"I won't say I know more," she replied. "I'll ask why the archive doesn't know who was in the room."
As they left, Dorian offered Nia the repaired violin bridge from his bench. She refused, puzzled. He explained that Lena had commissioned it for Caleb years earlier and never collected it. Tucked beneath the instrument cloth was a card in Lena's writing: *For the day he learns a beautiful sound is not the same as a famous one.*
At the door, Nia's phone rang. Frank Deller told her the hotel was terminating her employment for "failure to maintain professional distance from a guest." She stood on the sidewalk among the noise of buses and construction, trying to understand how a conversation about tea had cost her a living.
Then Dorian stepped outside and held out the festival photograph. "Take this," he said. "You'll need to remember what it is you're fighting for."
Nia slipped it into her bag. Twenty faces looked toward a camera from a folding-chair stage. They had made music together before anyone wealthy enough to purchase the rights arrived to explain whose music it was.
CHAPTER 05
A Room Without a Stage
Nia had expected losing her job to feel like a single blow. Instead it arrived in small humiliations. Her uniform hung clean by the washer with nowhere to wear it. The grocery app asked whether she wanted to renew a membership she could no longer afford. Evelyn offered to pick up an additional school shift and tried to sound pleased about the overtime. Caleb stopped talking about his audition whenever Nia entered the kitchen.
By Wednesday, strangers had discovered their address. A television van parked outside for an hour. A man who claimed to represent an educational foundation knocked and asked whether Nia would recite Mandarin phrases for a short-form video. She closed the door on him while her mother watched from the staircase.
"We need someone who knows how to handle this," Evelyn said.
"A lawyer costs money," Nia replied.
"So does doing nothing."
Dr. Shen arrived that evening with a woman carrying a laptop, a canvas tote, and a notebook filled with colored tabs. Her name was Maya Ortiz. She wrote for the local weekly *Cityline* and covered public institutions rather than celebrities. She had declined three interviews about the viral gala because she wanted to check the dates first.
"I don't need another video," Nia warned her.
"Good. Neither do I," Maya said. "I need to know what you're actually asking people to believe."
They sat at the kitchen table. Evelyn made tea; Caleb withdrew to his keyboard but left the door open. Maya took notes on the banquet, the wager, the melody, and the older woman who taught Nia Mandarin. Whenever a claim came from someone's memory, she wrote the word *memory*. Whenever Nia produced a document, Maya photographed it from front and back, including the edge of the paper.
"I can report that a publisher has disputed credits," Maya said. "I can't report that somebody committed fraud until the evidence supports it. Those are different things."
Nia nodded. "I don't want you to fill the spaces with guesses."
"Then we're going to get along."
They visited Harbor House the next morning. It had survived three threatened closures and two renovations. On the front steps, children argued about basketball while a woman inside coached a beginner's choir through a stubborn harmony. The director, Marisol Vega, took them into an office crowded with donated instrument cases and grant applications. She remembered Lena not as a scandal but as a person who patched torn coats before winter recitals.
On their way through the hall, a shy boy asked Marisol whether his trumpet sound would ever stop cracking. She crouched to his height and said that every instrument made a strange noise while someone was learning how to ask it a question. Nia remembered Lena saying nearly the same thing when Caleb's keyboard refused to produce a melody without mistakes. The boy offered to demonstrate his new scale, and they stood beside a drinking fountain while he played. Halfway through, a note escaped in a startling squawk. He closed his eyes, mortified. Nia told him it had sounded like a train turning a corner, which made him laugh and try again. The encounter lasted only a minute, but later she thought about it while reading the proposed archive grants. Harbor House was not a nostalgic institution needing to be rescued by the names of celebrities. It was a busy, imperfect place where children were still permitted to practice in public.
"Somebody built the myth of Harbor House around a famous donor," Marisol said. "The people who kept its lights on were never famous."
In a metal cabinet she found rehearsal attendance sheets, one festival poster, and an expense book showing small payments to teachers. Lena had been paid for twenty-eight sessions. Arthur Sloane was listed as a guest mentor on four days. The arithmetic did not establish authorship, but it made the simple story in the Crescent brochure much harder to believe.
A class of children drifted into the hallway during their conversation. One held a cello too large for her knees. She stopped when she saw Nia examining the poster.
"Is that the old orchestra?" the child asked.
"It is," Marisol said. "Before your parents were old enough to complain about parking."
"Can we play their music?"
Nia looked at the poster. There was no answer she could give without making a promise beyond her power. "I hope so," she said.
Outside, Maya's phone lit up. Gideon Sloane had announced a surprise increase to the Crescent Arts Prize. Its winning youth ensemble would receive a hundred thousand dollars. The publicity image showed him smiling beneath a banner reading **ART BELONGS TO EVERYONE**. Nia recognized the amount, and the carefully selected timing made her stomach contract.
"He's turning the bet into a prize," she said.