Rowan Hale had learned to read a room in hertz. Where most people noticed mood in the tilt of a smile or the way hands hovered, she listened for the subtle settling of air after a sustained note, the way a beam sighed on the downbeat. Her hands carried evidence of that trade—narrow calluses along the thumb and forefinger, a permanent grayish smudge beneath a thumbnail from years of rubbing varnish away, a set of tiny scars where a tuning pin had bitten too eager a palm. She arrived at Rookley Hall with her kit case banging against the weathered stone steps like a stubborn metronome.
The town met her with the kind of fog that felt intentional, as if the sea had remembered some rumor and refused to stop whispering it. Market stalls on the lane sold cardamom buns and thick porridge under a cloth banner proclaiming the annual pie contest; a brassheaded lamplighter wheeled past with a muttered complaint about bulbs that kept burning blue. Those details had nothing to do with the job, and Rowan took comfort in them. The world existed beyond instruments and odd harmonics.
She had eaten one of the buns while waiting on the doorstep; a small ritual. The pastry had been too sweet and exactly the sort of thing her mother would have judged as theatrically indulgent. Rowan thought of her mother only in short sentences and filed the thought away. Her ears caught the ridge of sound that prefaced a door—two people arguing about rehearsal orders, the soft cluck of a stagehand’s knife on rope, the distant roll of a bus settling into its brakes.
Amos Whitby had the theatrical memory of someone who insisted the past stayed polished if you insisted hard enough. He greeted her like a man who believed in protocol and in the curative power of being first through the hall’s door. "Miss Hale," he said, holding out a hand like a rehearsal baton. He wore a tweed jacket with elbow patches and smelled faintly of the peppermint lozenges his dentist had recommended. "We’re very glad you could take the job. The reopening means everything to us."
Rowan set her case down and shrugged out of her coat with a motion economy taught by years of lugging wooden bodies around. "I’ll make the piano play straight," she said. Her voice had the bluntness of someone who’d spent mornings tuning instruments for people who arrived with all sorts of expectations.
Amos’s smile dimpled into something apologetic. "There are... oddities. Old hands like me notice them."
She arched an eyebrow. "What, precisely, did your old hands do?"
He laughed then, easily—an indulgent sound. "They didn’t do anything, miss. That’s what worries me. They’re just—there."
Lena Park arrived like a warm draft; practical gloves, hair in a loose knot, eyes that cataloged problems like herding stray props. She carried a thermos with black coffee and a Tupperware of chopped pickled vegetables—the theatre’s improvised staff meal. She set the thermos on a crate laden with paint cans and balanced herself on the edge of the stage. "If the grand piano decides to be temperamental," she said, "we’ve got to be ready to make it behave. Also, do you like sour things?" She offered a slice of something pickled and made no apology for the insistence. The gesture was domestic, human, and offered Rowan a more immediate kind of solace than Amos’s sentiment.
They walked the stage together. Rowan’s fingers brushed wood and metal as if testing old acquaintances—propping up a loose board, inspecting a rusted hinge, palms flattening against the dress circle rail as she leaned to measure reverberation with her body. Her toolkit held the familiar: a brass tuning hammer, a set of felt mutes, a slender electronic tuner that would make purists tut, wedges of cork and a ration of spare strings folded into wax paper. She worked like a person named by her craft. When she lifted the piano lid the smell of old rosin and varnish rose like a memory; the strings glittered with decades of tiny adjustments.
Mateo Briggs, the conductor appointed for the reopening, arrived with the kind of energy that made him look like a man who’d decided the world was an audience he’d yet to charm. He moved across the stage with rapid, warm hands and a smile that smelled of cheap cologne and sincere determination. "Rowan! At last. I’ve heard good things. This hall has a soul—give it a slick hand and it will sing like a choir on opening night."
She let his enthusiasm hang in the air. It was tempting. Opportunity had teeth; it could be polished and offered as leverage. Rowan answered with a neutral nod. "I tune for sound. I don’t... remodel souls."
Lena banged a fist on the stage. "Mateo, if you want singing and not screaming, you let Rowan do the tuning and you trust her. Or you buy more coffee. Trust is cheaper, but we can always do both." Her grin was warm and disarmingly sincere. It showed that beneath the stage makeup and logistical lists, there were people who remembered how to joke at each other without tests attached.
They started with the piano. Rowan ran her hands along the rim, slid the dampers to feel their action, and eased the lid down until the instrument felt like a patient in a clinic. Fingers tested the bridge, traced the belly for odd hotspots, tapped the soundboard in a rhythm that had once been a private way to read a room. She noticed a pattern of tiny, unusual stitches in the soundboard—metallic threads that gleamed dully where wood met repair. She frowned and reached in, lifting a strip of felt to reveal a narrow strip of copper lain like a seam. It was soldered in small, deliberate arcs.
"That’s not standard," she murmured. She traced a finger along the copper and felt it hum faintly under her touch, a whisper of resonance that tickled the base of her skull.