"Thank you."

"It is more than real. It is — it is yours. You have written your first piece. Do you understand what that means."

"I think so."

"No. You do not. But you will. Listen. Come very close."

Ezra leaned in.

"Yes."

Grace came out of the green room a few minutes later. She had changed out of the dress into jeans but had kept the hair pinned up. Ezra introduced her to his parents. His mother shook her hand warmly. His father bowed slightly, a gesture he had learned in Tokyo and never stopped using. Ifeoma looked up at Grace with undisguised fascination and said, "You are very pretty," which Grace, to Ezra's eternal gratitude, treated with full seriousness, thanking her and saying, "So are you."

The evening closed out in the lobby. People congratulated Ezra and Grace. Mr. Karam gave each of them a small bouquet. Aditi hugged Grace and then hugged Ezra and then said, "The middle of the third movement. The passage where the piano slows. That was Schumann, wasn't it. You quoted Schumann." Grace laughed and said, "Yes. A little. Nobody has said that except you." Aditi said, "I hear it. You cannot hide Schumann from me."

He thought about this clearly and without drama. He understood it.

He stood there. He was full.

Later, at home, his father sat with him in the kitchen. His mother had gone to bed. Ifeoma was asleep. It was nearly midnight. His father had poured two small glasses of palm wine, which he kept in the refrigerator for occasions, and which he rarely shared with Ezra. Tonight he had shared. Ezra had taken a small sip. It was sweet and earthy and unfamiliar.

"Only a small amount," his father said. "Your mother would not approve. But tonight is a night."

"Yes."

"Ezra. I want to ask you something."

"Okay."

"In the third movement. At the end. The last thirty seconds or so. You and Grace did something I have not heard before. The piano took the melody and you played, underneath, only the open strings of the guitar. Six notes. Over and over. Like a — like a drone. Like a bell. What was that."

"Grace thought of it."

"Yes. But you executed it. Both of you made it."

"Yes."

"I heard it. I have been thinking about it since then. I thought you should know."

"Thank you, Dad."

"No."

"Not well. I had a teacher for two years, in secondary school, in Ibadan. I was not gifted. But I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the way an instrument teaches you to listen. It is not — it is not just about the instrument. Every musician knows this. It is about the listening. You learn to listen and then you listen to everything differently. To people. To the city. To yourself."

"Yes."

"You have that. I can see you have that. You listen differently than you used to, even six months ago. I want you to know I have noticed."

"Dad."

"Yes."

"Thank you. For the year."

"For what year."

"For staying. For commuting. I have not said it again. I wanted to say it once when I was not expected to."

"Okay."

"Finish your palm wine. Go to sleep. You have had a very long night."

Ezra finished his palm wine. He went to sleep.

The Saturday after the recital Ezra went to Tobias's apartment at the usual time.

It was the nineteenth of December. The streets had snow on them, real snow this time, an inch or so that had fallen overnight and been partly cleared, so that the sidewalks were wet and the curbs were piled white. The sky was a pale winter gray that had no shape in it. Ezra took the subway down because his guitar was heavy and because he had not slept enough, and he came up the stairs at 86th and Lex and walked east, and at Tobias's building he buzzed the buzzer, and Marta came to the door.

"Ezra."

"Hi."

"Come in, come in. Take off your shoes. There is hot chocolate today. I made too much. Come."

He came in. He took off his shoes. The apartment smelled different, which he noticed without quite processing — a medical smell under the usual smells, something antiseptic and quiet, mixed with the cocoa. Marta led him to the living room.

Tobias was in the armchair. He was thinner than last week. His left arm was in a soft sling now, which was new. His face was pale but his eyes were alert. He was wearing a red scarf over his sweater; Ezra had never seen him wear a scarf indoors before.

"Sit," Tobias said. "The footstool. Yes."

Ezra sat. Marta brought two mugs of hot chocolate. She set one on the small table by Tobias's chair, where he could reach it with his right hand. She set the other on the floor by Ezra's feet. She touched Ezra's shoulder very briefly. Then she went away, into the other room. Ezra could hear her, faintly, talking on the phone in German.

