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A solitary piano tuner is hired to 'calm' a restless building. Eli must choose whether to flatten its noise or retune the shared hum so neighbors can speak. A public, risky intervention—done with tools and timing—becomes the pivot for bringing a block together.
Eli Calder kept his hours like other people kept teeth: polished, private, and useful for the work at hand. His workshop smelled of figured wood and hot metal, a warm chemical honesty that had nothing to do with the city’s perfumed alleys. A lamp with a swing arm threw a cone of yellow over a worn upright that had been rescued from a community hall and rehomed to the corner of his bench. He moved with the kind of economy learned by hands that do small, exact violence—he eased pins, nudged hammers, coaxed stubborn strings into a place they would not resent.
There was a cat—always there, as if the shop had folded it into its inventory. The cat sat upon a stash of rosin and regarded Eli with the insolent patience of those who never paid for anything. When Eli lifted the lid and plucked, the cat swore at him once with a single indignant meow and then batted a loose tuning peg off the bench as if testing gravity in a personal experiment.
Outside, rain stitched the roofs in a thin, coppery mesh. People on the street carried umbrellas with small painted birds on the handles; the umbrellas were a local fashion and, on market mornings, the vendors would hang strips of citrus peel from their stalls so the air smelled like somebody had opened a jar of sunlight. That detail did nothing to alter the work of adjusting a temperamental action, but Eli liked to think of it: a city that treated its citrus as a charm.
A knock at the outer door came soft and tentative. He wiped his fingers on a rag, set the wrench aside, and opened to a woman who looked as if she had rehearsed patience and come up short. She introduced herself with a name like a small surprise—Maris Havel—and then offered a folded envelope full of notes that smelled faintly of lavender sachets.
"I need someone who knows what a building sounds like," she said without ceremony, which was when Eli suspected the job might not fit neatly on a timesheet. She did not glance at the piano; instead she stared at his hands, as if measuring them for proof. "There is a place in my house where people stop listening to one another, and I hear it in the stairwell. Can you… settle it?"
Eli’s first impulse was to decline on principle. Tuning was an honest craft, not a remedy for uprooted nights. But he had ears, and those ears were a kind of hunger. He nodded once and invited her in, watching how she hugged the coat to her like a small defense.