Once a week. Lessons took place at his home. Since I had no interest in music before, not even in listening to it, the early sessions were spent entirely on learning how to read sheet music.

From the white key at the far left to the white key at the far right. Fingers pressing the keys, eyes following the score. With the sounds rising from each keystroke as a backdrop, Sio would name each note aloud, one by one. His voice was so pleasant to listen to that I learned to read sheet music well before I let on, and went on pretending for more than a week that I still hadn’t mastered the scale.

Everything went that way, so my progress was terribly slow. After the notes and the scale came rhythm, and after rhythm came the symbols. Once I had a decent grasp of the basics, I started learning actual pieces.

Whenever we began a new piece, Sio would sit at the piano first and play it through as a demonstration. Every time he did, I would fall into a kind of rapture and simply watch him, absorbed in his playing. When the piece ended and he found me sitting beside him with a dazed look on my face, he would laugh and say, ‘You should be watching my hands, not my face.’

‘How could I watch your hands when the person I love is right in front of me? I barely have enough time to look at your face as it is.’

I would say that and pout, but at some point I stopped bothering to say it out loud.

The first lover of his I ever saw was a fellow student of Sio’s, like me, but unlike me she was a remarkably mature woman. She was said to be two years older than Sio, in fact. Her lesson was the slot right before mine, so we would occasionally pass each other in brief, glancing encounters, but it never once occurred to me that she was his lover. I only thought that I wanted to grow up and become that kind of poised, grown woman someday.

The day I understood their relationship was the day I arrived at his house a little earlier than usual.

“Not there, Sio.”

“What do you mean, not there? That means you like it there.”

Laughter, bright and bubbling, drifted from the piano room where lessons were held. I could have opened the door, but something instinctive told me I shouldn’t. A moment later, the woman’s shallow m*ans began. I wanted to pull away from those sounds, but my feet had turned to stone and refused to move.

“Stop it. She has a lesson again soon. The daughter of Lady Astrid. She seems terribly fond of you. Seeing this would devastate her.”

“All the more reason to finish quickly.”

The creak of the chair came, and with it the woman’s cry. I was only fifteen, but I was not young enough to miss what those sounds meant. They slowed and quickened in turns, circling my ears. Adagio to allegro, then andante to vivace again.

“Sio. Sio…”

She called his name again and again, lost in ecstasy.

‘Danyu has a wonderful ear. You seem more comfortable listening than reading the score.’

The good ear Sio had praised me for was something I resented for the very first time. I squeezed my eyes shut where I stood and pressed my hands over my ears.

When she finally emerged from the room a long while later, her hair was in complete disarray. Only then did it come back to me that her clothes had always been wrinkled on those occasions when we passed each other in the hall. She looked at me leaning against the door without a trace of surprise, let out a scornful laugh, and walked away.

I lingered in front of the door for a long time, struggling to hold back tears that kept threatening to spill, before I finally managed to step inside. The stifling warmth that must have filled the room had already dissipated. Sio greeted me with his usual gentle smile, but I could not look him in the face. Every time I tried, I seemed to hear her cries and the sound of his ragged breathing.

“Sio. Do you have a girlfriend?”

“Word travels fast. How did you find out?”

“I heard. I came a little early.”

“I’m sorry. I’ll be more careful from now on.”

He gave an awkward smile and ruffled my hair.

‘What exactly are you going to be more careful about?’

I wanted to ask, but the words would not come.

I could not bear to sit through the lesson that day, so I made an excuse about not feeling well and went straight home. After that, I moved the lessons to my own house. The thought of setting foot in the space where he had been with someone else felt maddening and unbearable.

The small first-floor salon, bright with sunlight, was the only room in our house that had a piano. My mother, who loved the arts, often held musical gatherings there, and the young artists of the capital who had no patrons came to think of our salon as a place of their own.

Sio was one of those young artists. His talent had earned him recognition long before, but he chose to pursue his art freely, unwilling to be bound by patronage. The noble-born musicians who already looked down on him for being a commoner and an orphan resented the way he trusted his own abilities and did as he pleased, and quietly shut him out.

That Sio had managed to establish himself in the music world at all was entirely thanks to my mother’s help. My mother was a distant relation of the royal family and a woman of considerable standing in upper-class society. The royal family’s influence had weakened since the parliament came into power, people said, but the kingdom was still a kingdom, and the royal family was still the royal family.

Once my mother declared herself a devoted admirer of Sio Lieselotte and began supporting him, no one dared treat him with contempt for his lowly origins. Respecting Sio’s wish to make music on his own terms, my mother chose not to give him a direct stipend. Instead, she paid a substantial tuition fee and entrusted me to his instruction. I had been jealous of Sio Lieselotte, whom my mother praised endlessly, but after meeting him in person, I became an even greater admirer of his than she ever was.

The first time I met him, he was playing a nocturne. A grave, restrained opening. A plaintive melody that followed. Along with those notes that burrowed into my chest, he lodged himself in my heart.

Andante sostenuto. Following the fingertips as they moved across the keys, the notes vibrated slowly through the air, like footsteps in no hurry to arrive.

“Too fast. Slower. Too much tension in your hands, too. Did you think through your interpretation of the piece?”

It was the voice I always heard during lessons. I stopped and turned my head. Sio, who had been leaning against the salon entrance, walked toward me.

Did he know what was in my heart when I played this piece? I posed that question to myself as I watched him approach. The moment I thought that Sio Lieselotte could never know, my hands lost all desire to return to the keys.

“Why did you come? I told you, you’re dismissed.”

“You can’t expect me to just accept that out of nowhere.”

He stood before me, looking at me with an expression I rarely saw on him. He was almost always wearing that easygoing smile of his. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but it gave me a small, secret pleasure that I was the one who had put that look on his face.

A week ago, I had dismissed him. That day was my birthday, and also the day I was introduced to his fiancée. I had thought he invited me to the finest restaurant in the capital because he wanted to celebrate my birthday, but when we sat across from each other, he had no idea what day it even was. If he had known, he would not have been cruel enough to introduce me to his fiancée on that particular day.

That evening I walked home through falling snow, sobbing the whole way. The dress I had taken such care to put on and the makeup I had applied with such effort were both ruined. Without question, it was the worst birthday of my life. And now the person responsible for that birthday stood before me, asking for a reason.

“Accept it? I don’t see why that’s necessary.”

He had always put his own understanding before my feelings. A consistently self-centered man, in that regard. The truth was, I had liked that rigid, particular quality in him. I just hadn’t known it would end up wounding me.

“I paid for a piano teacher. I hired someone to teach me. If I’m not satisfied, I can let them go whenever I want, can’t I? You have plenty of other students, so worry about them instead. And my tuition stopping won’t put you in any immediate difficulty, so what does it matter?”

In truth, it was my mother who had hired Sio Lieselotte. But she did not try to stop me when I came to her in tears, saying I would no longer take lessons from him. The support that had been channeled to him under the guise of my tuition would dry up, but my mother, who genuinely valued him as a musician, would find another way to help him.

“What do you mean, it doesn’t matter? Eight years. Eight full years. After a teacher-student bond that long, I think I deserve to hear a reason when it ends.”

His face, so close to mine, looked far more worn than it had a few days ago. His eyes were bloodshot, clearly from sleepless nights, and I felt a pang of pity, but I steeled myself.