"Yes."

"Good."

"Do not open it now."

"Okay."

"Open it tonight. When you are home. Alone, if you can manage. Open it slowly. Read it twice. The first time you will not believe it, and the second time you will."

"Okay."

"It contains some practical things. Instructions, if you want to call them that. Teachers I want you to study with. A contact of mine in Berlin who can help you when you are older. Pieces I want you to learn in the next year, the next three years, the next ten. It is a — a curriculum. Or a map. Or a set of directions. Whichever you want. You are free to ignore any of it. I will not know."

Ezra looked at the envelope. It was heavier than he expected.

"Tobias."

"Yes."

"I —"

"Ezra. Listen. What I want to tell you is this. I am sixty-eight years old. I have had a good life. You know this. I have also had a good teacher's life. I have had some good students. You are one of them. You are, Ezra, the best of them. I am telling you this now because I want you to have it. Not so that it will swell your head — you are not a person whose head swells, that has never been your problem. I am telling you because in the future you will have days when you doubt. You will have weeks when you doubt. You will consider quitting. Every musician does. When that time comes, I want you to remember that I said this to you in December of the year you were fifteen. You have it. You have what is needed. Work for it every day. Work for it as if you were paying rent on a house you love. But do not doubt the foundation. The foundation is there."

Ezra's eyes were hot. He did not speak for a moment. He was holding the envelope flat in his two hands.

"Yes."

"When you played the concerto last Friday — when the second movement began, when the piano began its low line and your guitar began its high line — I was playing too. I was inside the piece. Do you understand. I was there. You did that for me. So you see, it has not been one direction. It has been two. The music was always yours. It was always yours. I was just a hand pointing."

Ezra sat very still. The envelope in his hands felt warm, though it could not have been.

"Now," Tobias said. "No more talking. Play for me. Sor. The Study in B minor. Number five, I think it is, in the Segovia edition. Play it slowly. Play it as if you are discovering it."

Ezra took out the guitar. He tuned it. He began to play the Sor.

He played for twenty minutes. He played the Sor. He played some of the Carcassi studies. He played a simple Bach bourrée. He played scales, the slow ones Tobias had taught him three years earlier, the ones where you hold each note for four beats and listen to the bloom and decay. He played, and he did not look at Tobias, and he did not cry, and after twenty minutes he stopped and set the guitar down and looked up.

Tobias was asleep. Or almost. His eyes were half-closed. His breathing was even. His head was tilted slightly against the back of the chair. He was not asleep; he was listening. But he was using very little to do it.

Ezra sat for a long time without moving.

"Should I come next Saturday."

"Okay."

"Ezra."

"Yes."

"Go home. Read the letter tonight. Two times. Then sleep. Come Saturday if you can. If you cannot — if for any reason, if for any weather, if for any grief — if you cannot, you are not to think badly of yourself. You are to play scales. Do you understand."

"Yes."

"Go."

"Marta."

"Go. Take care. Come Saturday if you can."

He nodded.

He took the envelope into his room. He closed the door. He sat at the desk. He turned on the desk lamp. He opened the envelope carefully.

"I am not going to write a conclusion to this letter because I do not want it to feel like a conclusion. I want this letter to be a beginning. When you read it, which you are doing now, I want you to feel that you are at the start of a very long walk, and that I have put some stones in your pockets for the road. The stones are heavy, yes. But they are also instruments. You can skip them across water. You can throw them. You can stand on them to see over a wall. Do with them what you need. Now put this letter down and go back to work. I love you. T."

Ezra put the letter down.

He did not cry for a few seconds. Then he did cry. He cried for some time, quietly, with his forehead on the desk and the lamp on and the letter beside him and the guitar on its stand across the room. He cried in a way he had not cried since he was small. It was not a loud cry. It was a sustained one. And when he was done he wiped his face with the inside of his sleeve and he got up and he put the letter back into the envelope and he put the envelope on the top of his bookshelf, under the Chinua Achebe book his father had given him for his thirteenth birthday. He put the book on top of the envelope. Then he took the book off, and he opened it, and he took out the envelope, and he looked at it once more. Then he put everything back.

