*   *   *

Until now the music had never let Rose down. Sometimes she’d had doubts and wondered if she was chasing the feeling instead of flowing with it. But at her best, at the very height of her rising skill, she could disappear into the sound like a surfer riding through the tunnel of a long wave. And for that she had lived.

Now, as Rose Bowen exits Camden Town tube station after the crushing master class and turns at Camden High Street, wandering along Parkway, that all seems a long time ago in another world. In that world she might have answered Conor Flynn’s texts that first summer. Returned his kiss even. In that world her father would still be living and they would be laughing and he’d be telling her this very minute that the Kiwi dude was a “proper bollocks.” And all would be okay. And he would say something philosophical, like even though the teaching is external the learning comes from inside, and not to doubt herself. But it’s not that world, and it’s not all right. Conor’s texts had stopped and her father was not living.

Now she is just a girl moving through the night of the dark city, alone.

She passes the Jazz Cafe where a late-night crowd is queuing for Imelda May, the Irish rockabilly star. She keeps walking. It’s getting darker. The tables on the sidewalk outside of Dublin Castle are crowded with young people drinking beer and smoking. The girls wear short summer skirts and string tops and briefly fill the air with their tangled perfume. The guys are skinny with hair that hides their faces.

A lightness on Rose’s back where her violin should be makes her shoulders feel bare. It’s as though she’d had wings, but hadn’t realized it until now—now there’s a vacancy. Her feet slap the pavement as she crosses Gloucester Road. In the falling coolness she walks through the iron gates of Primrose Hill Park where the lights along the path make white patches in the grass that look like snow. Rose climbs the hill. Wind through the fingered leaves of horse chestnut trees makes a noise like rain, and hanging in the sky just above the tree line to her left is a half moon. A runner jogs with a golden retriever. A couple pushes a baby stroller. At the top of the hill, Rose sits down on a wooden bench and lowers her head to her knees, dark hair sliding along her legs touching the pavement, where it curls across the top of her shoes. A text beeps on her phone.

Rose, please ring me. Need to talk to you. ASAP. x Roger.

Red and purple lights of the BT Tower pulse in the distance. The light on the screen of her phone fades and leaves her face in darkness. As the late night folds around her she vows to sit still there above the city until she knows what to do. She ignores Roger’s text. She wants to call Iris but she can’t do it. She can’t confess to her mother just yet the madness that has happened. She wouldn’t be able to explain what she has just done or why she has done it until she can explain it to herself. It seemed that in the moment it was what she had to do. It was as though something prompted her to abandon the violin, as though she had no option but to bring the whole business of London and the academy and Roger to completion. Was she really any good? Who was she? She sat and stared down at the lights of the city.

Iris would understand, wouldn’t she? Yes. But. But she’d be heartbroken for her. So how could Rose tell her?

If Rose could have asked God for a mother, she would have asked for Iris. Good old Iris. Strong, yet able to bend like a flower in the wind. She’d have asked for a proud mother, a brave one, an understanding one, a fierce one who could be pigheaded, impulsive, determined, yet delicate, too, who wanted the best for her daughter in everything and would move whatever she had to just to make that happen, a mother who always had just the right amount of humor.

Stars pixelate in the night sky and remind Rose of the day before she left Ashwood for London at the end of August the previous year. She and her mother had lain out on beach chairs in the garden past midnight. They’d watched a meteor shower and counted twenty-four shooting stars. They’d held hands and agreed they’d come through an entire year and second summer without Luke. Somehow they had managed it. It was a miracle in a way and Rose had pressed her head against Iris’s apple-scented hair.

There are times she wonders about her birth parents (she’d be lying if she said she hadn’t thought about them, ever), but only in a matter-of-fact kind of way because Rose knows she’s lucky to have been adopted. She knows how much she was wanted and that in a way, she was chosen. That has always made her feel special. Life as Rose knows it—has only ever known it—has been as the treasured child of Iris and Luke Bowen, the mother and father who raised her, nurtured her, encouraged her, took care of her—like that time with the chicken pox when all she wanted to do was scratch her face to pieces and her mother kept bathing her in calendula oil. Or, when she fell from her bike, broke her collarbone and her mother had to do everything for her. Everything. Or the time she failed French in her Junior Certificate exam and was gutted. Then, her mother’s cups of tea and homemade scones were like some magic recipe to which only Iris knew the secret.

That’s what she needs right now, as she sits on the park bench in the fettered dark—magic. But there is nothing and no one. She’s on her own. A boisterous group arrives at the top of the hill and looks at the lights of the city. They don’t speak English. They are laughing and pushing and hanging off each other. Rose doesn’t understand them. But one of them has an iPod playing through headphones and something about the thin music escaping jolts her like a bolt of electricity.

Oh my God.

Oh my God, what have I done?

She jumps up, pushes past the group, and races down the hill and out through the gates. She tears down the High Street, past the pet shop, the greengrocers, the Primrose Hill Bookshop, past the now-closed pubs and chic restaurants and cafes, the street empty except for black plastic bags of rubbish and stacks of folded cardboard. Across the railway bridge she races down into Chalk Farm tube station. On the platform the tunnel wind blows her hair. The lights glare into her eyes and she feels disgusting, she feels like some insect wanting to run for cover. She walks quickly toward the red light so she can step into the first car as soon as the train comes and when it does, she pushes in through disembarking passengers when the doors open.

Next stop is Belsize. Did she get on the right line? Feck. Her anxiety is such that she gets out at Belsize to check. She jumps back in just as the doors are about to close. Hampstead, Golders Green. How long will it be to the end of the line? Brent Cross, Hendon, Colindale. Places she’s never been, never even heard of, doesn’t want to know. Burnt Oak. That’s what she feels like, she thinks. Burnt Oak. What have I done? What have I done?

Dadda?

Finally, Edgware. The tube doors open and Rose is first out. She’s frantic. Takes the stairs two at a time. Her heart is hammering.

I was stupid. I was stupid. I was stupid.

At the top step she looks quickly around like a frightened mother looking for a lost child. At the turnstiles other passengers come and go. She is wild with alarm, yet with hope, too, that somehow the violin will be here.

She flings her Oyster Card onto the Reader. Her eyes sweep across the ticket windows. Will someone recognize the look on her face and know that she’s not running from heartbreak but toward something? Will someone help her? Know this must be the girl looking for the violin that was brought in an hour earlier by some decent passenger? This girl with the flushed face and tossed hair must be her. It’s crazy ridiculous but it flashes through her mind just the same— It’ll be there. It’ll be there. It’ll be there.