The music had stopped long ago, but she only recognized the silence when it was split by the peal of a clock tower. Her phone sat on the piano, dead quiet. It had been set to silent and Do Not Disturb for about a week or two. She wasn’t sure about the time; everything was blending together. God. The world still felt strange and new and scary, and she had done what she did best: bury her head in the sand and lock everything else out. It was old tactic, one she had had tons of practice with and employed with impunity. Her life had just been way messier than it had been in a long time. It was strange enough to get used to Nerys being gone. She was enjoying a nice sabbatical in the French Rivera, and the world was going on without her. For so long, Nerys had clawed her way to be the center of life at Primrose, and now she was..just gone from it. Josh got a nice promotion, and the teachers were able to breathe a little bit better to have “one of their own” in charge. They speculated why Nerys had left: mental breakdown, covered-up scandal, a plush new job somewhere else. Only Rowen knew the truth.

It had been her.

She had met a boy, well a man, and that had been the start of it. They met one night, then the next morning. Breakfast had been great, what followed had been amazing. It had been so easy to shut off every other part of herself. When they were next to each other, she wasn’t Rowen Oswald, second daughter and first disappointment. She wasn’t the woman who kept a half-finished baby book locked in a storage bin. She wasn’t the woman who lived in a constant state of half-lived grief, with memories swirling under her skin like snakes. She wasn’t the former piano prodigy who threw it all away for a castle in the air and a buried promise or the girl who had been poked and prodded so often in her life that its absence felt like a judgement. She hadn’t been anything like that; she just been Rowen, the woman who could flirt with bar owners and blow off afternoon plans to wrap herself around that same man. For the first time in a long time, she had felt…alive.

But just as it always did, life was determined to have the last laugh. It was like one of the operas she had watched so often. Or a damn Greek tragedy. Or the worst soap opera B plot in history. Unbeknownst to any of them, she was not the only Oswald sister who Declan made feel special. It wasn’t his fault that they never exactly asked for last names; the concept had gotten lost in the shuffle. Besides, it wasn’t like she and Nerys spoke very openly about that side of their lives. They had just started talking again period. They were finally in a place where the silence wasn’t always awkward and where they could meet for more than short work talk in the teacher’s lounge. They were finally feeling like sisters again.

That made the fallout pretty spectacular. Her sister went off to France, and Ro got scared. She supposed those were the things they were both best at in the world. She knew that she liked Declan, knew that he made her feel like she was something. Good things in her life had a tendency to go belly up, though, and there were lines they had already crossed. It wouldn’t have been long before he made the choice or before life made the choice for him. That was the way things went, and the sooner she was used to being alone, the better it would be.

But life never left her alone for too long. There was a curt, neat, exactly numbered three knock. Shit. It was four on the dot, wasn’t it? That would be her newest charge, the incomparable, ever punctual Minerva Hawthorne. Rowen straightened up and slipped her phone into her back pocket, where it was safely out of sight but never out of mind. She tried a small smile out, just to make sure she could, before opening her door to the bubbly teen girl. Minerva all but danced into the room, dropping her bag into an empty chair. Rowen couldn’t help but notice it had one less unicorn charm on it than it did last time, but she didn’t have the mental stamina to get into that conversation. Again.

“Miss Hawthorne, have you been practicing your scales?” Ro asked as Minerva got comfortable on the piano seat. The girl slid back the cover on the keys and took her usual beginning stance. Her fingers were not quite long enough to be successful on the piano, but that was a moot point with Miss Hawthorne.

“I have been! I also started looking at songs for the spring show. Do you think I could learn to play ‘Moonlight Sonata’ before then?” Minerva asked as she dug in the folder stuffed with sheet music. The headache was already forming between Rowen’s eyes.

“Well, I think we should stick with the scales for right now. We can always move up when you’re comfortable.” Her tone was her usual encouraging but unpromising teacher tone. Minerva was undaunted by it, and full of her usual optimism, she flicked open the beginner’s book with a flourish. Ro stepped back and crossed her arms, delicately nibbling on the end of her thumbnail. It was hard to focus, and as much as the girl deserved her full attention, she shouldn’t give it. It was easy to say that she felt like she was doing the right thing; it was another thing entirely to actually believe it.

She felt small and stupid, like anyone could come and crush her under toe at any moment. Damn it. Those days were supposed to be done, weren’t they? She wasn’t supposed to feel like a single strong wind could knock her down and send the world tumbling after her.

Minerva’s too-short fingers crashed into too-close notes, and the dissonance broke Rowen's concentration. She nearly jumped but maintained composure. “Try that last set again, Minerva. Focus on your finger placement,” she instructed, anything to get the girl plunking at the keys once more. Min picked up the scales again, slower than acceptable, but she hit all the right notes that time at least. “Show me a song you’ve been practicing.”

A rustle of paper once more, and there was a piece of simple sheet music out on the piano. Minerva’s fingers hit the keys before Ro could say anything. The first couple of stanzas were passable, and Ro nodded as her mind wandered back to the weight in her pocket. At some point, she figured he would stop texting, just as Nerys had. He would fade from her life as quickly as he came in, and if she ever ventured back out to the Gorgon’s Head, he would be just as he was before. The world would go on, and she would too.

“You know, Miss Oswald, you can tell me if it’s bad.” The statement cut through her melancholy, and she could feel the dark and stormy set of her own face. She did her best to shake it immediately, but Minerva was already staring up at her, blue eyes too intelligent to be fooled by a quick change. “I know that I’m not great. I keep thinking that practice will help, but maybe there are just some things I can’t do.”

Ro noticed it then, the first quiver of a teenage girl’s lip. Oh no. She sat down beside Minnie on the bench. “No, no. It’s not that. I’ve just got a lot on my mind right now,” she tried to explain with a deep breath. She willed all whatever gods were out there to not let this child cry in her office; she could not handle it at that moment. Thankfully, Minerva seemed to perk back up to her placation, but there was something lingering there. Ro did her best to smile sweetly.

“Is it about your sister?” Ro’s smile grew teeth. Very few people even connected her and Nerys; they had always seemed such worlds apart. But nothing escaped the keen eyes of Miss Hawthorne. She had also commented on Ro smiling more a few weeks back, but she at least had more sense than to mention the opposite. Minerva caught the change in her once more and tried to back pedal. “I’m sorry. I know that’s, like, adult stuff. I just… I know if Andy left for whatever reason, suddenly, I wouldn’t feel like teaching third rate pianists either, you know?”

Ro shook her head; they just had twenty more minutes. She could grin and bear it through twenty more minutes. “Why don’t you start on measure seven again? We can clean up the crescendo a little bit.” She didn’t have the stamina to have a heart-to-heart with a sixteen-year-old, but she knew how to divert Minerva’s attention back to the task at hand. There was still skepticism there, but the promise of perfection was always a draw for Minerva. She hopped back to the measure in question and started playing once more. Ro took a moment to breathe and stood back up, leaving her cellphone on the desk across the room, but its metaphorical weight was never off her.

“That’s much better, but next time, linger on the whole note. Try it with more reverb.” Twenty minutes was all she had to face at one time. Life was just chunks of twenty minutes until they all blended together again.

Keeping in the quiet and shade.
I could run away with all my time.
Wouldn't it feel the same?

Oh, this is lonely territory.