I looked back at the page. The melody shifted again, lower now, warmer. I wrote faster, the notes coming more easily, as if something had finally clicked into place. When I stopped, it wasn’t because I’d finished, but because I needed tobreathe.
I set the pencil down and leaned back, letting the quiet settle around me.
“You’ve been writing for a while,” Stefan said at last, his voice low.
I huffed. “It’s nothing yet. Just ideas.”
“For what?”
I hesitated. “A piano sonata.”
Stefan arched his eyebrows. “That sounds like more than nothing.”
“Maybe,” I admitted. “If it goes somewhere.”
His gaze lingered on me for a moment longer. “It will.” There was no doubt in his voice.
I looked down at the notebook again, tracing one of the bars absently with my finger. “It’s strange,” I said quietly.
“What is?”
I didn’t look up. “How easily it came. I haven’t felt like writing music for a while now.”
“That’s understandable, given the circumstances.”
I had an idea why I’d felt the need to write, to catch the notes before they vanished into the ether, and it all boiled down to one thing.
This won’t last.
There was a world beyond this room waiting for me, a life I hadn’t yet returned to. Decisions I hadn’t yet made.
Consequences I couldn’t avoid forever.
Stefan glanced up, catching my gaze, and for a moment, neither of us spoke.
Then he smiled, and placed his laptop on the seat cushion next to him. “Come here.”
As if I could refuse that.
I closed the distance between us, settling astride him, my arms looped around his neck, the warmth of him immediate, familiar now in a way that still felt new.
His arms came around my waist, and I leaned into him, our lips meeting.
Don’t think about what happens next.
I wanted to live for this connection, this intimacy.
For as long as I had it within my grasp.
September 9
I was at the piano when Karl came home, the late afternoon light slanting across the keys. I nodded towards him, and he came over to me, listening as I played.
“That’s new. What is it?”
I hadn’t meant for the piece to take shape so quickly. What had begun as fragments—half-formed phrases, ideas that didn’t quite settle—had become more cohesive. It wasn’t finished, not even close, but its structure was emerging.
The last note hung for a moment, then faded into the room. I exhaled slowly, my hands still resting on the keys, and then I handed him my notebook. He took it without comment, scanning the pages, his expression shifting as he moved through the bars.