He was sitting on the bed when his father knocked on the door.

"Ezra."

"Yes."

"May I come in."

"Yes."

"Yeah."

"Here I am."

"Yeah."

"Tobias gave me a letter today."

"I see."

"He wrote me instructions. For — for the next ten years. Teachers to study with. Pieces to learn. A man in Berlin. He wrote it with his right hand. I don't know how long it took him."

"Some time, I imagine."

"Some time."

"Ezra."

"Yes."

"This is a great gift. This is a great gift from a great teacher. It is also a grief. You are allowed to feel both. Both are appropriate."

"Okay."

"Keep the letter. Keep the letter the rest of your life. Read it when you need to. Not before."

"Okay."

"I am here this weekend. If you want to take a long walk tomorrow, we can. We can walk down to the river. We can walk to the Battery if you want to. I do not have to be anywhere until Monday morning."

"Okay."

"Come here."

Ezra went. His father held him. Ezra was already almost as tall as his father; he had grown another half-inch since October. But his father held him the way his father had always held him, with a hand on the back of the head, the way you hold an infant, and Ezra let himself be held.

"Good night, Dad."

His father closed the door quietly behind him.

He slept.

Tobias died on a Tuesday morning.

"Marta."

"Ezra. My Ezra. He is gone. It was this morning. Very early. He did not wake up. He — he was not awake, Ezra. It was in his sleep. It was — it was easy, in the end. I wanted you to know first, before you heard at school. I wanted you to know from me."

He said, "Marta." He could not say anything else for a moment.

"I know."

"When."

"About an hour ago. Maybe two. The doctor is here now. I have called a few people. I wanted you to hear from me."

"I'm coming."

"Ezra. You do not need to come now. Go through your day."

"I'm coming."

"Listen to me. Go to your classes. Come after school. Come at three. Come at four. He is here. I am here. We are not going anywhere. Come when you are ready."

"Okay."

"Ezra."

"Yes."

"Okay."

"I will see you later today. Come when you are ready."

She hung up.

Ezra stood in the hallway for a long moment. The hallway was empty; homeroom had not let out. He slid down the lockers to the floor, slowly, and sat there. He put his head between his knees. He did not cry. He could not, yet. His breath was coming fast. He slowed it. He had learned, from scales, how to slow his breath. He slowed it.

After a few minutes he got up and walked to the school office and asked to see the dean of students. The dean was Ms. Beltran; she had known Ezra since he arrived at Northgate. She was in her office. She looked up when he came in and she saw his face.

"What is it, Ezra."

"My — my guitar teacher. He died this morning. His wife just called."

"I need to —"

"Yes. Of course. Sit down a minute. Let me call your mother. You can go home. You can go there. Whichever."

"I want to go to his wife. Later. She said after school. I want to — I want to stay at school until then. If I go home I'll — I'll just sit."

"Okay."

"But I cannot be in class today."

"You do not have to be in class today. Come here. You can sit in the guidance room. It is quiet. I will tell your teachers. All right."

"All right."

"And Ezra. I am so sorry."

"Thank you."

He sat in the guidance room for the rest of the morning. The guidance room had a big window that looked out on the courtyard and a couch and a small table with a box of tissues on it. Ezra did not need the tissues, yet. He sat on the couch. At some point Ms. Beltran brought him a cup of tea. At some point Grace knocked on the door — Ms. Beltran must have told her — and came in and sat beside him without saying anything, and held his hand, and after a while left again because she had a test. At some point Aditi came in and said nothing and hugged him and left. At some point Rana came in. She stood in the doorway.

"I just heard," Rana said. "May I."

"Yes."

"Yes."

"I am so sorry."

"Thank you."

"You do not have to talk."

"Thank you."

"Yes."

"I will be there."

"Okay."

She left.

