Page 77 of Second Song

“You can’t have been any more than six or seven, but a blackbird sang, and you played its song back on your whistle. Could play almost every bird I named. We looked some up on my phone.”

I do remember that.

“The next time she tutored one of my students, I tried to keep her here for longer by luring her with instruments to add to her collection. With castanets and sleigh bells. With tambourines. Never managed to keep her long term.” His snort is so soft. “I used to be married to my work until I fell under her spell. With her unique take on what learning could look like, with her magic. And with the music you two made together. I watched and listened for years before I got a chance to keep you both.”

It isn’t lightning that zips across the night sky outside. Maybe it’s a small star falling. We both watch a bright arc that abruptly blinks out before he describes another.

“We were only married for a few months. She crammed more life into them than I had into the previous fifty-five years. Couldn’t believe she finally fell for me too. I’ve wondered…” His swallow is audible. “I’ve wondered since if she was subconsciously aware of what was coming. That she was only a few more headaches away from an aneurysm. Her last words were about you. I promised her that you’d be safe with me.”

I picture the practice rooms I still have a key to. The codes he’s sent so often. A one-way trip he arranged to an Irish place of safety, and the heart of his family that he wrapped me in far away from trouble. “I didn’t know that.”

“No reason you would. But again, in hindsight, the life you had before was the one that suited you best.”

“Because it had no rules?”

He has a different answer, and at some point tonight, I’ll stop being surprised by him. I’m not there yet.

“Because it had no limits.” He crouches next to my roll of paper, touching where I started getting into trouble. Where I started failing. Where each lesson in this school lasted forever when all I wanted was to drum away my feelings. Again he has a different reason for my distraction. “How could you ever fit into a timetabled life? It was like pinning a butterfly’s wings and expecting it not to struggle.” He moves on to where a gap breaks my life path in two, and asks another surprising question. “Have you performed since?”

“Have I sung? Once.” This truth is as gritty his voice was. “It was good.”

I’m not prepared for this transformation. For this smile that feels like a first real one from him when I know that isn’t true after tonight’s wedding-photo reminder. Something shifts then. An old gap between us narrows enough that I can tell him, “You did exactly what she asked. You gave me what I needed.”

His lips press tight together until he blows out a sharp breath and touches that gap on my roll of paper. “It didn’t feel that way when this happened.” His lips compress again before he blurts, “Can I talk to you about this?”

That’s why I’m here, so I follow him along the hallway to another room I used to avoid. “The common room?” It used to be filled with students who didn’t get me, although in hindsight, Teo didn’t have more than one friend either until he started to open up. Grief had slammed my door shut. What my stepdad shows me on this common room notice board is what turned a key and locked it.

He touches the edge of a poster. “My vision of success used to involve every student getting high grades. But after the contest? After what happened to you? I couldn’t avoid this gap in their curriculum.” The poster shares a heading from my workbook, one beginning with the letter R that he says is now part of every student’s learning.

“Relationships should always be two-way. Respectful.” He reads some more from this poster before his gaze meets mine, eye contact almost impossible to maintain when he murmurs, “Should always be consensual, not coercive.”

Tonight, his gaze is a different kind of spotlight, one I don’t have to find my voice under.

He speaks for me.

“You changed right in front of my eyes on that livestream, Rowan. I heard you say things I knew you normally wouldn’t. Saw what that did to you in private. How it silenced you, little by little, and yet you kept going.”

Until I couldn’t.

“That photo…” He clears his throat. “It was published the day after I brought you home. It was… it was taken much earlier.”

He isn’t asking me a question. I don’t have to say, “I don’t know” or “I can’t remember.” He fills every gap for me.

“They knew about it and about the story and held it in reserve to… encourage your compliance.” He must mentally count back from each dire boy-band performance, calculating when I’d been ordered to sing with them but had refused to. “They had both the photo and story for months, and threatened to share them if you didn’t follow orders?”

Nodding has never been harder. This is even more difficult to acknowledge. “I didn’t know what to do.” This is a lot easier to grit out. “I just wanted to come home.”

“But you felt like you didn’t have one?”

Just like that, I’m back in a garden with Luke listing another kid’s trauma. I’m also back with Charles scratching a C into damp sand before four other initials. And I’m back in a library with a padre and a small boy who needed respite before his pain could come out.

“Rowan,” my stepdad asks so quietly, so gently, so full of apprehension. “Do you remember anything at all about when that photo was taken?”

When I shake my head, he shifts slightly, lifting a hand, which shakes again like when I marched into his study without knocking or waiting.

This time, he’s the one of us who keeps marching forward. He touches another word on a poster designed to help students navigate a world where some people are born to sing and others are born to take advantage. It gives simple how-to-stay-safe guidance, like keeping drinks covered in nightclubs and at parties.

It also gives a name for my own R-word suspicions.

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