Song to listen :
Nocturne in E-flat Major, Op. 9 No. 2 Chopin
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The piano arrived on a morning so gray it seemed like the sky had forgotten how to be anything else.
Yaz heard it before he saw it. A commotion in the hallway outside the Practice Room. Voices. The scrape and thud of something heavy being moved. Men speaking in short, clipped sentences about angles and clearance and which end goes through first. He pressed himself against the wall near the door, making himself small the way he had learned to make himself small, and watched through the gap as they carried it down the basement stairs.
It was black. That was the first thing he noticed. Black and shining, the surface so polished it reflected the bare bulb overhead like a small, trapped sun. The men carried it tilted, one at each end, their faces red with effort, their boots leaving marks on the stairs that no one would clean for days.
They set it down in the center of the Practice Room. The guitar case had been moved to the corner to make space. Everything else had been moved to make space. The piano demanded it. The piano took up room the way Thorne took up room, with an authority that did not need to announce itself, that simply was.
"Sign here," one of the men said. He held out a tablet, its screen glowing blue in the new arrangement of the room. Yaz did not know who he was talking to until Mrs. Okonkwo appeared in the doorway, her orange headwrap slightly askew, her breathing quick from hurrying down the stairs.
She signed. The men left. The piano stayed.
And Yaz stood in the doorway, looking at it, feeling something in his chest that he did not have a name for. It was like the feeling of standing at the fence and watching a whole family walk past. Like the feeling of writing "Once I was seven years old" for the first time. Like the feeling of holding a guitar and knowing, somehow, that it could speak for him.
But bigger.
He walked toward it slowly. The way you approach something that might be alive, that might startle if you moved too fast. His reflection grew in the black surface as he got closer, distorted by the curve of the lid, stretched and strange, a boy who was him but also not him, a boy who lived in the piano and was waiting to come out.
He touched a key.
The note that emerged was low and round, filling the room the way water fills a glass, all the way to the edges and then stopping, contained. It hung in the air for a long moment before fading. Yaz touched another key. Higher. Brighter. A different shape of sound.
The keys were smooth beneath his fingers. Cool. They gave way with a resistance that was also an invitation, pressing down and then pushing back up, as if they wanted to be touched, as if they had been waiting for someone to find them.
"Do you like it?"
Mrs. Okonkwo had come to stand beside him. Her hand found his shoulder, warm and steady. She smelled like the tea she drank in the mornings, something floral that he did not know the name of, something that meant comfort in a world that did not always offer it.
"It's beautiful," he said. The word felt small. Inadequate. But it was the only one he had.
"Mr. Thorne sent it. He says it's for your next phase of training. A new instrument. A new teacher."
A new teacher. Yaz thought about Javier, who still came on Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays, who still laughed and played "Malagueña" and called him pequeño in a voice that made the word feel like a gift. Would this new teacher be like Javier? Would they understand that music was not just sounds arranged in order, but something deeper, something that came from the place where feelings lived before they found their way out?
"When?" he asked.
"Tomorrow. Her name is Lydia Moreau. She's very accomplished, they say. Very demanding."
Demanding. The word sat in his stomach like something he had swallowed before it was ready.
"Mr. Thorne believes in you, Yassine." Mrs. Okonkwo's voice was soft. Careful. The voice of someone who wanted to believe what she was saying and was not entirely sure she did. "He wouldn't invest all of this if he didn't think you could handle it."
Yaz looked at the piano. At the black keys nestled between the white ones like secrets between truths. At his own distorted reflection watching him from the polished surface.
Invest. The word meant money. It meant expectation. It meant someone giving you something and expecting something in return, even if they did not say what the something was, even if they smiled while they were expecting it.
He pressed another key. The note rang out. Clear and true and completely alone in the silence of the Practice Room.
"I can handle it," he said.
He was not sure if he believed it. But it was what she needed to hear, and sometimes saying things made them more true.
Lydia Moreau was nothing like Javier.
Where Javier was warm and loose, Lydia was cool and precise. She arrived at exactly 2:00 PM on a Tuesday, which was a new day, which added to the pattern in a way that felt important even though Yaz could not explain why. She wore gray. Not the gray of the orphanage walls, which was flat and dead. A different gray. Elegant. The gray of things that cost money and knew it.
