“Are you thinking about your piece?”

“I should be.” Oscar laughed. “No, I’m thinking about how I’m seventeen and I’ve got old men calling me ‘maestro.’ It’s . . . a trip.”

“You know how many people would kill to be called ‘maestro’?” I shot him a playful glare. “Old men. Women, any age. And people in their thirties, forties . . .”

“I do know. This is the dream, right? Sometimes I think it might be better if I were in my thirties. This all feels weird to me.” His voice sounded upbeat—but his arm was taut against my back. “Like, overblown. Do you know what I mean?”

I thought about the New York Times interview. The splashy premiere for a symphony that hadn’t even been written yet.

“I saw your YouTube video,” I said.

“When? Before . . .”

“No. Right after we met.” I turned to him. His thumb idly stroked my shoulder as he waited for me to go on. “You’re really good.”

He leaned his head against the dark window. “Really good. See . . . I like ‘really good.’ Really good feels sturdy. Every time I hear the word genius, it feels like I’m in a prank video. I start looking for the hidden camera.”

He mimed paranoia, shielding his face, and I laughed, debating what to say. Should I tell him how much that word got thrown around at this level of the classical music world, so often that you became completely immune to it? How, despite that, I used to fantasize about overhearing someone use it about me? “Ruby’s take on the Nancarrow is stunning, Anna. You’ve got another genius on your hands . . .”

Oscar snuck a tickling kiss on the curve of my neck, returning me to the real world in one happy gasp.

“Do you think those guys were monks?” he whispered into my shoulder.

“Who?” I laughed. “The singers?

“Do they live at the Cloisters?”

I fell against him as I giggled. “It’s a museum! A replica.”

“There could have been a place to sleep. We didn’t tour everything.”

“They weren’t monks. They were wearing, like, shorts . . .” He started to argue, but I grinned, talking over him. “And one of them was a woman.”

Another stop. A pregnant lady stepped in, holding on to the bar. Oscar jumped up to give her his seat.

“Can’t women be monks?” He stood over me, our legs interspersed like a backgammon board. “This is the twenty-first century.”

“No, they still can’t be monks.” I pinched the knee of his trousers, wishing I could drag him down. “They can be anchorites.”

He nodded. “Good word.”

“I used to be sort of obsessed with the idea of becoming an anchorite.”

“Normal.”