My heart withered, and I gave a nod, but he did not leave. In fact, he continued staring.

“This music you hear. Is it . . . all the time? Or just certain days, perhaps when you are most tired?”

I pictured with absolute clarity the way he’d taken that invisible violin to chin and played with such precision, to the tempo of an unheard beat. You hear it too, don’t you? You hear the music. I balled my hands to keep from asking it aloud. Don’t try and tell me you don’t. “It’s more that I feel the music. Deeply. It’s in the air everywhere.” I watched for a flicker of agreement, of understanding, but he merely continued to stare, as if waiting for me to make sense.

Why couldn’t I explain it? Didn’t he sense the rhythm pulsing through the whole earth, the very order and symmetry to everything? The way two different people, a doctor and a musician, could work in parallel, playing different parts but ultimately linking together in the song of service to the weak? “Is it so wrong,” I whispered, “to have a life brimming with music?”

“Most people don’t go about hearing music that isn’t there. It’s as simple as that.”

“Most aren’t listening.”

He shifted, shoving hands into his pockets. “It isn’t so bad here, Miss Fletcher. You’ll see soon enough. We’re trying to help you. Just relax and let us do our work.”

A pull. A quicksand, everything nudging me farther into it, encouraging me to accept my fate and be swallowed by this place.

I would not. Neither would I cease to be who I was. I looked up at the doctor and spoke with a whisper-soft voice. “It’s a far cry from Vienna’s Theater auf der Wieden, but I enjoyed the concert you gave for Mary Jo all the same. And . . . my name is Vivienne.”

Four days it took to know whether or not Lew had delivered my letters. I’d been assigned to the laundry, since I already knew the work, and on one of the trips out to the yard I heard a voice.

“Psst.”

I nearly dropped the bucket of dirty water. I stood, scanning the tall fence, the empty yard. With a huff, I shifted, positioning my arms a few different ways to get around the container, and sloshed the metal tub full of grayish water farther out into the yard. Arms trembling as I neared the fence, I stumbled and the basin tipped, releasing all that sludge in a big whoosh over hard-packed ground . . . and my shoes. I groaned, hand to my face as wetness soaked through. Then I heard tapping.

“Psst.”

More tapping.