Her hair was silver, pulled back from her face in a bun so tight it seemed to stretch her skin. Her eyes were pale blue, the color of ice in pictures Yaz had seen of places where ice still formed. Her hands were long, the fingers tapering, the nails filed to perfect ovals that caught the light when she moved.
"So," she said, settling onto the bench beside the piano. "You are the child."
Her accent was French. Not like Javier's Spanish, which rose and fell like music. Lydia's French was clipped, each word a small, sharp thing that she released into the air with careful aim.
"Yes," Yaz said. He was standing near the door, uncertain whether to approach, whether to sit, whether to do anything at all.
"Come here. Let me see your hands."
He came. He held out his hands. She took them in hers, turning them over, examining them the way a doctor might examine a wound. Her fingers pressed against his calluses, the hard places where the guitar had changed him.
"Guitar?" she asked.
"Yes. Three months."
"Hmm." The sound was noncommittal. Neither approval nor disapproval. Just acknowledgment. "The guitar has given you foundation. Calluses. Finger independence. But the piano is different. The piano is discipline. The piano is architecture."
She released his hands. Gestured toward the bench.
"Sit."
He sat. The bench was hard, wooden, unpadded. It made his back straighten automatically, his shoulders pull back. The posture of attention. The posture of waiting.
"Your hands are small," Lydia said. "This is not a problem. Many great pianists had small hands. The key is not span but precision. Control." She positioned herself beside the piano, standing where she could see his profile. "Show me what you know."
Yaz placed his hands on the keys. The position felt different from the guitar. More spread. More exposed. On the guitar, his hands wrapped around the neck, cradled it, protected themselves with the curve of wood. Here, they were flat and open, each finger responsible for its own key, its own note, its own small piece of the whole.
He played a C major scale. It was the first thing he had learned on his own, picking it out key by key in the days since the piano arrived, figuring out which notes went together by the way they felt in his ears. The sound was clumsy. Uneven. His ring finger lagged behind the others, not strong enough yet, not trained.
Lydia listened without expression. When he finished, the silence was long.
"You have instinct," she said finally. "This is rare and cannot be taught. What you do not have is technique. Technique can be taught. This is what I am here for."
She sat beside him on the bench. Her perfume was subtle, something clean and floral that reminded him of nothing he had smelled before. Her hands found the keys. Positioned themselves with an ease that spoke of decades, of thousands of hours, of a relationship with the instrument that was older than Yaz's entire life.
"Watch," she said. "Listen. Feel."
She began to play.
The piece was called Nocturne in E-flat Major, Opus 9 Number 2. Yaz did not know that yet. He would learn it later, would see it written in Lydia's neat handwriting on the sheet music she provided, would come to know those numbers and letters as intimately as he knew the forty-seven tiles above his bed. But in this moment, he knew only the sound.
It was hope.
He did not know how else to describe it. The melody rose and fell like breathing, like the rhythm of walking toward something you wanted, like the shape of a future you could almost see but not quite reach. It was gentle and insistent at the same time. It made his chest ache in a way that was not quite sadness, not quite joy. Something in between. Something that had no name.
Lydia's fingers moved across the keys with a fluidity that seemed impossible. No hesitation. No struggle. The music simply flowed through her, as natural as water flowing downhill, as inevitable as time passing.
When she finished, Yaz realized his hands had risen from his lap without permission. They hovered over the keys, wanting to touch them, wanting to try, wanting to make that sound come out of this instrument and into the world.
"Chopin," Lydia said. "He understood something that many composers do not understand. That music is not about showing what you can do. It is about showing what you feel. The technique serves the emotion. Not the other way around."
She looked at him. Her ice-blue eyes were softer now, or maybe he was seeing them differently, seeing beneath the precision to something else, something that cared even if it did not know how to show it.
"Talent without discipline is a river without banks," she said. "It floods everywhere and nourishes nothing. You have the talent. I will give you the discipline. Together, we will build something."
Build. The word was like Thorne's word, invest. It meant expectation. It meant work. But coming from Lydia, it felt different. It felt like a promise instead of a demand.
"When do we start?" Yaz asked.
