Nefeli came on Wednesday. She always knows when to come.
She was already on the settee, legs folded under her, holding my good wine glass, when I came down from changing. She looked at me the way she always looks at me — like she’s reading the last page first.
“You have a teacher,” she said. Not a question.
“Piano,” I said.
“Mm.” She drank. “How is it going.”
I sat across from her and told her the same thing I’d told Leo: that it was fine, that I was learning, that the teacher was technically very good.
Nefeli smiled. Not the big one she uses for parties. The small one. The one that means I already know.
“What are his hands like,” she said.
I told her I hadn’t really noticed.
She laughed — really laughed, the kind that turns her whole body, and I felt heat in my face that had absolutely nothing to do with embarrassment, I told myself. “Idyia,” she said, “you notice everything. You’ve noticed everything since we were seventeen. You just decide afterward that you didn’t.”
I thought about denying it. I’ve had practice.
Instead I said: “They’re still. His hands. When he listens.”
Nefeli considered this the way she considers things that interest her — turning them over, feeling their weight. She has always been the one who knows what a thing means before I’m ready to hear it. This is why I love her. This is also why I sometimes don’t tell her things.
“Leo’s hands are never still,” I said. And I immediately wanted to take it back, not because it wasn’t true but because saying it aloud made it a different kind of true.
Nefeli didn’t say anything. She just looked at me. Long enough that I had to look away.
“Thursday?” she asked.
“Thursday.”
She picked up her wine. “Tell me how it goes.”
I knew she didn’t mean the piano.
After she left I sat for a while in the quiet. Thinking about what Lason had said — about hesitating, about letting it cost you something. I hadn’t known what that meant when he said it. I’d thought it was about music.
I’m starting to think it wasn’t only about music.