Where were we heading? Oscar seemed to know. He had a full tank and a map in his body, and we drew closer with every step until we were jogging clumsily with hands clinging, fingers locked together tight.

He turned us onto West Sixty-seventh—and only then did I know.

In the hazy streetlight, the optical illusion between buildings was even harder to spot, but Oscar wasn’t fooled. He pulled us into the courtyard.

The apartments around it were all lit up. White fairy lights glittered along the top of the fire escape. I’d never seen this place animated by night before, people washing dishes, laughing at dinner tables, flipping on televisions.

But the courtyard itself was as mystifyingly quiet as ever.

He pulled me slowly in until my cheek rested against his warm chest, my hands traveling around his back to pull him even closer.

I closed my eyes and listened—to our gasps. Our heartbeats. A percussive two-voice melody.

“You asked me to pick one song to listen to for the rest of my life,” Oscar whispered.

I smiled at the memory. “You couldn’t choose.”

“How about this one?”

I peered up at him, every cell jumping, dancing, jittering, terrified. Happy.

“That’s quite a promise.”

He leaned back, eyes burning into mine. “It’s quite a song.”

I lifted my chin and kissed him, listening hard to the rich, full silence, marveling at the change in this place. In the person I was here.

Any mental picture I could form of my life—two, five, ten years from now—was as unclear as it had been at the beginning of this summer. But ambiguity no longer felt like a failing. Just a natural law. A space where wonders could occur, sparks and surprises and things I never thought I could do and people I never thought could be real.

There were things flittering in the back of my mind even now. Facts.

He would go back to Bethesda in two days, reunited with his family, missing me desperately. I would plan a visit and meet the Bells. We would call, text, video chat in honest conversations, raw with longing. We would compare college application notes. His fame would skyrocket from tonight, my own path would form in unexpected directions, and then . . . I didn’t know.

I only knew that our future wasn’t blank. It was a crisp, clean composition page, waiting to be written on.

Oscar kissed me and I kissed him, every touch a note, while just past the silence, the city kept time to the heartbeats of eight million extraordinary lives.

Acknowledgments

Writing Night Music was a bit of an odyssey, both mentally and geographically, since I relocated from Florida to England while working on it! There is no way I could have steered this book home without the help of an incredible crew of brilliant minds and enormous hearts helping me along the way.