Adelaide’s left hand, skeletal and precise, reached for the mahogany metronome. She wound it. Tick. Tick. Tick. “Again. Slowly. From the sign.”

Luca looked at the keys. They were no longer black and white. They were the color of rain on cobblestones, of bread rising in a cold oven, of something almost mended.

“Pozzoli, opus 55, number 7,” Adelaide said, placing the yellowed sheet music on the stand. “Page fourteen. The exercise in parallel sixths.”

One rainy Tuesday, a new student arrived. His name was Luca. He was eleven, with knuckles like walnuts and the posture of a question mark.

Signora Adelaide Pozzoli had not played a piano for pleasure in forty-three years. Her life, since inheriting her father’s conservatory in Milan, had been a cathedral of dry fingerings: legato, staccato, terzine, scale cromatiche . Her students feared not her wrath, but her silence. When a boy played a B-natural instead of a B-flat, she would simply stop the metronome and stare at the offending key as if it had personally insulted her ancestors.