But it was all different now. He’d said that too. I was softer, more aware. Loving. I’d learned what God had meant to teach me in this place, and perhaps now, despite Harford’s words, he was releasing me. Maybe Harford didn’t know what he was talking about. I’d gone through my desert, learned to love instead of resent, and now it was time to return to life as a better version of myself. To carry out the rescuing I’d always longed to do.

Won’t you make a way, God? Won’t you allow me to leave this place and rescue women for you? I’ve been preparing this symphony for years and have yet to be able to perform it.

Yet I felt no release. Sensed no solution. I reached for the last fig which was stuck to the bottom, but the whole jar came away from the table with it, my fist trapped inside. I stared at it in the dim light, that narrow-mouthed jar with the final fig and my hand still grasping it. Stubborn. Decided.

Trapped.

Then my heart burst open with awareness as gentle truth swept over me. The candle stub sputtered out and I stared at my hand grasping the last fig. I’d never been one for writing my own music. I only ever played what the masters wrote.

Except when it came to my life.

We’re all of us told to walk in the light, but we don’t. We simply wish to drag the light over to where we’re already standing, so we may better see the path we’ve set out for ourselves. I dearly wished to set my own path. To take control for once in my life. But perhaps I wasn’t meant to—not in the way I’d tried it, anyway.

Let go.

I stared into the dark, at my hand caught in the jar, and released my hold on the fig. The jar fell away, my sticky hand freed.

Freedom.

Release.

Then I did the same in my heart. God Almighty, what is the song you have written for me?

I closed my eyes and remained poised there in the silence of the night, waiting for the shackles to descend and clamp around my heart as I gave over control. But instead a sweet melody surfaced—one of Hurstwell and hopeless women and shadows that no one else dared venture into—and I knew it had not been Marcel or Harford or even Nurse Duffy controlling me, but him guiding me, gently beckoning me toward the pianoforte with the music he’d written laid out and waiting for me to begin. Now I was finally ready to play.

And it would be magnificent.

37

God sends you somewhere that makes no sense, because he alone knows what you will find.

~Vivienne Mourdant