Søren began playing the haunting melody again, and she let it draw her inexorably into its insistent rhythms. She watched his hands, his perfect pianist’s hands, and recalled all too well how intimately she knew those hands, how intimately they knew her. One courageous strand of Søren’s perfect blond hair threatened to fall over his forehead. She longed to reach out and brush it back.

“You played this for me that night,” she said as the music faded. Nora closed her eyes and let the past come to her. “You were playing it when I came to the rectory.” She remembered that night like yesterday, slipping in through the tree-shrouded back door, following the music to Søren’s elegant living room. She stood in silence and watched the priest who would become her lover that night play by the light of a single candle the world’s most beautiful piece of music as if it had been written by him and for her. “The next morning I woke up in your bed for the first time.”

“The best morning of my life,” Søren said.

“And mine.” Nora felt the old tug of love and straightened, trying to brush it off her. “When did the church get a grand piano?”

Søren smiled.

“A mysterious stranger had an Imperial Bösendorfer delivered to my home on my most recent birthday. I donated my Steinway to the church.”

“That was very generous of that mysterious stranger,” Nora said with a sheepish grin.

“Very generous indeed. Although the Steinway still plays beautifully.”

“It’s had a tricky sustain pedal for ages.”

“Yes, and whose fault is that?”

“That is not my fault,” Nora protested. “Do you recall what you were doing to me at the time? I had to hold on to something, didn’t I?”

Søren looked down at his hands. His fingers hovered over the keyboard playing soundless phantom notes.

“You could have held on to me.”

Nora only swallowed, finding herself in a rare moment of speechlessness. Perhaps sensing her discomfort, Søren dropped his hands to the keyboard and began playing again.

“The Moonlight Sonata is a strange piece of music,” Søren said. “It’s been called a Lamentation. You can feel that when you play it, can feel the sorrow and the need in the endless repetitions. It’s simple to play but maddeningly difficult to play well. The arpeggios allow great freedom of expression. Too much freedom in untutored, unskilled hands. They say Beethoven wrote it for a seventeen-year-old countess, the Countess Giulietta Guicciardi. He may have loved her. More likely he was simply trying to seduce her.”

“It would have worked for me.”

“It did work for you.”

This time Nora smiled at the memories Søren’s words conjured. Again she slid her hands lovingly over the piano. “My God, the crimes against nature that have been committed on this piano.”

“I hope you aren’t referring to my playing.”

“Never. I know how gifted those hands of yours are.”

“Some decorum please. We are in a church, Eleanor,” Søren reminded her with only a playful hint of sternness about his lips.