Black and shining, sleek and majestic, the instrument occupied the same corner as it did in our parlor. Far more beautiful than anything we’d ever owned, it struck me as something Mom would have gasped at the sight of, too.

I went to it, my shape silhouetted in its gleaming, polished surface.

The keys, not a one yellowed or chipped, shone white as snow.

White as the lilies that had covered my mother’s casket.

Unable to help myself, I slid onto the bench. And now here I was again, inside the shell of a memory. Though, this time, within the confines of a dream.

I put my fingers on the keyboard, hands taking up the familiar positions my mother’s always had, as if doing so could somehow summon her.

I pressed the white E key and then the black D-sharp, alternating between the two until moving to B, D, C, and onward, the notes falling together, becoming a melody. The pattern repeated itself again, and then again, varying slightly as I coaxed it along. It flowed through me and from the piano, building all the way to the place where it . . . stopped. Well, where I stopped.

A shadow fell over me, and I turned to find him standing at my left, his form backlit by the glow of the fireplace. His eyes, more penetrating even than before, bored into me.

“What are you doing?” he demanded, his voice even more intense than his gaze.

I retracted my fingers from the keys, curling them inward.

“Don’t,” he commanded.

“Don’t what?”

“ ‘Für Elise,’ ” he said, gesturing to the keyboard. “You cannot just cease in the middle . . . You must play the rest.”

“I don’t know the rest of it.”

His attention went from me to the piano, his expression crestfallen.

“I’m sorry,” I stammered, quick to slide out from the seat I should never have taken. “I never learned. We—”

I stopped myself there, the silence sweeping in to surround us once more, though uglier than before since it was now filled with everything I didn’t want to talk about.

“We?” he ventured. “You’re speaking of yourself . . . and your mother?”

My eyes narrowed at him. “How do you know about my mother?”

“It was merely a well-aimed guess.”

“A very well-aimed guess.”

He pressed his lips together in thought. Then he peered toward the fireplace, the light illuminating his too-handsome profile.

“Her absence,” he said finally, his focus returning to me after a beat. “It looms.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that. Especially not when his words provided uncomfortable evidence that he really was able to listen in on us and possibly see us, too.

“We shan’t talk about her if you do not wish to,” he said. “Trust me when I say . . . I understand.”

I’d been ready to rail at him. To lash out. Suddenly, though, I couldn’t. Not when his words carried far more weight and sadness than needed to convince me what he’d said was true.