What people say about closed doors is true. If the way is barred to you, simply find an open window to go through instead. Music was that window at Hurstwell, a way to sneak into the inner person that still existed, that beat with its own rhythm, where precious things were still hidden. Yet it had to be exactly the right song, something that engaged the patient’s heart and memory, for music that didn’t move them was simply noise. Knowing which song out of millions of possibilities meant knowing them. At least a little, and that too was a gift. Knowing these lost people.

The room held its breath. Dr. Turner crossed to Violet and gently released one, then the other restraint holding her to the chair. Her eyes darted about. Her hands, now completely free, felt about frantically. Then she yanked loose and sprang forward, pounding on the keys. It was chaos . . . but with a sure tempo—every strike.

A nurse and two orderlies rushed forward to pull her away and I shook my head. “Oh please, let her do it.” I added a lower melody to the beat of her banging.

Dr. Turner bent toward me, hands on the girl’s shoulders. “You don’t mind?” His voice rang with the depth of his emotion.

I paused and smiled up at them. “If I did, I’d be missing the point entirely.”

The way he looked at me then, with a tender kinship and unguarded affection, swept the last thing into place. He saw me, he heard the music—my music. His affection was borne of “because of” rather than “in spite of” and it was bigger than a tidal wave.

Oh. Oh.

I could hardly breathe, sitting there in the glow of his admiration, that ruggedly handsome face that seemed more familiar than any longtime friend. I fell so deeply—not a flutter of romance as I’d expected such a thing to be, but a profound, weighted anchor for my floundering soul. A knowing. The sensation was rich and good, and it plummeted deep.

I looked down at my fingers, for I could not look at Mitchell Turner as he watched me, absorbing every nuance of my song.

Violet pounded out the rhythm as I played through the grand crescendo and finale, then she sat upright, shifting forward and back only a little as she stared at me. “Moe,” she said. “Moooooe.”

Dr. Turner’s radiant face turned, taking in the whole of her, and I felt the wonder of a starry night sky in his gaze. Something in his expression had burst open, cobwebbed shutters giving way to a magnificent daybreak of the soul. This meant something to him—something more than the response of a lost patient—and I’d never felt such glorious sunshine in my soul. Not in ten thousand performances.

“More? Is that what you’re asking?”