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partner, Quincy, tended to keep her late, and on those nights Oliver practiced longer than usual.
     Quincy worried him.
    He remembers one of her visits. He doesn’t know why it comes to him now, inside the tunnel. The studio was dark except for
     a single light illuminating a maze of sheet music scrawled in faint pencil, notes so quick and urgent they were indecipherable
     to anyone but him. His fingers ached from hours of playing, but he didn’t stop. The composition was all but there when he
     heard the click of the door. He didn’t know what time it was, only that she was late. It was always that way. The songs came
     in the pressured moments of waiting, his hands straining to keep pace with his mind.
    When he heard April’s footsteps behind him, he started the song from the top, eyes closed, mind awash. He felt himself rising
     up from the bench, dispossessed from his hands at the keys. The studio reverberated, guitars quivering on their hooks, flutes
     vibrating inside their cases. If April was breathing, Oliver could not hear it.
    When it was over, he leaned on the piano. The room was silent but teeming; the walls retained the sound. April straddled the
     bench with her back to him, the coarse denim of her jacket whisking his shoulder. Her long hair was in disarray, scented with
     smoke from the bar.
    “Quincy keep you?”
    She did not answer. The dim halo of light reached the worn knee of her jeans, her fist resting on her thigh, thumbnail gnawed.
     She was the kind of girl he would expect to have long, frightening nails, a color called Cherry Vanilla or Fire Truck Red.
     Instead they were unpainted, bitten down to the flesh. Each time Oliver noticed this, it came as a surprise. Her Western boots
     were silver-tipped, imitation snakeskin, as if she were someone to contend with.
    “Can you do it again?” she said. “Slower this time.”
    Oliver grazed his fingers over the keys without depressing them. He wanted to ask her something, but what? The question floated
     in his mind, just below articulation.
    April got up and slid down along the side of the upright piano, her usual spot. On the floor, she pulled her knees to her
     chest and bowed her head. Oliver began the song with eyes opened this time. He noticed that her hands, now raked through her
     hair, were in fists. She sat with her back to the piano to hear the music with her body as well as her ears.
    Oliver tried to concentrate on the song as he had the first time, but he kept thinking of April in the steamy, windowless
     back room of the bar, loading and unloading the dishwasher. He screwed up the last few notes and the song ended abruptly.
     “I wish you’d quit that place.” He paused, waiting for the usual argument.
    “It’s your best song yet,” she said. “You’ve turned a corner. Something’s new.”
    He closed the piano lid and sat near her on the floor. “What about it? I could get you something at the nursery. The orchid
     lady just quit. Or you could take my job when I leave.” He let the sentence trail off. She could have gotten into college,
     too, had she applied. She looked up, her face flushed. He smelled booze and wondered why he hadn’t noticed before.
    “They’d die,” she said. “The orchids.”
    He thought of the creamy petals easily bruised, smooth as newborn skin. “I’m telling you, April, you don’t need this job.
     You can do better.”
    “Remind me,” she said. “How much is the scholarship for?”
    “Don’t,” he said. “You know I turned it down.”
    She looked at him with dark, unblinking eyes. Oliver had called Juilliard on his own, declining their offer before discussing
     it with his teachers, his father, least of all April. “You could still enroll without the scholarship,” she said. “Take out
     a loan.”
    “Listen,” he said. “Stanford isn’t exactly chopped liver.”
    “It is if you’re Oliver Night.”
    “It’s only a piano, April. It’s not my life.”
    She was silent.
    “At