He went in.

He did not touch him. He wanted to but he did not know whether it was right.

Ezra went around to the side of the bed. He took Tobias's right hand. It was cool but not cold; it felt like nothing he had felt before. He held it for a moment. Then he laid it gently back down where it had been. He turned to Marta.

"I am going to go now," he said. "I am going to come back. When is the memorial."

"Saturday. Four p.m. At the church on 84th. He was not religious but the pastor there is a friend of his. The pastor let us use the space. I would like you to play."

"I will play."

"Will you play the second movement. Of the piece. For two hands. For guitar alone."

"I will."

"Thank you."

He embraced her again. He left.

On the street it was cold, and there was a low gray sky, and the wind was coming up the avenue. He walked. He walked for a long time. He walked south to 79th, then east, then south on Park, then across to Fifth. At some point he was on Fifth Avenue in the Seventies, with the park on his right, and he had not realized he had been walking toward the park. He went in. He found a bench near the boat pond. He sat.

He cried. He cried for perhaps twenty minutes. It was not violent. It was steady. Nobody approached him. Nobody seemed to notice. The city was doing its business around him; a woman was walking a dog, a man was reading a book on a nearby bench, two girls were laughing as they crossed the bridge. He cried until the crying was done, and then he sat for some time longer without crying. The sun was starting to go down. He looked at the pond, which had a little ice at the edges.

He thought about the room with nothing in it, in Rana's painting.

He told her. Not everything. He told her Marta had called. He told her about the shirt. He told her about the memorial. She listened. She did not say "I am sorry" more than once. She had a way of being with sorrow, his mother, that was older than he had realized; she had lost her aunt, her father, a childhood friend, a baby she had miscarried between him and Ifeoma. She knew sorrow. She did not tidy it. She sat with it.

After dinner Ezra went to his room and he took out the guitar. He began to practice the second movement. Alone. For the memorial. The movement was written for two instruments and he had to decide how to arrange it for one. He worked for three hours. He wrote a guitar-only version that kept the outer lines and let the middle voice imply itself. It was different from the original. It was smaller. It was, in a way, more naked. He thought it might be what the memorial needed.

He slept eventually.

The next three days he practiced. He went to school in the mornings. He ate his lunches with Grace and Aditi. He did not talk much. People were gentle with him; the news had gone around the school by Wednesday, and teachers let him alone, and students were kind. Grace came over to his apartment on Thursday evening and they ate dinner with his family and then they went to his room and she sat on the floor while he played, and she gave him small notes, and she did not try to be anything except what she was, which was a person who loved him and wanted the piece to be right.

On Saturday, December twenty-sixth — the memorial was the Saturday after Christmas, because Marta had wanted to wait a week, because she had said she did not want to ambush anyone during the holiday — Ezra put on the same charcoal suit he had worn for the recital, and a white shirt, and a dark tie, because a tie felt right this time. He took the subway to 84th. He walked to the church.

It was a small stone church, tucked between a brownstone and an apartment building, with red doors. Ezra had walked past it a hundred times in his life without ever going in. Inside, the sanctuary was simple — dark wood pews, a plain altar, high small windows. Maybe sixty people, maybe seventy. Many older people Ezra did not know — Tobias's generation, other musicians, a few who had come from Vienna, a cousin from London. A few from Northgate. His own parents, in the fourth pew. His mother had her hand in his father's hand. Ifeoma was beside them, in a dark green dress, solemn. Grace, across the aisle, in the blue dress from the recital, with Aditi beside her. Behind them, he saw Rana. And beside Rana, to his deep surprise, Miles Delacroix, from the orchestra, a French horn player from the eleventh grade whom Ezra barely knew but who must have come on his own, for his own reasons. He saw Mr. Karam in the back. He saw Ms. Beltran. He saw the whole of what he thought of as the Northgate ensemble — the kids he made music with, and the teachers who taught them — in the rows near the back.

Marta was in the front pew, alone. She had not wanted a reserved seat. She had wanted to sit alone.

