Tears welled up and overflowed. Dicey shook her head.
“She’s perfect. Derrick said you’d hang around for her sake. I guess he was right, huh?” Miriam glanced over at the tall man, legs splayed, mouth open. “Should I wake him?”
Dicey shook her head and typed again: Who phoned
Miriam shook her head. Truly, Dicey was a wonder. “My brother. Don’t worry about it.”
About Gus?
Miriam gave a half laugh through her nose. “Does nothing get by you? You were sedated, girl!” She raised her shoulders. “Yes, it’s about Gus. He figured it out.”
Course he did
You gotta go
Miriam shook her head. “Eventually. Not now. Right now you’re more important.” Even the BiPAP couldn’t hide Dicey’s scowl. “Okay,” Miriam said. “Let me be frank. I promised your mom I wouldn’t go anywhere. And call me chicken, but I’d rather stay on your mom’s good side.”
Dicey’s eyes crinkled, but she tapped on the phone again. I handle mom.
Miriam laughed. “I have no doubt, but …”
Dicey shook off her grasp, typing again.
I’ll be here when you get back.
promise
Miriam smiled, her insides relaxing. She drew her lips between her teeth, her jaw trembling, because that, after all, was the only reason she wasn’t already on her way to the car.
Twelve more hours. She’d give it twelve hours, to make sure Dicey was really and truly on the mend. Then, she’d go.
“Okay,” she said.
Dicey closed her eyes briefly and then typed one last word.
Sing
Miriam stared at her. “Now?”
Dicey nodded. Her eyes were already drooping.
“All right,” she said softly. She breathed deep, let her throat relax, and began softly. “Amazing grace, how sweet the sound …”
She could swear Dicey was trying to sing too, but it was something more felt than heard. She clasped Dicey’s hand as she finished the first verse and began the second.
Suddenly, she wasn’t singing alone. Derrick’s voice joined hers, his rich baritone adding a layer of harmony. Tears sprang to her eyes. How long had it been since she’d really paid attention to the richness of singing with another person?
Derrick gripped her hand. Human contact—simple, profound. A warm hand, a shared love. Everything there was to live for. The thing she had withheld from Gus.
From the moment Blaise had reached out to him, this moment had been inevitable. Dicey had realized it days ago. Gus could hardly help recognizing himself in the young man he’d fathered. This was what he’d been instinctively reacting to these past weeks. What he needed now—what he craved—what kept him unnaturally invested in her life at the expense of his own—was a sense of completion, of clarity, of understanding.
Teo had known. Don’t you think he deserves …?
No, she’d said. But she’d been wrong. The time had come to let the truth into the light.
Through many dangers, toils and snares
I have already come
’Tis grace has brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.
The open road was calling. Only this time, she didn’t need to flip a coin to know where she was headed.
Part 10
San Francisco, California
Forgiveness is the final form of love.
—Reinhold Niebuhr
Text message conversation with Brad Lewis:
Miriam: Headed to SF. Wish me luck.
Brad: I have tomorrow off. I’ll meet you.
Miriam: I would love to see you but after. I need to do this on my own.
Brad: You sure?
Miriam: Yes.
Brad:
Miriam:
45
Friday, May 13
San Francisco Conservatory of Music
11:43 AM
WHEN MIRIAM WALKED INTO the San Francisco Conservatory on Friday morning, she didn’t know what to feel. The students walking around, chatting and sipping coffee in the lower atrium, represented everything she’d once wanted. But the memory of Dicey trying to sing along with “Amazing Grace” around the edge of the BiPAP mask put it all in perspective: how small her regrets really were in the grand scheme of things.
She missed Dicey. Missed her company, her no-b.s. attitude, her strength. Above all, her strength. She could use some of that for the meeting to come.
Miriam framed the atrium in her screen and captured the image, then sent it in a text. Wish you were here.
Miriam tightened her elbow against Blaise’s music bag as she looked over the railing, taking in the building of glass and pale stone stretching above and below, the staircases circling the enormous atrium. The smell of coffee drifted up from the cafe below; hallways and doorways on every level beckoned, offering tantalizing snatches of sound: vocalizations, scales, shouts of laughter. If things had been different, she might have been here today with Blaise, visiting his new school.
But the sound of a piano overwhelmed all: fluid, impassioned—Beethoven’s Tempest sonata. One of Blaise’s competition pieces. The music tugged her forward, around the perimeter, to the open door of the concert hall.
Miriam recognized the towering walls, the recessed blocks on the ceiling, and the pillars on the side walls marching toward the low stage, which was bathed in warm light. The hall looked just as it had on Teo’s sketchy iPhone video—right down to the single grand piano in the center of the stage.
She could see them in her mind’s eye. Blaise and Talia played off each other perfectly, their comic timing impeccable. She could see herself on that stage too—the performer she might have been. For the first time, it all seemed real. And disquieting. Foreign.
The music stopped. Miriam focused on the pair on the stage: two men, one at the piano, the other carrying a bag of tools.
“So far, so good,” Gus said. “Let me check something more melodic.” He touched the keys again.
Miriam rested a hand on the seat back nearest her. Somehow she’d expected to find him rough and unshaven, with circles under his eyes. She should have known Gus wouldn’t do soul torment the way everyone else did.
In the shock of seeing him so unexpectedly back in Colorado, she hadn’t taken the time to really examine him. Here, in his element, it was clear that he was everything she’d imagined him to be all these years: handsome, debonair even in polo and
