"If you can do that," Camille said, "I'll find a way to thank you."
"You don't need to pay anyone back," Daniel replied. "We already have a program for educational access. We haven't been using it enough. This is exactly the sort of request it was designed to cover."
He promised a definite answer by seven the next morning. For the first time all day, Nia asked if she could call Mrs. Whitaker without discussing the airline first. Her teacher answered on the second ring, wearing a faded green cardigan and the expression she used when she expected a student to confess to skipping a scale exercise. Nia told her about the piano, the attendant, the performance, and the flight cancellation in one breathless rush.
"Slow down," Mrs. Whitaker said. "You played your composition on a concert grand?"
"Yes, ma'am. And it sounded different. The bass was much louder than at the center, even when I wasn't hitting it hard."
"Then you learned something useful. Tell me what happened to the tempo after the middle section."
Nia hesitated. "I pushed it. Maybe too much."
"Did you hear yourself doing it?"
"Only after."
"Good. Tomorrow listen sooner." Mrs. Whitaker paused, her face softening. "I'm proud you asked to play. I'm proud you stayed polite when someone wasn't polite to you. But remember, none of those people are your examiners. You don't have to carry their opinion onto the bench."
When the call ended, Camille sat beside Nia and asked what had hurt most in the lounge. Nia expected to say the attendant's voice or the way strangers had watched. Instead she told her mother about the moment she had been tempted to play something fast and flashy, as though being herself would not be enough. Camille listened without correcting her, then said that unfair treatment could make a person waste years trying to impress people who had never intended to be fair.
"Then what do I do?" Nia asked.
"Keep asking for the same chance everyone else gets," Camille said. "And when you have something to show, show it because it matters to you. Not because you need someone's permission to matter."
They slept badly. Camille woke twice thinking she had missed an alarm, and Nia dreamed that the piano had been replaced by a desk where she was required to explain each note in words. At six thirty, Daniel sent confirmation: the lounge could reserve the instrument from ten until noon, and the airport's small audiovisual team could provide a stable microphone and camera connection. The program had approved the location. Camille sent back a thank-you and the meeting information, then woke Nia with a gentle knock on the bathroom door.
At the airport, Margaret was waiting near the lounge entrance. She wore the same immaculate navy jacket, but there was no clipboard in her hands and no warning already forming on her lips. She greeted Nia by name, asked whether she had eaten breakfast, and showed Camille a written plan: a staff member would ask guests to use the opposite seating area during the audition; the coffee grinder would be switched off; and the public address announcements could not be silenced, but their schedule had been checked so the major boarding calls fell outside the performance window.