She sat at the desk and took up a pen.
Outside, the nearby church bell marked the hour. The sound carried through the thin glass.
Lila drew a new staff line across the page and set three notes upon it. The same pattern Henry had claimed as his own. She added a simple left hand beneath. A foundation strong enough to hold a child’s courage.
A tune for a boy who kept music inside because the world had shaken it loose. She added another bar. The ink shone wet, then dried.
No one had asked her to compose for him. There was no commission. No coin. Only the quiet urge to give shape to something that had begun between them in the music room.
“You are not invisible,” Wolfton had said.
She touched the pen to the margin. Whether he was right did not matter. What mattered was moving through the world as if caution still had use.
She turned the page and wrote again.
Chapter Fifteen
The following morning,Marcus woke before dawn. Not from shadows. Not from dreams. From the faint sound of paper shifting near the hearth.
Henry sat cross-legged on the rug, firelight gilding his hair. He had dragged a blanket over his shoulders and bent low over a piece of parchment spread across his knees.
Marcus sat up slowly. “You are awake early.”
Henry startled and tried to hide the page, too late.
Marcus lowered his feet to the floor and crossed the room. “What are you working on?”
Henry hesitated. Then held out the paper.
Marcus knelt. Music.
Crooked bars. Notes hovering like birds, unsure where to land. Lines scratched through. One phrase circled again and again.
“Is this the piece Miss Edgewood taught you?” Marcus asked.
Henry shook his head. “It is the one I kept.”
There it was. The instinct that had surprised Marcus from the first lesson. Henry did not merely repeat sounds. He absorbed it, held it inward, then tried to give it back.
“It is good,” Marcus said.
Henry’s brows knit. “Miss Edgewood wrote it in her book yesterday. I saw. She changed the ending.”
Marcus studied him. “Did that upset you?”
Henry considered the question with care. “No,” he said at last. “She made it better.”
Marcus’s throat tightened.
Henry rolled the blanket more securely around his shoulders. “Will she teach me today?”
“She will.”
“And you will come with me?”
“Yes.”
Henry relaxed, not into dependence, but into certainty.