Lydia almost smiled. Almost. The corners of her mouth lifted by a fraction, a movement so small he might have imagined it.
"We have already started. The question is whether you are ready to continue."
September became October. October became November. The days shortened. The light through the windows changed, losing its summer warmth, becoming thin and pale like tea diluted with too much water.
Yaz practiced.
That was what his life became. A rhythm of practice. Scales in the morning before the bell rang. Lessons with Lydia on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Lessons with Javier on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays. The hours in between filled with keys and strings, with chord progressions and finger exercises, with the slow, patient work of teaching his body to do what his mind could imagine but not yet execute.
The Nocturne was impossible at first. His fingers could not find the keys fast enough, could not coordinate the left hand's rolling arpeggios with the right hand's singing melody. He stumbled. He stopped. He started over. Again and again, until the stopping felt like part of the music, until the frustration became its own kind of fuel.
"You are trying too hard," Lydia said during their third lesson. She had been watching him struggle through the opening bars, her face unreadable. "Music is not conquered. It is courted. You must woo it, not wrestle it."
Woo. He did not know the word. He asked what it meant.
"To pursue with gentle persistence. To show respect while also showing desire. To make the beloved feel chosen, not captured."
Yaz looked at the keys. At his small hands, still not strong enough, still not coordinated enough. At the Nocturne waiting in the sheet music, patient and impossible, beautiful and out of reach.
"How do I woo it?"
Lydia's almost-smile appeared again. "You practice. But you practice with love, not with desperation. There is a difference. Can you feel it?"
He could not. Not yet. But he tried.
That night, alone in the Practice Room after dinner, he played the Nocturne again. Not for accuracy. Not for speed. Just to hear it, to let it fill the room, to court it the way Lydia had said.
His fingers stumbled in the same places. The arpeggios rolled unevenly. The melody did not sing the way it sang when Lydia played.
But something was different. Something in the way his hands approached the keys, something in the way his body leaned into the instrument instead of fighting against it. The music was still imperfect. But it was warmer. It was more alive.
He played it again. And again. And each time, it got a little closer to what it was supposed to be.
This is how you learn, the Maestro said. Warm. Present. Encouraging, the way it had been in the beginning, before the contract, before the red light. Not by forcing. By yielding. By letting the music teach you while you think you're teaching it.
Yaz smiled in the darkness. It was the first time he had smiled while practicing in weeks.
Thorne visited more frequently as the weeks passed.
He came on Thursdays now, after Lydia's lessons. He would arrive just as she was leaving, their paths crossing in the hallway, their nods to each other polite but distant. Two professionals who worked for the same purpose but did not, perhaps, share the same understanding of what that purpose was.
"Yassine." Thorne's voice was always warm when he said the name. As if Yaz were something precious. As if the name itself carried value. "How are the lessons progressing?"
They would sit in the Practice Room, Thorne in the chair that had been Javier's, Yaz on the piano bench. The conversations were never long. Thorne asked questions. Yaz answered. The questions were about music, about practice, about how he felt, whether he was happy, whether he needed anything.
The answers were always the same. Fine. Good. Working hard. No, nothing needed.
But sometimes Thorne would talk instead of ask. He would lean back in the chair, his long legs crossed, his gold watch catching the light, and he would share stories. Stories about the music industry. About artists he had discovered, nurtured, revealed to the world. About the dangers of fame without preparation, of talent without protection, of young people chewed up and spit out by a machine that cared only for profit.
"I've seen it happen," he said one evening in late October. The Practice Room was dim, the single window showing a sky already darkening toward night. "Children like you. Extraordinary children. They're discovered, and the world goes mad, and everyone wants a piece of them. Record labels. Media. Fans who love them until they don't, who build them up so they have further to fall."
Yaz listened. He always listened. It was what children did when adults talked. But something in him was paying closer attention now, cataloging the words, the tone, the way Thorne's hands moved when he spoke, gesturing at invisible enemies, invisible dangers, invisible futures that only he could see.
"I won't let that happen to you," Thorne continued. "You remind me of myself at your age, you know. The same intensity. The same hunger. The same sense that there was something inside you, something that had to come out, something the world needed even if it didn't know it yet."