The service was simple. A pastor Ezra did not know spoke for ten minutes — he had known Tobias for many years, and he spoke without notes, about a man who had taught him, the pastor, how to listen. A friend of Tobias's from the Juilliard guitar faculty played a Bach sarabande, very slowly, on an old guitar. A niece read a poem in German, and then in English. Marta did not speak; it had been agreed in advance that she would not.

Then Ezra played.

He had been told to play when the pastor nodded at him. He stood up from his pew. He walked to the small area near the altar where a chair and a footstool had been placed for him. He sat. He took the guitar out of its case. He tuned it, quickly, quietly. He did not look at the audience. He looked at the guitar.

He played the second movement of the concerto. Just the guitar part, arranged for guitar alone. Three and a half minutes. The low crossing voices. The long held notes. The little chime at the end. He did not rush it. He did not slow it either. He played it the way Tobias would have wanted, which was the way he, Ezra, had written it. He played it as if he were discovering it.

When the last note died, Ezra did not stand up right away. He sat. He looked down at the guitar. He let the silence that Tobias had always said was the most important part of music be the silence that it was. Then he stood, and he bowed very briefly, and he went back to his seat. Grace, across the aisle, was looking at him. She did not wave. She simply held his eyes until he sat down.

The pastor said a few more words. There was a final hymn, which Ezra did not know. People sang it. People began to leave.

"Marta."

"I know. I am not going to say more. I am going to sit for a minute. Will you sit with me."

"Yes."

They sat. After some minutes she squeezed his hand once more and stood up and went to speak with the cousin from London. Ezra stood up. He went to his parents. His mother took his arm. His father put a hand on his shoulder. They stood together for a while.

Then they went home.

That night, in the living room of the apartment, the family sat together. Ezra's father was in the armchair. His mother was on the couch. Ifeoma was on the floor, leaning against the couch, with her head on her mother's knee. Ezra was in the other corner of the couch, with the guitar across his lap. It was eight-thirty in the evening and the Christmas tree, which they had kept up for the week after Christmas, was lit up in the corner, and there was a candle on the low table. It was snowing again, the soft sort of snow that does not accumulate, just falls and disappears on contact with the street.

Ezra played the first movement of the concerto.

He played it alone. He played the guitar line without the piano, because there was no piano in the apartment and because, anyway, it did not need one tonight. He played it for his family. Ifeoma closed her eyes. His mother did not take her eyes off him. His father sat in the armchair and did not move. When Ezra reached the end of the movement, the ending that Tobias had called a doorway, he let the last note die, and he looked up.

The song does not end with the singer.

Ezra nodded.

"No."

"It is a proverb. My grandmother taught it to me. She taught it to my mother, who taught it to me. I am teaching it to you now. It is yours."

"Thank you, Dad."

"Do you understand it."

"I think so. I think — I think it means that the song is bigger than any one person who sings it. That the song is passed on."

"Yes. And also — also it means that when the singer dies the song does not die. The song keeps being sung. By someone else. Maybe someone the singer has taught. Maybe someone the singer has never met. It means that a song, once made, has a life of its own."

"Yes."

"This is a Yoruba proverb but it is also a true thing in every language, my son. Your teacher gave you a song. His song. He also gave you tools to make your own. Those songs, now, will go on."

"Yes."

"Ezra."

"Yes."

"I am very proud of you. I want to say it tonight, because I did not get to say it this afternoon. I am very proud of you, today, in a particular way. The way you played at the church was not the playing of a student. It was the playing of a musician. I heard it. Your mother heard it. Ifeoma heard it. He heard it. Wherever he is now, he heard it."

His father patted his shoulder. He leaned back.

Everyone looked at her.

"What," she said. "I have been thinking about it. I want to learn. Ezra can teach me."

"When."

"Tomorrow."

"Okay."

His mother laughed. His father laughed.

They sat together in the living room for another hour. His mother made hot chocolate. They talked, a little, about small things — something Ifeoma had read in a book, something Ezra's father had seen on his walk that morning, something in the paper that Chinwe had been annoyed by. The candle burned. The snow, outside, kept not accumulating.

