Second Chair

There is a particular kind of silence that lives in a rehearsal room after everyone else has gone home, and Yun Sagara had spent four years learning its shape.

She stayed late because the practice rooms were booked until nine and because she did not like being heard while she was still bad at something. Both reasons were true. Only one of them was the reason.

The other was that Ilse Brandt practised in room 4 until eight forty, and Yun had never once been able to make herself leave before that door opened.

They had been placed side by side in their first week, a first-year seating chart drawn up by a coordinator who did not know either of them. Ilse in the first chair. Yun in the second. Nobody had revisited the decision since, which meant that for four years Yun had watched the back of the same head, matched the same bow, and breathed at the same time as a woman who had never asked her a single personal question.

It was not that Ilse was cruel. That would have been easier.

It was that Ilse was precise — with her playing, with her time, with the exact number of words a situation required — and Yun had somehow ended up filed under situations requiring very few.

“You’re flat on the descent,” Ilse said, in passing, in October of their second year.

Yun had gone home and worked the passage for three hours. She had not been flat on the descent again in two and a half years. Ilse had never mentioned it a second time.

At eight forty, the door of room 4 opened. Yun heard the case snap shut, the specific rhythm of it, three seconds she could have identified in a dark room among a hundred other violinists.

Then, unexpectedly, footsteps that did not go toward the stairs.

Yun looked up as Ilse appeared in her doorway, coat already on, expression doing the thing it always did — arranging itself into something that gave nothing away.

“Novak’s out,” Ilse said. “For the term. Maybe longer.”

Yun set down her bow. Novak was the concertmaster. Novak was the reason the seating chart had never been revisited.

“Alright,” she said carefully.

“They’re giving us the Bach.” Ilse’s jaw moved slightly, the way it did before she said something she had already decided not to soften. “The double. Both parts. Together.”

The silence in the room changed shape.

“Us,” Yun said.

“Yes.”

“Have you told them no?”

Ilse looked at her for a long moment. Long enough that Yun, who had spent four years reading the back of this woman’s head, realised she had no idea at all what the front of it was thinking.

“No,” Ilse said. “I haven’t.”