Maya sat down on the kitchen floor. She did it without deciding to; her knees simply declined the situation. The linoleum was cold through her jeans. "Yes," she said. "Yes, ma'am. I have a few minutes."
I will be direct with you, Ms. Torres, because I suspect directness will be a relief after your week. A faint sound that might have been a smile survived the phone line. "I have seen the video. Everyone in my building has seen the video. My faculty have opinions about it ranging from delight to alarm, and I am not calling about the video. I am calling because I remembered your file. I pulled it before I watched a single frame. Your second-year jury comments used the word inevitable — Professor Almeida wrote that your Rachmaninoff was inevitable, that it sounded as though the music had no other way to go. We do not use that word carelessly here."
Maya's hand had found the edge of the cabinet and was holding it. "I withdrew, Dr. Yoon. I didn't finish."
I know what you did. I also know why; your file is thorough, and some of us have long memories for our scholarship students. A pause, papers moving. "I am calling to tell you that the conservatory holds a completion scholarship. It is funded from our own endowment — conservatory money, alumni money, no outside sponsor. It covers a final-year return: tuition, fees, and a modest stipend. There is one award. One, Ms. Torres. And I am not offering it to you."
The kitchen floor got colder. Maya heard, quite clearly, the two halves of the sentence arrive in order: the door, and then the lock.
The scholarship is decided by competition, Dr. Yoon went on. "A formal recital audition — forty minutes, program of your choosing — performed before the full faculty board and judged by the board alone. There will be three finalists. The other candidates are current and recent postgraduates of this conservatory, people whose hands have not been carrying trays. I tell you that not to discourage you but because I will not insult you with a story about how the viral moment opens doors here. It does not. The board will not — I will not allow it to — be seen rewarding a video. If the award comes to you, it will come because eleven musicians in a room decided your forty minutes were the finest they heard. That is the only way it can mean anything, and I believe you understand that better than most."
I do, Maya said. It came out rougher than she intended. "That's — thank you. For it being like that."
You are thanking me for the lock, Dr. Yoon said, and now the smile was certain. "Good. Then you are who your file says you are." The papers moved again. "The audition is in six weeks. The formal notice will come by post and email — repertoire requirements, scheduling, the names of your fellow finalists. Prepare as though the video never happened, Ms. Torres. In that room, it hasn't. Professor Almeida has retired, but I've taken the liberty of telling him you may write to him. He replied within the hour. I will leave you to guess what a retired man with an hour's enthusiasm looks like."
After the call ended, Maya stayed on the floor a while. She looked at her hands — dishwater-pruned, a burn scar on the left wrist from a sheet pan in her first month at Grand View, nails cut to nothing for service. Hands that had been written about all week by people who had never seen them. Six weeks. Forty minutes. Bach, she thought, already, traitorously, practically — something with architecture, something that would show the board order before it showed them heart, and then the Chopin, and then — she closed her hands slowly, and opened them, like a person testing a door she had been told was locked and finding the handle real under her palm.
Locked. But a lock, she thought, is also a promise that there is something on the other side worth keeping.
Diego found her there when he came in with groceries, and she told him standing up, apron still on over her clothes from the morning's dishes, and he whooped so loudly that Rosa, napping before her shift in the next room, came to the doorway in alarm and then stood in it, listening to the whole thing a second time with her hand flat against the frame, the way you steady yourself against good news that is also a cliff edge.
One award, Rosa said at last. "Eleven judges. Six weeks." She nodded slowly, cataloguing it the way she catalogued everything: not as a dream, as a shift schedule. "Then we plan," she said. "Like anything else. We plan."
Maya laughed, and found her eyes were wet, and didn't mind either of them seeing. "There's something else," she said. "There's a — I should tell you before it happens. Westbrook's office called this morning too. Before Dr. Yoon. He wants a meeting. Tomorrow. At the estate."
Rosa's expression did the thing it did when a bill arrived in a thicker envelope than usual. "About?"
His foundation, Maya said. "That's all his assistant said. His foundation, and my future." She looked at her hands again. "He wants to talk about my future."
Then tomorrow, Rosa said, "you listen. Listening is free." She began unpacking the groceries with terrible calm. "And Maya — you remember what your hands felt like on those keys on Friday. Whatever he says tomorrow. You remember which parts of this week were yours."
Richard Westbrook's office at the estate was not an office so much as an argument: dark wood, a desk the size of a dining table, windows framing the lawns like paintings he had commissioned from God. He received her standing, which was somehow worse than sitting would have been — all six foot three of him, in shirtsleeves, with the manner of a man enjoying in advance his decision to be generous.