He put the phone down.

Ifeoma got up from the floor and hugged everyone — she had started doing this in the last week, hugging everyone before bed, a new habit of hers that Ezra found a little funny and a lot good — and went to her room. His parents went to bed. Ezra stayed in the living room another minute. He picked up the guitar. He looked at the Christmas tree, which was still lit. He looked at the snow outside. He thought about Marta, in her apartment, alone tonight, and he thought — she is all right. She is going to be all right. She is a person who knows how to carry a thing.

He played, very softly, one chord. G major, with an added sixth. The ending of the third movement, the home-you-can-see-from-a-hill chord. He let it ring. He let it ring until it died.

Then he put the guitar on its stand. He blew out the candle. He turned off the Christmas tree. He went to his room. He brushed his teeth. He lay down. He looked at the ceiling for a long time, at the crack that was shaped like the coast of Africa.

He thought — a year ago tonight, I did not know Grace. I did not know that Tobias had ALS. I did not know that my father was going to be offered the Lagos post. I did not know I was going to write a piece of music. I did not know any of these things, and now they are part of my life, and I am fifteen and I am going to be fifteen for one more year and then I will not be anymore, and all of these things will have happened to me, and will keep happening, and I will keep changing.

He thought — the song does not end with the singer.

He thought — tomorrow I will teach Ifeoma a chord. I will teach her D minor, because D minor is where I started, and it is a good place to start. I will teach her to hold the chord for four beats and listen to it bloom and decay.

He closed his eyes.

But he did not, quite yet, sleep. He opened his eyes again. He reached for the small lamp by his bed. He turned it on.

He got up. He went to the bookshelf. He took down the envelope from where he had hidden it under the Chinua Achebe book. He sat on the edge of the bed. He opened it again. He read Tobias's letter a third time. He had said he would read it twice, that first night. He had read it twice. This was a third time. He read it slowly. He read the list of teachers. He read the name of the man in Berlin. He read the list of pieces. He read the final paragraph.

He did not cry this time.

He put the letter back in the envelope. He put the envelope back on the shelf, this time not hiding it under the Achebe. He put it on top of the Achebe. Where he could see it. He thought — I am going to keep this where I can see it. Not all the time. But when I need to see it.

He turned off the light.

He lay in the dark. He thought about one more thing before sleep, which was a small memory that came to him unbidden. It was from his first lesson with Tobias, three years earlier, when he had been twelve. Tobias had asked him, at the very start of the lesson, to play a C major scale, slowly, listening to each note.

Ezra had played the scale. He had played it the way a twelve-year-old plays, fast, because twelve-year-olds are afraid of silence.

Ezra had played it slower.

"Again. Even slower. Listen to each note."

Ezra had played it even slower.

"Again. As slow as you can bear."

Ezra had played it as slow as he could bear.

"Slower than you can bear."

Ezra had played it slower than he could bear. It had taken him perhaps a full minute, maybe ninety seconds, to play an eight-note scale. In the middle of it he had wanted to stop, to laugh, to speed up, to do anything to escape the slowness. He had not. He had played to the end.

He thought — I can keep listening. I can keep listening for the rest of my life. That does not require him to be alive. That is a thing I can carry, alone, and bring to Ifeoma, and bring to whatever student I someday have, if I have one, and bring to Grace, and bring to the next piece, and bring to the world.

He thought — the song does not end with the singer.

He thought — I am going to sleep now.

He slept.

He dreamed again, that night, of a room he had never been in. It had a window. Through the window was a soft blue light. In the room, there was nothing else. He stood in the room for a long time and did not feel alone. He woke, in the morning, with the dream very clear, and he wrote it down in his notebook, because this time he wanted to remember.

The next morning, as promised, he taught Ifeoma another chord. G major. She took to it more quickly than D minor. She was a faster learner than he had been at her age, which he was not going to tell her, because eleven-year-olds can afford to be slightly overconfident for a few more years.