Himself at your age. Yaz thought about what that meant. Thorne had been young once. Had been small. Had been a child who did not yet know what he would become. It was strange to imagine. Thorne seemed like someone who had always been exactly what he was now: silver-haired, certain, sitting in rooms and making decisions about other people's lives.
"What happened to you?" Yaz asked. "When you were my age?"
Thorne's face did something complicated. A flicker of surprise, maybe. Or discomfort. The face of someone who had not expected the question and was deciding how much truth to include in the answer.
"I learned," he said finally. "I learned what the world wanted from people like us. And I decided to be the one who controlled that, instead of the one who was controlled by it."
Controlled. The word hung in the air between them. It was a powerful word. A word that could mean protection or possession, depending on who was using it and why.
"Is that what you're doing with me?" Yaz asked. "Controlling it?"
Thorne's smile returned. The warm one. The one that reached his eyes, or seemed to.
"I'm giving you what I wish someone had given me. Time. Training. A chance to become who you're supposed to be, before the world decides who you should be instead."
It was a good answer. A perfect answer. The kind of answer that made you feel safe and seen and grateful, that wrapped itself around you like a blanket and asked nothing in return except that you stay beneath it, warm and still.
Yaz nodded. He said thank you. He meant it, mostly.
But later, alone in the Practice Room, practicing the Nocturne for the hundredth time, he found himself thinking about control. About who had it. About what it meant to be protected by someone who was also making decisions about your future, your training, your life.
He believes in you, the Maestro said. The voice was there, but different now. Quieter. More cautious. But believing in someone and owning them can look very similar from the outside. Which one is this?
Yaz did not have an answer.
The variation came by accident.
He was practicing the Nocturne in early November, moving through the familiar passages, his fingers finally finding the keys without fighting, when something shifted. His left hand played the usual arpeggio. But his right hand, without his permission, went somewhere else. A different note. A different shape. A deviation from the sheet music that was wrong, that was not what Chopin had written, that was...
Beautiful.
He stopped. Stared at his hands. Tried to remember what he had just played.
His fingers found it again. The same wrong turn, the same deviation, the same unexpected note that somehow fit, that somehow made the melody more his even as it made it less Chopin's.
He played the passage again. And again. Each time, the variation settled more firmly into place, becoming part of the piece, becoming inseparable from the original the way a graft becomes part of a tree.
It was small. A tiny thing. Four measures, maybe five. But it was his. He had made it. Not from whole cloth like "7 Years," but from something that already existed, something that had been beautiful before he touched it and was now beautiful in a different way.
He played the entire Nocturne, incorporating the variation, and when he finished, the silence felt different. Charged. Like something had changed in the room itself.
"That was not Chopin."
Lydia's voice came from the doorway. He had not heard her arrive. She stood with her coat still on, her bag over her shoulder, her ice-blue eyes fixed on his hands.
"I'm sorry," Yaz said automatically. "I didn't mean to..."
"Do not apologize." She walked toward the piano, her heels clicking against the floor. "Play it again. The part that was yours."
He played it. His hands shook slightly, the tremor of being watched, being judged, being seen in the middle of something that was supposed to be private.
Lydia listened. When he finished, she was quiet for a long moment.
"You have begun to speak," she said finally. "Not just to repeat. This is..." She paused, searching for the word. "This is what I was waiting for."
Waiting for. As if she had known it would come. As if all the lessons, all the drills, all the scales and exercises had been building toward this moment, toward the instant when Yaz would stop playing other people's music and start playing his own.
"Should I keep it?" he asked. "Or go back to the original?"
Lydia's almost-smile appeared. This time it was closer to a real smile, a crack in the ice that showed something warmer beneath.
"Keep it. Develop it. See where it leads." She sat beside him on the bench, her presence close and cool. "The masters are not monuments to worship. They are conversations to continue. Chopin would be honored that his work inspired yours."
Honored. Yaz thought about Chopin, who had lived two hundred years ago, who had written this melody in a world so different from this one that it might as well have been a different planet. Did the dead feel honored? Did they feel anything at all?
But the music felt honored. The Nocturne felt honored, if a piece of music could feel. It felt like it had been waiting for Yaz to arrive, to add his small voice to its larger one, to continue the conversation Lydia had described.
"Thank you," he said. "For teaching me."
