“Last I heard, doing well in Ohio. She and Zoe are living with her mom and she’s taking classes at Cleveland State. Still working toward law school one day.” Emily thought about Rob and his mom’s saying, Everything is always okay in the end, and if it’s not okay, it just means it isn’t the end. She didn’t believe it, not one hundred percent, but she understood what his mom meant by it. Things happen, and usually people can work through them; usually they can find a semblance of normal, a way to keep going, in spite of the pain. If they’re lucky, they’ll even find a way to thrive.

63

The next Sunday Emily and Ezra were walking through the city, bundled up against the December cold, when Ezra spotted a piano in the park.

“Is that one of the Sing for Hope pianos?” he asked. “I thought they were supposed to go to schools in September. What happened to this one?”

Emily walked over, too. The piano had been placed in a gazebo, safe from rain or snow. The change in temperature couldn’t have been good for it. “Maybe they forgot this one,” Emily said.

“More likely they left it here on purpose,” Ezra answered, lifting up the cover on the keys to play a few notes.

Emily prepared herself to wince, but it wasn’t as out of tune as she’d feared. She walked closer, running her fingers up the keys in a scale. “Not bad,” she said.

“Any requests?” she asked him, sitting down on the bench, taking off her gloves.

Ezra leaned against the piano and looked at her. “How about one of your songs?”

Emily had been working on something new. Something about her and Ezra that she was calling “Dark Night of My Soul.” She started to play and sing softly to her husband.

Lost in the blackness

When my soul felt bleak

When my heart felt broken

My body weak

My love for you

Reached its peak

It was the dark night of my soul

Ezra sat down next to her on the bench. “I think that one’s a duet,” he said.

She looked at him, her eyebrows raised in question.

“Will you teach it to me?” he asked. The vulnerability in his eyes touched her. Over the last couple of months their hearts had been slowly opening to each other again, and she saw his now, wide open, every door unlocked.

So she taught her husband the melody. And once he was able to sing it, she harmonized behind him. And then changed the words at the end of the chorus: It was the dark night of our souls.