When Karina came back downstairs, the scent of grilling meat greeted her. She strategically took a seat with her back to the pool, where some were still swimming. A bowl of guacamole sat on the table and she dug in hungrily with a tortilla chip. Micah, holding a beer bottle, was monitoring lamb chops on the barbecue. Karina knew she should offer to help with dinner preparations, but she was too exhausted. They ate outside, everyone milling around, in casual conversation.

She turned to Micah to excuse herself, but before she could speak, he put a hand on her shoulder and said, “Karina, tonight you get to experience one of the most special things we have here, the Music Salon.” Karina followed the others down the hallway, toward the sound of an electric guitar tuning up. The living room featured a large leather sectional, a drum set in the corner, guitars propped on stands and large amps on the floor. Unsure where to sit, Karina perched on one of the couch’s wide leather armrests.

August was playing the electric guitar, and he moved from tuning up right into a solo. His left hand slid up and down the fingerboard while his right hand twanged on the strings. Karina didn’t recognize the melody, but his virtuosity was clear. As August trailed off with a single blazing vibrato note, he nodded to Micah, standing behind the keyboard, who began to play, fingers dancing up and down the keyboard. August joined back in on the guitar, then Rufus, another resident Karina had met at Thanksgiving, blended into the harmony on bass. They all played together for a while, until finally Micah led several dramatic chords to close. Karina clapped along with the others but still found herself fading. The loud music was compounding her exhaustion and her head began to ache again.

Ericka leaned close to her and whispered, “Do you play anything?”

“Not really,” Karina said. “A bit of clarinet when I was a kid.” The clarinet her parents had bought for her twelfth birthday still sat on the top shelf of her closet back home. She’d been excited at first; it felt important to have a musical instrument of her own to carry back and forth to school, her name emblazoned on the case. She forbade Prem to touch it and yelled at him once when she found him on the floor of her bedroom with the clarinet in his mouth. “That is so gross!” she screamed, tearing it out of his hands. “Now I have to sanitize the mouthpiece and throw that reed away!”

Her father encouraged her to continue with band practice when their lives resumed after Prem’s death. He dutifully drove her to school early, and though she went through the motions, she couldn’t hold the clarinet without remembering the hurt look in Prem’s eyes and the yelp that escaped from his throat as she pulled him across the room. When she told her dad that she wanted to quit a few weeks later, he didn’t protest.