The last concert they performed together was Haydn’s Farewell Symphony—ironically enough. She’d continued with her career, touring now with the Bulgarian Philharmonic. She was to meet them in Amsterdam for a concert of Richard Strauss’s Metamorphoses.

Orfeo told no one any of this. Instead, he poured himself into the piano. What was the point of speaking? When you play a cello, your whole body vibrates with the wood. You open your legs and let the instrument resonate up your body, through the lumbar and into the rib cage. That was the thing Orfeo Raskolov missed most about not playing the cello; and that was what he had told Evdokiya that afternoon in the rehearsal room eleven years ago: how, to play the instrument correctly, you had to let yourself be a conduit, the wick of a flame. You had to resonate, as well as the instrument. And that was what he’d felt that summer afternoon in the rehearsal hall: both of them resonating together, at the same time, as if they were one string spanned on the same wooden box.

He played the Beethoven. It was his favorite sonata, the silences, the gentle phrasing. Still, he missed the cello. When you bowed a cello string, you created not one sound but a whole set of overtones, each of which—together—created the illusion, the sensation of a single note.

Fifteen

By nightfall, Mrs. Liang hadn’t been found. At the main house, Kevin put out dinner—French onion soup, chicken à la piémontaise, a frisée salad—but no one had an appetite. Afterward, in the Quahog Cottage, Ana couldn’t sleep. The splinter in her foot pulsed. She counted waves. Sixteen per minute. She turned all the lights on in the cottage, ransacked the cabinets for tweezers. Even if she found a pair, she probably couldn’t reach the damn thing; it was right on the outstep of her left heel. Finally, she pulled on jeans and headed to the main house.

A few lights were burning in the upstairs rooms, but the place seemed abandoned. The ocean boomed below. The television flickered with the sound off in the drawing room. In the library she found Pars on all fours, examining something on the carpet.

I’m sorry, she said and turned to go.

It’s quite all right. He gestured her in, then stood and colored. She gave him a quizzical look.

You were having a moment, she said.

It was nothing…momentous. It’s the rug. He slipped his glasses on.

It’s from Isfahan, he explained. I was just checking the cartouche. My grandfather used to deal in wool. Actually, it’s a pretty good weave.

Really?

Uh-hmm…Many, many knots.

Oh, Ana said.

She looked around the room as if expecting someone. They were both silent a moment. Ana toyed absently with the ring on her left hand.

Pars brightened. Oh, I forgot. I have something for you.