Nia steadied her voice and addressed Dr. Shen in Mandarin. She spoke about the jasmine tea, about a teacher who had once planted jasmine outside a cramped apartment window, and about why people sometimes heard a familiar tune in a foreign country and felt unexpectedly at home. Dr. Shen listened with her fingers pressed against her napkin.
Then Nia looked toward the quartet. Their violinist had reached the central theme for the third time. "The piece they're playing," she added in Mandarin. "My teacher used to play a version of it. But the printed title is wrong. She called it 'Rain Before Dawn.'"
Dr. Shen went perfectly still.
"Who," she asked, "was your teacher?"
"Lena Wu," Nia replied. "She lived across the hall from my mother."
The older woman gripped the edge of the table. Gideon leaned forward, trying to catch the words and finding only the change in her face. Dr. Shen whispered a name Nia had never heard: "Lin Yue."
At the back of the ballroom, the quartet stopped playing. For a moment the room held nothing but the quiet clink of an unattended glass. Then Dr. Shen stood and began to applaud Nia—not for her pronunciation, but for a memory the music had just returned to her. Two other guests rose, uncertain. By the time Gideon realized the room was standing, he was the only one still seated.
He had wagered a hundred thousand dollars on a language. He had not understood that Nia had spoken the name of a woman his company had spent twenty-five years keeping out of its programs.
CHAPTER 02
The Woman in the Green Jacket
The applause embarrassed Nia more than the insult had. She had spent years carrying trays through celebrations, accustomed to being visible only when a glass was empty. Now people were turning toward her with cameras raised and expressions full of expectation. In the narrow space between admiration and spectacle, she could still feel Gideon's calculating stare.
Dr. Shen stepped beside her. "Please," she said softly in English. "May we speak somewhere quiet?"
The banquet manager, Frank Deller, materialized near the curtains with the smile he reserved for customers who could fund an entire quarter. "Nia, perhaps you should return to the service corridor. The guests have had their fun."
"She is my guest," Dr. Shen said. "And I haven't finished asking her questions."
Frank examined the donor list as if hoping to discover an applicable policy. Nia spared him the decision. She handed the water pitcher to another server and followed Dr. Shen toward a side room used for coat storage. It smelled of lavender polish and expensive wool. Through the door, they heard the quartet restart with a harmless waltz.
"You said Lena Wu," Dr. Shen began. "How old was she?"
"Seventy-four when she died, two years ago. Maybe seventy-five. She hated birthdays."
"Did she ever tell you her Chinese name?"
"She said names change when people cross oceans. She didn't like us making a mystery of it."
Dr. Shen sat on a padded bench. "Before I moved to the United States, I knew a composer called Lin Yue. She used that professional name in Shanghai and later in Chicago. She wrote a work called 'Rain Before Dawn.' It was never published under her name."
Nia folded her arms. "Why not?"
"That," Dr. Shen said, "is a question I have asked for a quarter century."
She explained that in 1999 an immigrant youth ensemble had rehearsed in the basement of Harbor House, a neighborhood arts center on the city's South Side. The ensemble included children whose parents cleaned offices, drove buses, repaired instruments, or attended night school. Their music had been coached by Lin Yue, who transformed their improvised melodies into an ambitious suite. It was supposed to be performed once at a city arts festival. Instead a publisher acquired recordings and notebooks. The music reappeared with a new name, *City of Lanterns*, credited to Arthur Sloane, Gideon's father.
Dr. Shen remembered visiting Harbor House during a winter rehearsal. The heating system had failed, and the young musicians kept their coats on as they played. Lena moved from chair to chair correcting bow positions with numb fingers. When the children complained that the room was too cold to sound beautiful, she asked them to describe the weather through music. Their answer was an awkward, joyful passage of shivering trills and long bowed notes. Arthur Sloane, then a respected arranger, laughed and said a professional orchestra would never play such a thing. Lena told him a professional orchestra might benefit from learning how. Dr. Shen remembered admiring the exchange and then leaving to catch a flight, never asking who would receive credit for the work they made after she left. Her memory was vivid in its warmth and deeply unreliable in its dates; she warned Nia of both. "I want you to know why it matters to me," she said, "without treating my recollection as a certificate of proof.
"But Arthur was a composer," Nia said. "I read his biography on the hotel's program."
"He was," Dr. Shen answered. "And that's what makes the truth complicated. I am not saying he wrote nothing. I am saying other people wrote something, and their names vanished."
Nia pictured Lena in worn slippers at an upright piano, pausing to correct a single note with a patience no adult had ever extended to her. Lena had taught her Mandarin through recipes, songs, radio news, and stories about a river Nia had never seen. She had never mentioned a famous composition. In the final year of Lena's life, arthritis had made her hands stiff. She continued to hum while Nia helped hang laundry.
"You were close to her?" Dr. Shen asked.
"She helped raise me. When my mother took overnight shifts, Lena sat with my brother and me. She said music should belong to anyone willing to listen."
Dr. Shen removed her glasses. "That sounds like Yue."