For three years, Grace had treated her blindness as a wall between her and the things she loved, and the piano had become the tallest part of that wall.

She had stopped playing not because she could not physically press the keys — her hands worked perfectly — but because the piano was bound up, in her mind, with seeing: with reading the sheet music, with watching her own fingers, with the whole sighted apparatus through which she had always approached it.

To sit at it blind felt like sitting at the ruin of a thing, a monument to what she had lost.

And what Emily gave her, and what Lily had understood instinctively, was a reframing so simple it took three years to arrive at: that the music had never lived in Grace’s eyes.