Lydia nodded. The ice was back in her eyes, but it was not as cold as before. Or maybe he was seeing differently. Maybe the practice was changing not just his fingers but his vision, teaching him to see beneath surfaces the way music taught him to hear beneath sounds.
"Continue," she said. "We have much work to do."
Thorne heard the variation the following week.
He had arrived unannounced, as he sometimes did now, appearing in the doorway of the Practice Room while Yaz was playing. Yaz did not notice him until he finished the piece and the applause started, a single pair of hands clapping slowly, deliberately, like a metronome marking time.
"Remarkable," Thorne said. He stepped into the room, still clapping, his hazel-green eyes bright with something that might have been pride, might have been calculation, might have been both. "Absolutely remarkable. When did you compose that?"
"Last week. It just... happened."
"Inspiration often does. The muse strikes when she chooses, not when we wish." Thorne crossed to the piano, stood beside it, ran his fingers along the polished black surface. "Play it again. I want to hear every note."
Yaz played. The variation felt different with Thorne watching. More exposed. Less private. Like undressing in front of a stranger, showing skin that had only ever been seen by his own eyes.
But he played it anyway. Because Thorne had asked. Because saying no did not seem like an option.
When he finished, Thorne was quiet. Thinking. His finger tapped against the piano's surface, a rhythm only he could hear.
"This is exactly what I hoped for," he said finally. "You're not just learning, Yassine. You're creating. You're becoming." He looked at Yaz, his gaze intense. "Do you know how rare that is? How many people can play Chopin. How few can add to him."
The praise should have felt good. It was shaped like praise. Delivered like praise.
But Yaz noticed Thorne reaching for his tablet. Tapping something on the screen. Turning it slightly away, as if hiding what he was writing, as if the words were not meant for Yaz to see.
"What are you writing?"
The question came out before he could stop it. Direct. Unpolished. The question of a child who had not learned to pretend he did not notice things.
Thorne's finger paused. His smile flickered, just for a moment, before settling back into place.
"Notes. Documentation. Nothing you need to worry about." He pocketed the tablet. "The important thing is that you keep working. Keep growing. You're exactly on track."
On track. For what? Yaz wanted to ask. But the question felt too large, too sharp, too likely to cut something if he was not careful.
Later, in the hallway outside the Practice Room, he passed Dayo going the other way. Dayo was carrying his tablet, the same kind Thorne used, and he was reading something on the screen with a frown that looked like concentration or worry or both.
Yaz caught a glimpse. Just a flash. Words on the screen.
Market potential. Hold for development.
Then Dayo noticed him looking and the tablet tilted away, and the words were gone.
"Hey, kid," Dayo said. His voice was neutral. Careful. "Good practice session?"
"Fine," Yaz said. "Good."
Dayo nodded. Walked past. His footsteps faded down the corridor, taking the words with them.
Market potential. Hold for development. Yaz did not know exactly what they meant. But he knew they were not words about music. They were words about money. About plans. About a future that was being decided without him, written in documents he was not supposed to see.
Why do they need to keep you hidden to keep you safe?
The Maestro's voice was quiet. Almost a whisper. As if it was afraid of being overheard.
Yaz did not have an answer. He stood in the hallway for a long time, listening to the silence, feeling the shape of a question he could not quite ask.
Mrs. Okonkwo found him at the fence.
It was late November now. The cold had arrived in earnest, the kind of cold that bit through the thin fabric of his orphanage-issued jacket and settled into his bones like something that planned to stay. Outdoor hour was brief these days, most children hurrying through the yard and back inside, unwilling to linger in weather that punished lingering.
But Yaz stayed at the fence. He always stayed at the fence. The cold did not bother him, or he had learned to ignore it, or he had decided that the cold was a price worth paying for the view of the street and the families and the world that continued without him, indifferent to his watching.
"You'll catch a chill," Mrs. Okonkwo said, coming to stand beside him. Her breath made small clouds in the air, ghostly shapes that formed and dissolved with each word. "Come inside."
"In a minute."
She did not push. That was one of the things he appreciated about her. She understood that children sometimes needed to stand in the cold looking at nothing, that not all pain required fixing, that presence was sometimes more important than intervention.
