Mom covers her ears with her headphones to get some work done as I swallow the lump in my throat. It’s complicated. I believe in my mom, in her talent. I know how it feels when the words flow onto the page and writing feels so completely right. It’s how I feel every time I write a perfect line of dialogue, how I felt all summer working on Melted. But Mom is an example of just how wrong it can go. It’s everything I’m afraid of and dangerously close to how I feel now—stuck and stressed because the words are becoming work.

Maybe Henry is right. Maybe this is all just too much now.

But seeing Mom’s fingers fly across the keyboard, her words returning like they never left, remembering how writing feels when it works, is the motivation I need to push through.

I have to at least try.

Hours later, music envelops the kitchen the moment I swing the basement door open. Reid is down there playing Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in B-flat. Somewhere in the second movement, I think. I used to know without thinking, in another life when instinct was reaching for the clarinet the moment I got home from school. I close my eyes and access the music part of my brain, trying to remember. Dad says it’s all muscle memory. If I stack my hands left over right, like I’m holding my clarinet, will my fingers play along on imaginary keys? It makes me pause.

This is why I hate listening to Reid play. It always, always makes me pause.

I ignore the scratchiness in the back of my throat as I walk down the stairs.

When I push the studio door open, Mozart goes sharp.

“Already?” Reid asks, placing his clarinet on its stand, then moving to the electric piano in the corner. The clarinet is Reid’s band instrument and his musical soul mate, but the piano came first, in the form of weekly lessons in elementary school. He only picked it back up in a meaningful way in high school, with his growing interest in music theory and composition.

“Unfortunately,” I respond.

Reid begins to play scales as I take a seat at the desk on the adjacent wall. It’s impossible to separate my clarinet feelings from this space, and memories resurface. Installing wood-paneled walls, just the two of us, the Chanukah I was in sixth grade. Watching hours of YouTube together at the computer—everything from music theory videos to animated shorts that made me laugh so hard tears streamed down my cheeks.

The clarinet was an entry point into my dad’s world, but the memories aren’t all music.

“Codirector! You could at least pretend to be listening.”

Reid’s snark brings me back to reality.

“I am,” I insist.