“Is everything okay? You didn’t come home, and I was worried, and—what?”

She nodded to her son, then went back to the violin. “Shizuka Satomi came in with a new student. They brought this.”

“That’s—”

“A violin from China,” she said without looking up. “Yes, I know.”

“No, I mean, it’s all in pieces.”

“Yes. So are we all.”

There is a reason that most luthiers never let players see what they do to their instruments. They would faint.

Violinists often think of their violins as fragile, delicate creatures.

But what do mere players know?

What makes a violin special is not its fragility, but its resilience. One can change the strings and adjust the bridge. One can slide a sound post, replace the fittings, rebore the pegbox, carve a new bass bar, even change the angle of the neck.

If one did analogous things to a painting or book, the piece would be ruined. Even pianos, for all their pomp and circumstance, are tragically temporal things. Modify the action of an Erard or Pleyel, or do what was done to that poor Cristofori at the Met, and one effectively destroys it.

But a violin’s existence, its vitality, depends only upon its capacity to sing.

With the violin disassembled, Lucy could better feel the warmth of the wood. She ran her eyes along the joints, the edges, the curve of the ribs. She examined the inside pieces—the bracings, the top and bottom blocks—for any carelessness or lack of craft. But every element of this Chinese violin was textbook.

Textbook?

Of course. Now this violin made more sense. It was not made by a dedicated luthier, but by a carpenter.

That was not necessarily a bad thing—this was a very good carpenter, someone who knew wood, who could craft strong and proper structures, who worked with the grain so the parts expanded and contracted with humidity and temperature, yet never warped out of place.

Yet strong and proper is not enough. A violin is not a footstool; it must risk breaking if it is to give everything to its song.

Lucy twirled the faceplate on her fingertip, rapped it with her knuckle, and listened. With a pencil, she freehanded a shape into the wood. Then, she began carving, first with a finger plane, then with a knife, taking a millimeter here, a half millimeter there, and listening all the while.

“Can you get me that scraper blade over there?” she said to Andrew.

“Yes, Mom,” Andrew said automatically.

His mother’s hands.

Andrew Matía had seen her hands shake nervously when speaking to Mr. Zacatecas. He had watched them quiver when eating a burrito.