Sometimes she stumbled upon a piano in the wild, church basement, dance hall, back of a bar, anywhere with ghosts, and there it was, one note broken, that dumb mute key grinning among the rest. Whatever she planned to play, that silence would rise up like an uninvited ex and insist on being essential. It didn’t matter if it lived in the bass where thunder sleeps or way up high where angels chip their nails, it always cut into the melody.

Theoretically, of course, it was absurd. Eighty-seven still worked fine, a near-perfect democracy of hammers and strings. But the wound called attention. Every other note started sweating, trying harder to shine. You can’t write this into theory. She laughed at the mathematics of it all, a reminder that perfection is just another form of deafness. And she played, she played, like someone who finally believed in the value of missing pieces.