Isla's POV
The Steinway's last note hung in the air long after my hands left the keys.
Eleanor was silent for a moment. Then she closed the score with a soft snap that sounded almost like approval.
"Better," she said. Just that one word, but coming from a woman who'd trained at the Vienna Conservatory for two decades, it felt like a standing ovation.
I exhaled.
The past two hours had been brutal in the way only music can be. The Chopin had turned into something raw and exposed under Eleanor's relentless precision. She'd made me play the same sixteen bars of the Nocturne eleven times. Not because I was getting the notes wrong, but because I was playing them safely.
"You're performing," she'd said on the tenth repetition, her accent sharpening the consonants. "Stop performing. Feel it.
