Your Favourite Stranger

Chapter Four

The Hum Under the Piano

Elaris played the recording that night with the lights off. She told herself she was only checking the sound quality, that a good student council president reviewed her materials before submitting them, but the truth was that her house felt too quiet after dinner. Her parents were abroad again, her housekeeper had gone home, and across the hedge Rhovan's bedroom window glowed yellow, close enough to wave at and very far away. She put on her headphones and pressed play.

The piano sounded better than she had expected. Whoever had placed those microphones had understood the room, and every note carried a warmth she rarely got from the school's old grand. She leaned back against her bed and closed her eyes, listening to her own hands as though they belonged to a stranger. It was strange how much a person could learn about herself by hearing it from the outside.

Then, around the thirty-minute mark, she heard something that wasn't the piano.

It was so faint that she almost missed it, a thread of sound under the quiet bars, a few notes of a hum that rose when the melody rose and fell when it fell. She sat up and pulled the headphones tight. She rewound ten seconds and played it again, and there it was, soft, unconscious, and unmistakably human. Somebody in the room had been humming along without realizing it.

The tune was her own. It was the lullaby she had been trying to pick out all afternoon, the one from the radio.

Elaris stopped the recording and sat in the dark with her heart doing something unreasonable. There had been exactly two people in that music room, herself and Caelis Veyr, the quiet boy from the window seat who had said his name was only a coincidence. She replayed the hum a third time and tried to measure the voice, but it was too faint, too low, too much a breath with a pitch. It could have been anybody. It could have been her own memory filling in the gaps.

Don't be ridiculous, she told herself. The Boy After Midnight has a hundred listeners and you're building a mystery out of a hum.

Still, she remembered Caelis's face when she had asked if he knew the song. It had gone very still, like water before it rippled. She remembered how he had said, Perfect like someone was really in the room, and how the words had settled in her chest in the exact shape of a message she had read two nights before.

Her phone buzzed. It was Rhovan. Hey. Can we talk tomorrow? I hate that things are weird.

She looked at it for a long time, then turned the screen face down on the bedspread. She wasn't angry at him, and that was what made it so hard. He had been kind. Kindness couldn't be argued with, and it couldn't be forgiven either, because there was nothing to forgive. She picked up the phone again, opened a different app, and typed into a plain white box with a small microphone icon in the corner.

It's Stranger. I'm sorry if I'm being a lot. I listened to the recording of my own piano tonight, and I thought I heard someone humming your song underneath it. I know that's impossible. I think I've just been hearing it everywhere. Is that what it's like when someone's voice gets into you?

She read it once, nearly deleted it, and pressed send before she could.

Caelis read the message at 11:03 p.m., sitting on the floor of his bedroom with his back against the bed and the phone held in both hands like something that might spill.

Someone humming your song underneath it.

He covered his face with his free hand and groaned into his palm. Of course he had hummed. He did it when he was nervous, and when he was happy, and when his brain had no other way to hold a feeling, and for forty minutes he had been all three at once, three meters from the girl he loved while she played the song he had written about her. He had forgotten the microphones could hear everything.

His phone rang. He answered without looking at it. "Don't say anything dramatic."

"I'm not dramatic," Nymor said, from what sounded like a bathtub. "I'm concerned. Did you kiss her? Did you confess? Did you fall on the piano?"

"I hummed."

There was a long pause. "I'm going to need you to say that again, but with context."

Caelis told him, in the flat voice of a man reporting a car accident, and when he finished, there was a splash and a gasp that suggested Nymor had sat up too fast in the water. "Okay. Okay. This is either a catastrophe or a miracle. Which one depends on you. Are you going to tell her?"

"I can't."

"Why not?"

"Because she told the Boy After Midnight things she wouldn't tell anyone." Caelis's voice dropped. "She cried about Rhovan. She called herself tired. If she finds out it was me, every one of those messages becomes something she said to the boy from the window. She'll never write again, and she'll never feel safe in her own head. I would be taking away the one place she could breathe."

"And if she never finds out?"

Caelis looked at the glowing screen. Is that what it's like when someone's voice gets into you? "Then I'll know a girl who trusts me completely and has no idea who I am."

"That sounds exhausting."

"It sounds like the only thing I have."

Nymor was quiet for a moment, and in the silence Caelis could hear water dripping. "I'm going to say something wise now," Nymor said. "Please don't interrupt, because it's rare."

"Go on."

"Secrets are like soup. They go bad if you leave them out too long." Another pause. "That was a metaphor. I'm very proud of it."

Caelis laughed, a real, helpless, wobbling laugh that surprised him, and the heaviness in his ribs shifted by a millimeter. After the call he sat for a while with his thumbs above the keyboard, trying to answer the girl who had just asked him whether a voice could get inside a person. In the end he typed the one honest thing he could say without lying.

Yes. It happens more than people admit. But sometimes the one humming along is just someone who loves the music too. Don't be too hard on yourself for hearing songs in the quiet.

He read it back twice. It wasn't a confession and it wasn't a denial, which meant it was exactly as cowardly as he was. He sent it anyway, then lay down on the floor and stared at the ceiling until the rain began again.

(End of Chapter 4)