Chapter 5 - The Missing Bars
The morning after we discovered June's letter, my father arranged for a professional conservator to examine the damaged score.
I almost protested.
Having someone handle the torn pages felt like allowing a stranger into a private conversation between my grandmother, my mother, and me.
But the conservator, a patient woman named Rosa Delgado, spoke about fragile paper with the same respect June had once given a hesitant beginner at the piano.
She explained what could be repaired, what should remain untouched, and how to document the pages before changing anything.
I told her there was a complete digital version saved on my laptop and in the college's cloud storage.
Rosa nodded.
"Then the important thing is not pretending the torn paper is your only copy," she said.
"It is still an original object, and we can care for it as such."
Her distinction mattered.
The composition was not dead.
Only one of its physical forms had been damaged.
Together we laid the fragments beneath protective sheets while Marcus photographed each page and noted where it had been found.
The fifth page, containing a difficult transition into the second movement, appeared to be missing entirely.
So did the sheet on which I had first written June's name beneath the dedication.
I remembered Celeste holding those two pages after ripping the rest.
At the time I thought she had dropped them onto the floor.
Now I was no longer certain.
"Could she have taken them?"
Marcus asked.
I hated answering yes.
But I remembered the movement of her left hand as Owen guided her toward the doorway.
She had clutched something thin against the front of her crimson blouse.
I had assumed it was her own lesson notes.
Marcus did not treat my uncertain memory as fact.
He wrote down what I remembered and asked whether there might be photographs of the pages in my phone backups.
There were.
I had photographed my handwritten revisions to compare them after playing each version.
The images carried ordinary date and time metadata, not magical proof of authorship, but they showed a consistent record of work unfolding over months.
My laptop also contained successive draft files, MIDI recordings from my keyboard, and a dated email in which I had sent Celeste an early version for feedback.
That email became particularly important because Celeste had answered with instructions to replace my dedication with her name.
Her reply had seemed irritating then.
Now it looked like the beginning of a documented attempt to rewrite ownership.
My father wanted a legal review before anyone contacted the concert organizers.
He called Naomi Brooks, an attorney who had handled the family's charitable contracts for years and who understood intellectual property better than the rest of us.
Naomi listened without interrupting as I described the piece and Celeste's proposed credit statement.
She asked whether I had agreed to a joint composition, assigned any copyright, or signed a written commissioning agreement.
I answered no to all three.
"Helping someone improve a score is not automatically the same as writing it," Naomi said.
"But we'll review every document before telling anyone what the law conclusively means for these particular materials."
I liked that she did not offer a spectacular promise about ruining Celeste overnight.
She asked for the drafts, the emails, and the unsigned credit statement.
She also asked my father not to call the teacher's professional contacts and threaten their careers.
"We want the documents to carry the argument," Naomi said.
"Not your influence."
Charles looked mildly offended, then nodded.
He had built businesses by dealing decisively with problems.
Accepting that a legal process required patience was difficult for him.
I found it difficult too.
The next discovery came not from a detective or an elaborate technological search, but from my own crowded inbox.
A week before the attack, a regional arts foundation had invited me to approve a draft concert program for a spring donor preview.
I had ignored the email because Celeste had told me the program was preliminary.
Now I opened it and read the proposed title.
For the Hands That Stayed, by Celeste Vale, arranged by Ethan Reed.
My stomach dropped.
The draft placed her name in larger type than mine and described the work as her meditation on family devotion.
She had not even asked permission to borrow the title that meant so much to us.
I forwarded the message to Naomi.
Then I kept reading.
The foundation's administrator had attached an earlier email from Celeste saying she could produce signed author acknowledgments shortly.
This was the promise Celeste had demanded I make good on.
When I refused, she had tried to make me believe refusal would cost me my musical future.
I wondered how many times she had used the same trick against students who lacked money or parents willing to intervene.
Naomi advised us to ask the foundation to pause use of the score pending a documentation review.
The administrator agreed to hold the program while authorship was clarified and apologized for presenting provisional information as settled.
That response did not mean we had won a case.
It meant the story Celeste wanted the world to accept had finally met a fact it could not easily explain.
That evening I sat near the piano with Rosa's photographs spread beside my laptop.
I enlarged an image of the missing fifth page and found the pencil marks I had made after listening to June's cassette.
A sudden thought troubled me.
Celeste had asked me to remove a single measure, a quiet passage in the lower register, because she claimed it interrupted the momentum.
I had refused, and she had called the measure sentimental.
But when I checked the foundation's preview recording, the same measure was present in an orchestral mock-up credited to Celeste.
Whoever prepared that preview had used a version of my score after my final revision.
I showed my father the waveform and the matching notes.
He listened in silence.
"Can you prove that arrangement came from your file?"
he asked.
"I can show when I wrote it and when I sent it to her," I answered.
"The rest needs examination."
He looked proud of my caution.
I was proud of it too.
Months with Celeste had taught me to doubt every judgment I made.
Carefully identifying what I knew, and what I did not, felt like recovering something she had taken.
Before I closed the laptop, an email arrived from a different address.
It carried no greeting and only one line beneath an attachment.
May you like
"She did this to me, too."
The attachment was a photograph of another young musician's torn score.
