He’d smiled, but it wasn’t convincing. “I am just getting old, that is all,” he said. He paused a moment before adding, “I am concerned for you, Felicia.”

So that was it. “I enjoy my life, Signor Abe. I understand that you worry about me, but as I’ve told you before—”

He cut her off with a dismissive flick of his hand. “I know what you have to say, so let’s pretend that you have already said it and move on. I want you to promise me something.”

She cocked her head, waiting. When dealing with her uncle’s generation, it never paid to make a promise before all terms had been revealed.

“If anything happens to you, if ever you are in any trouble, I want you to come to me.”

Looking back on the conversation now, she wondered if Signor Abe hadn’t known something. Even at the time, she’d felt her pulse quicken with his sense of urgent mystery.

He’d read her expression exactly, and hurried to soothe her. “I don’t mean to frighten you,” he’d said. “As I get older I sometimes worry about things that perhaps I shouldn’t. But if there ever comes a time when you feel as if you are in danger—or even if there comes a time when you merely feel lonely or hungry for some of my fettuccini—I want you to promise that you will come by the shop. I worry that I am not showing you the hospitality that I should. I don’t want to disappoint my dear friend Henryk.”

That conversation had taken place only two weeks ago. Now, as she walked purposefully up the hill, she forced her mind to think of music. If she could bridge the synapses of her brain with triplettes and chromatic scales, maybe there would be no room left for her fear. No room left for the looming grief that awaited her when she finally confronted the fact of her uncle’s death.

She walked faster. The increased tempo brought to her imagination the sound of American bluegrass music—fiddle music instead of the violin—a music form that she’d never taken seriously until she’d listened to a CD that featured Yo Yo Ma bringing sounds out of his cello that she had never heard before. She heard alternating strains of joy and melancholy. She’d tried to recreate the sounds in her own violin, but could never quite discover them. It was as if those particular strands of musical DNA could not be found in an instrument played by a Polish girl whose childhood was steeped in classical training.