She had not lost music, or dignity, or her capacity for joy, or her right to a full life, though for three years she had let the one loss masquerade as all of them.

And when she found middle C, and missed it, and laughed, what she was really doing was taking back everything the blindness had bluffed her out of but never actually seized.

The blindness had taken her eyes.

It had been trying, for three years, to take everything else by convincing her it already had.

At that piano, she finally called the bluff.

And she got the rest of her life back, changed in its methods but whole in its substance, for the taking.