The cataloging of the contents of the trunk was complete.  The group from the law firm were still making phone calls and searching the web in hopes of finding some authentication.  But at dinner the night before, Rachel had struck up a conversation with one of the paralegals who had been charmed by the house as it was now in its renewed state.  This woman was more than willing to accompany Rachel in search of what she might find to wear when she received Jacob in the house the next evening.  They drove to Charleston and to a store where she had never been before and they shopped in a way she had never shopped before, ignoring the price tags on every garment they inspected.

When they returned to the house, bags in hand, they were surprised to see a van in the driveway and workmen maneuvering a baby-grand piano, now legless and turned up on its side, through the front door.

“Jacob had this delivered,” said the chief of the security crew.  “He said that you could send it back if you want.  He knows that you don’t play but he said that he didn’t think the house would be complete without it.”

At three o’clock Rachel sat in the room at the top of the turret.  All was quiet in the house now.  The security team had the perimeter controlled and were relaxed at their stations.  The folks from Jacob’s law firm were still at their laptops but now focused on other matters of business. There was no noise from hammer or saw and, at long last, no feeling of anxiety in her heart.  It had happened.  The dare was met.  There would be a great house here again, and the influence of it was yet to be seen.  It would certainly be greater than she had ever imagined it.  And all that was left to her now, in this moment at least, was to wait. She had been waiting for a long time as the house progressed and as the obstacles manifested themselves and as they had been addressed.  But this afternoon, here in this silent little room, was a different kind of waiting.  To wait quietly and without interruption or worry for Jacob to come. She thought again of their time together in the early days and she remembered scenes that had stayed with her all the years between, and she allowed herself to ponder them in a way she would not have before and in that reverie she remembered other scenes – scenes that she had long forgotten, and she remembered the words of their conversations that seemed so spontaneous and matter-of-fact at the time they were spoken but that now seemed prophetic, imbued, even heavy, with meaning that neither of them could have imagined at the time.  And she felt then the only true and final satisfaction that any woman or man can ever know: that there was more to her story. That the course she had determined and on which she had wagered her fate led further than she had even dreamed. Not only more than she deserved, that would satisfy her risk and venture, but a surprise of even more than she dreamed.  

She and Jacob had been young then and too lighthearted to consider the possibility of destiny, to take seriously any idea that they were caught up in some other plan, something bigger than them both, something that they might only accede to or ignore and that they might begin to see the faint outlines of as they followed that light.  But she saw it now. 

Maybe he had always known. But there was no denying it now.

The late-winter sunlight poured through the narrow windows and made long, golden streaks across the polished maple floor. She stood and walked to the window and looked out at the meager and slow-moving traffic of the little town.  All the people going places.  But now she was in her own place, the place where she belonged.

The sound she heard was faint at first and she thought it must have come from outside, but she could not identify it, could not imagine such a sound, such an even and pure tone, coming from nature or any of the commerce that surrounded the house.  Then it came again, a high, pure resonance.  Then again.

She opened the door of the little room and now the sound was clearer, and she recognized it from her days at college when she worked one semester as a desk clerk in the school’s conservatory.  This was the tone of a tuning fork, struck humming and then amplified as it was stood and held against the soundboard of the piano.  Then answered by the corresponding note from the piano keyboard.  Down the stairs the instrument – her piano – was being tuned.  She stood there, hypnotized, till the tuner had finished his task and then, as a reward to himself, rolled and wove the newly perfected notes and chords until they flowed into a melody.  What was it?  She knew it.  It was one of those songs from the records her parents had played during their bridge parties when she was just a child.  She had listened to it, time and again as she laid in her little bed at the end of the hall. She knew she knew it but could not remember its name. She tried without success to think of the lyrics as he continued until this phrase, like the touch of a magician’s wand, lifted the veil from an indelible memory:

The melody
Haunts my reverie
And I am once again with you
When our love was new