“It’s fantastic to see such a great turnout again this afternoon. Caitlin’s just told me that ninety-three of you have signed in, which is incredible. We assumed you’d be dropping like flies by the fifth week, so perhaps I’m not working you hard enough.”

There was a low murmur of laughter as Ben grinned, his eyes roaming across the room. It was similar to the one in which the auditions had been held—wooden floor, whitewashed walls, wide rectangular windows on one side—but at least double the size.

“Seriously, putting together something like this is a bit like sending out party invites. You only expect about half the people to turn up, so I really am grateful that so many of you are still here after nine rehearsals. It may sound like an obvious thing to say, but a choir doesn’t exist without singers. It doesn’t exist without you. And given how well you guys have started coming together already, I’m confident that when we step onto the stage at the Albert Hall on June twenty-fifth, the audience are going to believe we’ve been singing together for years.”

Audrey savored Ben’s confidence, wondering what it was that made someone like him able to pull a disparate group of people into a choir in such a short space of time. He had an infectious, boyish enthusiasm that made you want to succeed, not just for yourself but for him too. She thought back to the first time she’d met him at the audition just over six weeks before, how relaxed he had made her feel in spite of her nerves. It was as though he looked past the surface to something underneath, something hidden, that you hadn’t yet discovered yourself.

“So far we’ve been focused on getting you to sing in unison—we wanted you to start feeling like a group, like a choir. Now the hard work begins. Today we’re going to start singing in harmony. Don’t look so worried—I know most of you have never done that before and I promise we’re going to take it one step at a time. If I’m totally honest, I suspect there’ll be moments over the next few weeks when it feels like this thing is never going to come together. But I want you to trust that it will. Because, believe me, I wouldn’t have started it if I didn’t think we could pull it off. So let’s get going, shall we?”

As Ben began dividing them into sopranos, altos, tenors, and basses—Phoebe to sopranos and Audrey to altos—Audrey glanced around the room, smiling at some of her fellow choir members as she caught their eye: Isabel, thirty-eight, recently separated from her alcoholic husband and locked in a custody battle over their two young children; Binti, twenty-four, the daughter of Somali immigrants who fled the civil war twenty-five years previously; Tim, forty-six, whose story of his fourteen-year-old daughter having recently entered remission after two years’ battling leukemia had reduced Audrey to tears. As she looked around the room, she realized that many of the people she’d got to know over the past few weeks had some painful truth from which they were escaping, some demons they were laying to rest, or perhaps some unfulfilled dream they were trying, in some small way, to achieve.