Midnight Shadows Read Online Free PDF Page B

and began to play. She played the entire song instrumentally first. She’d written it as a ballad, simple but with a complex counterpoint. The kanun allowed for both—for the top notes of the melody and the deeper underlying contrapuntal music.
    She remembered every moment of composing it. She’d just met Douglas at a presentation of antique jewelry. Her friend Suzanne Huntington, the wife of Douglas’s partner, a man his friends mysteriously called Midnight, had designed the cases. She’d begged Allegra to play at the opening. Allegra hadn’t played since the night her father had been murdered and she’d been beaten so badly she’d lost her sight.
    She’d felt out of place, sad and lost, when she’d met Douglas. It was his voice—that delicious basso profundo—that had attracted her at first. Then the jewelry show had been attacked by armed thieves and Douglas and his friend Midnight and another friend, a homicide lieutenant named Bud Morrison, now married to her friend Claire, had saved the day.
    Douglas had been beyond brave and then he’d insisted on driving her home. They’d made love all night and it had been the very first happy thing to happen to her since she lost her sight. She hadn’t been able to compose any music since the beating. But after that magical night, the best night of her life, while Douglas had gone for a run in the snow, she’d started composing ‘New Love’. Because something as special as the night she’d spent in his arms needed celebrating.
    The music had come literally welling up in her soul, happiness written in notes.
    She remembered all that as she played, the incredible joy she’d felt with him, the surprise that such joy could exist in her world of the blind. The miracle was that that original happiness had been real, and had grown every day she spent with Douglas. She must have intuited that from the beginning because ‘New Love’ had that in it. Light at the top, profound at the bottom.
    She lost herself, hands now moving of their own accord over the strings. The strings no longer individual things but part of a whole, like a tapestry. She swayed slightly as she played and when the first instrumental rendering of the song was over, without thinking about it, without having rehearsed it, she sang.
    Of the hundreds and hundreds of songs she’d sung in concert halls and recording studios, many of her own composing, this was the song closest to her heart. She was scarcely aware of the words. Like the music, it became one whole to her, endless and complete. She was barely aware of herself, knowing herself only as a conduit for the music. It flowed in her, through her, true and crystalline.
    When it was over, when the last note shimmered in the air and dissipated, she rested her hands on the edges of the kanun and savored the moment, because this was the moment her life came together again.
    It was back.
    The music was back.
    And with it, her soul. From that moment on she knew that she was going to make it, that the surgery had done its work, that she was whole again. Weak, but whole.
    She smiled and opened her eyes. Douglas was sitting across from her, silent and immobile. His eyes were glassy.
    “Was I that bad?” she asked, her voice shaky.
    He shook his head. Words fled him when he was moved. She was moved too because she would never have come to this point without Douglas. She’d still be mired in weakness and despair. They’d come this far together.
    “Douglas,” she whispered and held her hand out.
    Never once, in the time she’d known him, had she held her hand out to him and he hadn’t taken it. This time, too. He stood, lifted away the kanun with one hand and lifted her up out of the sofa with the other.
    She looked up at him, at her incredible husband, grateful for everything. For the music that had come back into her life and for her husband, who would never leave her as long as he was alive.
    “Love me, Douglas.” Like the music, the words welled up