Flavio is the location’s general manager, and Cam’s highest paid employee.

I’m opening my mouth to respond when I spot the clock on the dash: 3:01. A whole minute late, and to pick up a child who loses her shit at the tiniest adjustment to her daily schedule. “Oh crap, gotta go. Call me later.”

I hang up, swipe my bag from the floor and Bax from the back seat, and race to the double glass doors of the building, looking over my shoulder the entire way.

I look for him after. Instead of turning left for home, I point my car right, steering past the spot where I saw him last, leaning against the sign. Four times I hold up traffic to search him out of the crowd, twice headed in the wrong direction, then two more times on the drive back past the building. I press my iPhone to the window and ride the brake the entire time, creeping by the entrance to the lot so slowly that more than one impatient driver honks.

But he’s not there. The patch of trampled grass by the sign is empty. The man-bunned man is gone.

Baxter pushes up in his booster seat, straining to see out the window. “Mommy, where are we going?”

“We’re going home.” I’m headed in the right direction, but my hunt took too long. Now we’re stuck in traffic.

“Then why do you keep turning around?”

“And why are you going so slow?” Beatrix adds before I can explain. She swipes a wet finger down the back window, pointing at two women speed walking past us. “Are you sure we’re not going backward?”

Beatrix knows we’re not going backward, but she enjoys being a smart-ass. Too clever for her nine years. Too sassy and energetic, too, and as tightly wound as the composite core strings on her DZ Strad violin—at least that’s according to her teachers.

And as much as I love my daughter, they’re not wrong. Beatrix has been a handful since the second she came into this world, bloodred and hopping mad. Colic. Sleeping issues. Sinewy muscles that hated to be swaddled. My pediatrician called her a high-needs baby, patted me on the shoulder and promised me most grow into normal, well-adjusted kids.

Something that for Beatrix will never happen.

My daughter is a musical genius, something I accidentally discovered when she was four, when after a quick dash through Fresh Market she hummed a perfectly pitched concerto all the way home. A few weeks later at Target, she picked out the melody with two chubby fingers on a keyboard, but it was the pink toy violin she begged to take home. Within a few months, I managed to find a teacher willing to give formal lessons to such a young student. The woman, a stern grandmotherly type, emerged from their first session pink-cheeked and throwing around the word prodigy.