Whitney's laugh was thin and bright.
"Fairly? Everyone here knows why she's on that stage, and it isn't talent."
Greer Vaughn stood three feet behind her mother in a plain light gray T-shirt, light brown ponytail, freckles, cello case strap cutting into her shoulder. She was Maya's age. She looked as if she wanted the floor to open and swallow the conversation whole. Her eyes flicked to Maya, then away, then back, the way a person looks at a fire they did not start and cannot put out.
Maya did not answer Whitney. She had learned, in rooms like this, that answering sometimes fed the thing that wanted to eat you. She held the cello's neck. The wood was warm from her hand. Somewhere in the auditorium a cough blossomed and died. Somewhere a phone glowed and was hissed at.
Then Corbin Mayhew stumbled in from the greenroom corridor, black tuxedo, white shirt, black bow tie, beard neat until pain made it irrelevant. He was forty-eight, the night's featured guest cellist, hired to open the Harborlight spring showcase with a short unaccompanied Bach set before the youth orchestra took the stage. He clutched his upper abdomen with one hand and his chest with the other as if he could not decide which organ was betraying him.
"I can't go on," he said.
Seth moved fast. He caught Corbin's elbow, steered him toward a chair, called for the house manager. Corbin's face had gone the color of wet paper. Sweat beaded at his hairline. Later the EMTs would write what the ER confirmed: acute biliary colic from a gallstone, pain radiating up under the sternum so fiercely it mimicked a cardiac event, nausea rising behind it like a second weather system. Not violence. Not drama for drama. A body doing something bodies do when a stone lodges where a duct wants to stay open.
For now there was only the fact of a tuxedo man folding in on himself and a program that suddenly had a hole where Bach was supposed to sit.
Seth's hand landed on Maya's shoulder. Steady. Not gentle in a pitying way. Firm in a working way.
"Maya, you're on. Just breathe."
Whitney's voice cracked the air.
"You can't be serious."
Seth did not look at her.
"She knows the Prelude. She's been covering the guest chart in rehearsal in case of emergency. This is the emergency."
Maya's ears rang. The Meridian scholarship had bought her Saturdays with Ms. Kendra Boateng in a ground-floor room at the Eastline Community Center, where the radiator clicked and the carpet smelled faintly of crayons. Kendra Boateng, Ghanaian American, mid-forties, former section player in a regional orchestra who taught kids like Maya the way some people teach swimming: as if drowning were optional and unnecessary. For two years Maya had lived inside Bach's G major Suite the way other kids lived inside video games. Prelude first. Then Allemande. Then the rest, slow as honesty.
She walked onto the empty stage.
The spotlight found her and did not ask permission. The auditorium was a dark mouth full of programs and perfume. She sat. Adjusted the endpin. Settled the cello between her knees. Raised the bow.
For one held breath the hall waited on the edge of a first note that had not yet decided to exist.