Footsteps. Music swirled up within me and eclipsed the song I played as I realized at once who it was. That low, gentle voice, the steady steps. I slid my hands off the keys. As my fading notes rang through the room, I felt him approach and I paused, feeling the oddness of his presence within a fully lit asylum. In this place of light and sunshine and rich wood instruments.

Then he was standing just behind me, his aura calming and exciting at once. In the ringing silence, he pulled up a chair on the left. Out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed his profile, kind and sturdy, and its masculinity nearly overwhelmed me.

I turned to face him, saying not a word. Drinking in Bach’s cello solo that filled the room in its subtle, unobtrusive way. How handsome he was, swathed in sunlight and warmth of spirit with a new calm, a peaceful levity, while the slight stubble on his jaw and those rolled-up sleeves remained so familiar. He hadn’t even bothered to change his appearance to call upon me—for I knew that’s why he’d come back—and I adored him all the more for being so wholly himself.

His steady gaze lay upon me, radiating appreciation, tender affection, then he magnified it with a crooked little smile that lit up every corner of my heart.

“Play,” he said, and I did, allowing another verse to spill from my heart.

I cross the wide, extended fields,

I journey o’er the plain . . .

But suddenly I wasn’t journeying over them alone. Mitchell Turner’s fingers found the lower notes, adding depth to my higher ones, joining his melody with mine. His rich baritone filled in the words echoing about the chambers of my heart.

And in the sunlight of His love

I reap the golden grain.

We continued, and I shivered at the textured melody flowing from the instrument, the very rightness of these harmonies playing together. Through the last two verses we played, then the refrain, his hand crossing over mine and climbing the notes in an intimate, intermingled piece that lay gently over the pair of us and lifted to the God we praised together. We climbed and crescendoed, and I closed my eyes, drinking in the most richly woven piece I’d ever played. One I’d never known existed.

As the notes of our duet faded, I waited a beat, then glanced over at him. He was watching me with bright appreciation, just as he had when I’d played for Violet.

That crooked little smile again. “Hello.”

“You came back.”

“How could I not?” He looked down to our hands, then back to my face. “Your music has pierced me and lodged within. I could not get it out of my head.”