When she pulled her hands back from the keys, she was startled to hear applause from the back of the auditorium. She stood quickly, pushing the piano bench back with such force that it toppled over, and then there he was, her Ezra, leaping onto the stage, sweeping her up and into his arms like he’d just witnessed something magnificent, something just in its nascency, when what Frankie was there for was to honor the end of something else. He wouldn’t stop talking. He wouldn’t stop marveling. Frankie had fled her dorm and retreated to the one place she knew she could find security—behind the black and white keys of the grand piano center stage in an auditorium—and he invaded that space and shattered it. If she had explained this to him, maybe he would have understood. Instead, he kept saying things like, “Is this what you meant when you said you played piano? Because this is definitely not, like, ‘Chopsticks,’ ” and “Holy shit, why would you not tell me that you are basically Beethoven or . . . ?” He searched around for another great composer, another master performer, but Ezra wasn’t fluent in her old language, which was part of what she loved about him. She thought he was looking at her differently, inhaling her differently. And then he said, “I don’t understand—if you are this brilliant, why would you ever stop? Don’t you owe it to yourself to keep going?”

And that was it. That was all it took for Frankie to believe that her instinct not to trust him with who she had been before had been correct. That of course she shouldn’t have told him about her secret, inexplicable gift, which she hadn’t asked for, didn’t want, which made her feel like a bird inside a gilded cage for the entirety of her childhood. Ezra didn’t understand that to be the greatest at something, you could never relent—and even if he understood this, he wouldn’t have found relentlessness a deterrent. Just look at his passion, at his direction toward law. But at least that was his decision, Frankie had thought back then. At least Ezra got to throw himself toward his own choice of relentlessness. Frankie had never had a say in hers, had never been behind the decision-making. So when she was finally old enough to choose for herself, the only thing she cared about was freedom, about independence, about having the right to make whatever fucking choices she wanted for herself in the first place. Her parents would never understand it. LaGuardia never understood it. Fred didn’t, conservatories didn’t, her nerd friends from the competition circuit didn’t even try to. But Frankie did. Frankie did.

And of all people to choose everyone else’s side: Ezra.

She went from zero to a thousand in an instant, and looking back, she could have, would have, done it very differently. But she exploded about how little he knew about her, how right she was not to trust him with her secrets, how the only person she could count on in this whole fucking world had let her down. She left him in the aisle of Steinway, pushing past him and running to her dorm room, indignant, furious, burned. Eventually, he knocked and looked like he’d been crying, and he said he was sorry and he’d never bring it up again. He hadn’t realized that he was pressing into a bruise that was already purple. In his defense, he said, how could he have? She’d never let him take a look.