Not yet. She could feel the resistance - not inability, not tiredness, but an interior weather that she'd learned, across twenty years of discipline, to respect. Forced playing produced correct notes and nothing behind them, and nothing behind them was the one thing she could not tolerate. She would come back to it.
She closed the case.
She was back at the kitchen counter, second cup of coffee, when she let herself think about Sebastian.
On bad mornings, he arrived the way music arrived when you hadn't been listening for it: already playing, already there, fully formed before you'd made any decision to allow it. She had gotten better at managing the duration. Not at stopping it - that had proven impossible - but at managing how long it ran before she redirected it elsewhere.
This morning she let it run a little longer.
She thought about April, two years ago. His first genuine BSO engagement - an invitation, their program, his interpretation from first rehearsal to closing night. She had been in the section for all four days, watching him with the split attention that orchestral musicians develop: technically analytical and also deeply personal, reading the signals and also reading the man.
On the last rehearsal day, he'd found her in the corridor outside the green room.
"Elise."
She had stopped walking.
He'd come to stand beside her - not in front, not blocking, beside - and said, almost immediately, as if he'd been building to it for four days: "I keep trying to not be here."
"I know," she said.
"It's not particularly effective."
"No."
He was quiet for a moment. "Elise." Just her name, with a weight she had no vocabulary for.
She understood, in that moment, exactly what she felt about him. Not as a new discovery - it hadn't been new. It had been there for months, accumulating in the background of every room they'd ever shared, growing in the specific way that things grow when you consistently refuse to look at them. She'd been refusing to look at it for the better part of a year.
She also thought about Olivia.
Olivia who had introduced them - three years before that corridor, at a fundraising gala. Olivia who had talked about Sebastian with an animation that was different from her other animation: a specific brightness, a slight carefulness, the energy of someone who was managing something they didn't want to spill. Olivia who had once paused mid-sentence in a completely unrelated conversation and said, lightly and quickly, "I wonder if Sebastian's back from London yet," and then changed the subject with the brisk efficiency of someone covering a slip.
Elise had heard it. She heard most things.
She had stood in that corridor and felt two facts simultaneously: she loved Sebastian, and Olivia loved Sebastian, and these two facts could not both be fine.
She had said, "I'll see you at the performance tonight."