"I spoke with Mr. Thorne today," she said after a moment. Her voice was different. Careful in a way that was not the usual careful. The careful of someone about to say something they had been thinking about for a long time.
Yaz's fingers tightened on the fence. The cold metal bit into his skin, familiar and grounding.
"About what?"
"About... your future. Your situation here." She paused. The silence was full of things unsaid. "A family came to the office. They were interested in... they asked about you."
Interested in. Asked about. Yaz understood what she was saying. A family had come to the orphanage looking for a child to adopt. A family had seen his name on a list, or a picture in a file, and had thought maybe, possibly, this one.
"What did they say?"
"They wanted to meet you. To know more about you." Another pause. Longer this time. "Mr. Thorne was there. He... explained the situation. The training. The investment. He said it wouldn't be appropriate to disrupt your development. That stability was crucial."
Stability. The word Thorne always used. The word that meant staying here, staying hidden, staying under the contract and the cameras and the slow, patient process of becoming whatever Thorne wanted him to become.
"So they left."
"Yes." Mrs. Okonkwo's hand found his shoulder. Warm through the thin fabric. "I'm sorry, Yassine. I thought you should know."
She was not apologizing for telling him. She was apologizing for what had happened. For the family that had been turned away. For the chance at something different that had been closed before it could open.
"It's okay," Yaz said. His voice was steady. Even. The voice of someone who had learned not to hope for things that did not come. "This is temporary. You said so. When I'm ready, when the training is done, I'll perform. And then..."
And then what? He did not know. The then was as murky as the gray sky overhead, as uncertain as the future Thorne kept promising but never defining.
"Yes," Mrs. Okonkwo said. "When you're ready." But her voice did not sound convinced. Her voice sounded like someone who was trying to believe something she was not sure was true.
They stood in silence. The wind cut through the yard, rattling the chain-link fence, carrying the smell of car exhaust and cold concrete. Beyond the fence, a woman walked past with a child bundled in a red coat, the child's mitten-covered hands waving at nothing, at everything, at a world that was available to him because someone had chosen to make it so.
Yaz watched them until they turned the corner. Then he let go of the fence. His fingers ached from the cold, the metal having pressed its diamond pattern into his skin, a grid of small hurts that would fade in minutes but felt, in this moment, like something permanent.
"I should practice," he said.
Mrs. Okonkwo nodded. She looked like she wanted to say something more. Her mouth opened, closed, opened again. But whatever the words were, they did not come out.
"I'll bring you tea," she said finally. "Something warm. You can practice with something warm in your stomach."
It was not what she had meant to say. But it was something. It was care, offered in the only form available. And Yaz took it, because care was rare, because warmth was worth accepting wherever you could find it.
"Thank you," he said. And he meant it. Even if the thank you could not cover all the things he was actually feeling. Even if gratitude was the smallest part of the complicated knot in his chest.
That night, he played the Nocturne differently.
Not better. Not worse. Just different. The variation was still there, the four measures he had created, the small piece of himself inserted into Chopin's larger work. But now there was something else beneath it. A weight. A sadness that had not been there before.
He played the melody, and he thought about the family. About the people who had come to the office and asked about a child named Yassine Kwon and been told no, not this one, this one is not available, this one belongs to something else.
He played the arpeggios, and he thought about the fence. About all the families he had watched walk past without seeing him. About all the children who had been chosen, taken, given names that meant something because someone had decided they meant something.
He played the coda, the final descending phrases that ended the piece, and he thought about control. About Thorne sitting in his chair, speaking in his smooth voice, making decisions about futures he did not have to live, closing doors he did not have to walk through.
If this is protection, the Maestro said, why does it feel like a wall?
The question had been there for weeks. Maybe longer. A small, persistent voice beneath the louder voices of lessons and practice and the daily rhythm of becoming what he was supposed to become.
Now it surfaced. Clear and sharp. Impossible to ignore.
He finished the Nocturne. The final note faded into silence. The Practice Room was very still, the kind of still that felt like an answer even though he did not know what the question was.
The black keys and white keys stretched before him like a road. He could play hope now. He could make it sing.
But somewhere beneath the music, a question was forming that he did not yet have words for: If this was protection, why did it feel like a wall?