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grateful to have her there. The longer I’m apart from mine, the more I realize how much they mean to me.”
    Nicholas nodded, though it was nothing he himself felt. His mother had died in an accident before he was a year old, before he had any memory of her. In the last existing family photograph, she was a frail-looking woman with dark circles under her eyes, sitting next to her young daughter and holding the newborn Nicholas in her arms; her husband stood over them all, looking worried. After her death, Nicholas’s father—already something of a misanthrope (or so Nicholas had been told)—had become even more withdrawn. Even now, living on a sparsely inhabited Scottish isle, the man had little to say to his two offspring. A series of aunts and great-aunts had taken care of Nicholas and Glenda until they were sent to boarding school, first in Edinburgh and then in London.
    Nicholas mentioned none of this to Yoni. Whenever he did divulge some slice of his past, people reacted with pity—even after Nicholas explained that none of it had been a trial. It was simply the beginning of what had continued to be a peripatetic existence: so many places to explore, new people to discover. But according to Glenda (a social worker employed by the British military as a trauma therapist, who could supply a psychological explanation for basically anything), both she and Nicholas, denied the unwavering love of a true family, relied on their talents and charm rather than connecting genuinely with others. Deep down, she insisted, Nicholas harbored profound pain and fear of intimacy. It was the sort of thing she had to believe, since it kept people like her in business.
    To Yoni, Nicholas said simply, “Well, yes, it can be difficult to be apart.”
    Yoni sighed, and together they continued on their way.
    HER TINY TRIUMPH CAME THE following Sunday, when Lynn was absent from rehearsal. It was snowing—one of those demoralizing March snowfalls, big wet flakes that splattered as soon as they hit the ground—and as Remy made her way to the concert hall, stubbornly without a hat or scarf, the dusky streets glimmered, and even the complaints of car horns became a sort of music. When she took her seat in the first violin section, her hair and even her eyelashes were wet.
    All day she had been humming melodies from the repertoire, envisioning the subtle alterations of expression that occurred in Mr. Elko’s face. She liked the way the muscles in his jaw flexed, and the slight squint of his eyes when a passage wasn’t quite there yet. A single eyebrow raised just so meant “and now the piccolo calls out ever so faintly,” while a downward tilt of his head, brow frowning beneath his sweep of dark hair, meant “here comes the rustle of the cellos, underfoot, menacing.” After he had been conducting for a quarter hour or so he would remove the tweed jacket and, after a few more minutes, roll up the sleeves of his button-down shirt. The way the muscles of his forearms seemed to pull him right up into the air made it seem all kinds of wonderful things were possible.
    Like Oscar Wilde said: Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.
    The stage lights warmed her, drying her curls. When it became clear that Lynn would not be coming to rehearsal, Remy fastened her hair into a thick ponytail and moved over to first chair. How good that simple movement felt, the easy taking of something she had wanted so badly.
    Now it was Remy Mr. Elko nodded to, and she felt more alert, somehow—felt the spark of comprehending his sign language, his hands articulating his thoughts about the music. For Scheherazade , she played Lynn’s solos as though they had been hers all along, experimenting with dynamics and rubato yet remaining attentive to the orchestra, to the way Mr. Elko coerced this united sound, sweeping them all together under the arc of his arm. The sensation of the other