She knew the number. She had told herself not to count, but she was constitutionally incapable of not counting - numbers embedded themselves in her memory without permission, precise and unwelcome, an occupational effect of a brain trained for musical precision.
It had started with a text at 10:40 in the morning:
I'm on Newbury. Are you home? Can I come up?
This was Olivia's way of saying: I need to see you, but I'm not going to say that I need to see you. Olivia was never just in the neighborhood. She planned everything carefully and then performed spontaneity with remarkable commitment. Most people were taken in by it. Elise, who had grown up in the same house, was not.
I have rehearsal in two hours.
I'll only stay for one.
She met her at a coffee shop rather than the apartment, and Olivia accepted this without comment - another thing Elise would think about later, that particular accommodation, that particular ease. They took a corner table. Olivia ordered something with too much foam and talked about the new production Lawrence Kingsley's theater company was mounting for spring, about how she'd been cast in the lead role, about how her director kept giving her notes she couldn't parse.
"He keeps saying to access my grief," Olivia said. "Access it from where? I'm twenty-eight. My grief is limited."
"You have grief."
"Not enough to read across a theater."
"You have the amount you have. Scale it to the scene."
Olivia looked at her across the table. "That's actually helpful. Why is that helpful? You're not a theater person."
"Same principle as music."
"You always know exactly the right thing and make it sound like it cost you nothing." She reached across and flicked Elise's knuckle with one finger. "It's maddening."
"I know."
"Tell me I'm good enough for this role."
"You're good enough."
"You're saying it because I asked."
"I'm saying it because both things are true. You asked, and you're good enough."
Olivia had smiled then - the real one, not the wide performance smile she deployed in public but the small, sideways one she kept for moments that had actually landed. She sat back in her chair. "I love you," she said, easily, the way she said everything that mattered. No buildup. No ceremony. Just the fact of it, offered.
"I love you too," Elise said. And she had meant every syllable.
She had also, at the same time, been calculating whether she had enough time after the coffee to run through the Debussy passage once more before leaving for Symphony Hall. Both things were true simultaneously, and she had not understood - had genuinely not understood, not even considered - that this was the last time.
She had thought: That was all it had been. Just Thursday.