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: Thursday. That was all it had been. Just Thursday.

The phone call had come fifty-two days later, at 9:47 in the evening. Their mother's number. She had answered it with a hello that had already registered something wrong before the call connected - a part of her brain that processed certain information ahead of conscious awareness, that had said quietly: something is wrong - and then Vivian's voice had come through, broken in a way Elise had never in her life heard before.

The next hour existed in her memory in fragments. She had learned, in the months since, not to try to assemble the fragments into a continuous sequence. They were not a sequence. They were just pieces.

What she came back to, on mornings like this, was simpler than the fragments. She came back to the Thursday. To the moment when Olivia had said I love you easily across a corner table, and Elise had said it back, and had meant it, and had also been thinking about Debussy.

She was going to have to live with that gap - between there and fully there - for the rest of her life. She'd accepted that.

She had not accepted all of it yet. But she'd accepted that part.

Her flute case sat on the piano bench in the corner of the living room.

She didn't own a piano - the bench had come with the apartment, and she'd found it useful as a surface for things she needed to access daily. The case was matte black, worn at the corners, with a scuff on the left clasp that had been there since 2016 when she'd dropped it boarding a tour bus in Vienna. Her stand partner had been horrified. Elise had checked the instrument, confirmed it was undamaged, and declared the situation resolved.

Inside was the Muramatsu. Handmade, custom-fitted, presented to her at the BSO's tenth-anniversary gala for her tenure as principal flute, with enough ceremony to make her profoundly uncomfortable and deeply moved at the same time. She had cried. One moment of it - a single tightening of the throat before she controlled it - but she had cried.

Because ten years. She had lasted.

She had spent years, particularly the early ones, uncertain about something she couldn't have named precisely. Not of her technique - her technique had never given her serious reason for doubt. But of her belonging. Whether she was a presence in this orchestra or a placeholder. Whether the people around her saw what she was genuinely capable of, or whether they saw what she had grown up being seen as: the reliable one. The useful one. Accomplished, but not remarkable.

Olivia had been the remarkable one, from birth, approximately.

Elise had found her own remarkable somewhere else entirely, in a discipline that answered only to her. It had taken time. But the Muramatsu on a piano bench in a small Boston apartment was proof that she'd found it. No one could take that from her.

She opened the case. Ran one finger along the barrel without picking it up.