By the time she was seven, the neighbors had stopped complaining about the noise and started leaving their windows open on purpose. By nine, she was playing for the church choir, her small hands flying across keys that should have been too big for them. By twelve, the music teacher at her school, a tired gray man named Mr. Patterson who had given up on most things, stayed late three nights a week just to teach her, because he said in forty years he had never seen a gift like hers and he was not going to let it die in a building that couldn't afford to keep its piano in tune.
"You have something, Nia," Mr. Patterson told her once, "that money can't buy and schools can't teach. You don't play the notes, Nia. You make people feel them."
Della worked double shifts to pay for the competitions. Esther sewed Nia's recital dresses by hand. And the whole neighborhood—the man at the corner store, the women at the salon, the old men who played dominoes on the stoop—they all pitched in a few dollars here and there, because they had decided collectively that this girl was going somewhere, and they wanted to say they had helped get her there.
At sixteen, Nia Coleman won the state youth piano championship. At seventeen, she was offered a full scholarship to one of the most prestigious music conservatories in the country.
And at eighteen, three weeks before she was supposed to leave for school, everything fell apart.
It started with a cough. Esther had been coughing for months, but she waved it away the way she waved away everything, with a hand and a frown and a "Don't you worry about me." But the cough got worse. And then the weight started falling off her. And then, one morning, Della found her grandmother on the kitchen floor, unable to get up.
The doctors used a word that Nia couldn't bear to repeat for a long time afterward, and the bills came fast. Della worked three jobs. Nia got a fourth. The scholarship covered tuition, but it didn't cover the world falling apart at home. And someone had to be there. Someone had to drive Esther to her appointments. Someone had to sit with her through the long nights. Someone had to hold the family together while it tried to come apart at the seams.
So Nia made a choice. She deferred the scholarship for a year. Just a year, she told herself. Just until things stabilized. Just until Grandma got better.
But Grandma didn't get better. Esther died on a cold Tuesday in November. And at her funeral, the same neighborhood that had pooled its money to send Nia to competitions now pooled its money to help bury the woman who had taught her to play.
Nia sat in the front pew of the church and stared at the organ Esther had played for forty years, and she could not bring herself to touch it.
The conservatory called. They asked when she would be coming. Nia looked at the medical debt stacked on the kitchen table, at her mother who had aged ten years in twelve months, at the upright piano in the front room with its cracked keys and its stuck middle C. And she told them she wasn't coming.
She told herself it was temporary. She told herself she would go back to it someday. But days became months, and months became years. And Nia Coleman put away her music the way you put away a photograph that hurts too much to look at—not because you've stopped loving the person in it, but because loving them has become unbearable.
She took whatever work she could find: cashier, cleaner, front desk. And eventually, at thirty-one, she walked through the doors of an elegant French restaurant called Maison Lauron, where the tips were good and the hours were long, and there happened to be a grand piano in the corner that she had trained herself never to look at.