The year ended. A new year began. Snow fell and did not fall. Grace played. Ezra played. Ifeoma practiced her two chords and then, slowly, a third, and then a fourth, and sometimes Ezra came into his room to find her already there, on his bed, with his guitar, puzzling out a finger pattern. He did not mind. He had started to think he should get her her own guitar. He would mention it to his parents.

Ezra put that letter with the other one, on top of the Achebe.

He kept practicing.

He kept listening.

"Yes."

"You are quiet tonight."

"I was thinking about the third movement. About whether the ending is right. Whether we should revise it."

"You want to revise a piece that is already done."

"Maybe."

She laughed. "Ezra. A piece is never done. You know that. You know it better than I do. You can revise it every year for the rest of your life if you want to. You can come back to it at thirty and find it is a different piece than you thought. But for now, tonight, this month — the piece is done. Let it be done for now."

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay."

"How can you tell."

"I can smell it."

"Snow does not have a smell."

"Yes it does. It is that smell right now."

He sniffed. He could not smell anything except the city — exhaust, a pretzel cart, cold stone. But he trusted her. He trusted her about snow, about music, about almost everything now.

"I will."

"Ezra."

"Yes."

"We are going to have a good year."

"Yes."

"We already are."

"Yes."

She went into her building. He walked home. On the way it did begin to snow — small flakes, coming down slowly through the streetlights. She had been right about the smell. He thought about this the whole way home, amused and full, and when he got to his apartment his mother had made ginger tea and he sat with her in the kitchen drinking it before he went to bed.

"Okay."

"He is a sentimental man, in his old age."

"He is not old."

"He is getting there. I will not tell him you said so."

"I will."

"Ezra."

"Yes, Mom."

"You are doing well. I see you. Not just tonight. All this year. I see you."

"Thank you."

She went to her room.

Ezra sat at the kitchen table another few minutes. Outside, the snow had picked up. He could see it through the kitchen window, swirling in the streetlight on the corner. He thought about everything — about Tobias, about Grace, about the year that had just begun, about the song that did not end with the singer. He did not try to resolve any of it. He let it sit.

Then he got up. He washed the two teacups. He set them on the rack. He turned off the kitchen light. He went to bed.

THE END

----------

AUTHOR'S NOTE

This book is about diaspora, about music, and about the teachers who shape us.

Tobias Halberstam is fictional, but there are teachers like him everywhere — teachers who give their students not only a technique but also a way of being in the world. These teachers are usually under-recognized and usually under-paid. They are also, often, the reason any of us can do the work we do. If you have had such a teacher, this book is an encouragement to tell them, if you can, while you still can. And if you are becoming such a teacher, this book is an encouragement to keep going. It matters more than you know.

The Bahá'í Faith teaches that humanity is one, that the arts are a form of worship when offered in the spirit of service, and that loss is not the opposite of love but a part of it. These themes appear in this book not because Ezra is Bahá'í — he is not — but because they are themes that the Bahá'í Writings have articulated with particular clarity and that ring true across many traditions. I have taken care not to fictionalize or misrepresent any of the Central Figures of the Faith. What is here is the lived shape of these ideas, carried by characters who are still figuring out what they believe.

Rana Mehdizadeh, introduced in Book 1 of this series, appears here again not because her story is resolved but because stories in a diaspora community overlap at their edges. Her father's release is a grace note, not a conclusion. His recovery, and her family's long road, will continue in books to come.

A word on the music in this book. The concerto for guitar and piano that Ezra and Grace compose is fictional, but the compositional vocabulary it draws on — the D minor studies of Fernando Sor, the piano literature of Chopin and Schumann, the guitar tradition from Villa-Lobos forward — is real and available to any young musician who wants to enter it. Nothing Ezra plays in this book is beyond the reach of a serious student his age. If this book nudges a young reader toward an instrument, or toward a teacher, the book will have done more than it set out to do.

The song does not end with the singer. Thank you for reading.

— Crimson Ark Publishing