In July she found the ending of the elegy.
He heard it — or heard its arrival — from outside her window early one morning, the way he sometimes did. He was walking back from an early run and the music was coming through her window, and it was different. He stopped on the path and stood in the warm morning air and listened, and even with his non-musician's ear he could tell that something had broken open in the composition, that the circling had stopped, that whatever had been building for two years had found, at last, its final shape.
She opened the door before he knocked, as if she had heard him stop.
Her eyes were bright, her hair was disheveled from a long night of work, and she was holding the pencil she used for notation. She looked at him with a face so open and undisguised that he felt he was seeing her more clearly than he had ever seen anyone — not more of her, but more essentially, the thing she was under all the considered and unconsidered layers.
'I found it,' she said.
'I heard,' he said.
She laughed and pulled him inside and played him the ending: seventeen minutes of music that began with the three bars he had heard before — the beginning of resolution — and continued through a long, luminous passage that did exactly what she had described. Not happiness. Not the absence of loss. The settled, clear-eyed acknowledgment that the lost thing was real, was here, will not be forgotten. The difference between erasure and absence.
He sat on the floor of her living room with his hands in his lap and let it do what it did, and when it was over there were tears on both their faces and neither of them was embarrassed.
'That's what it was for,' she said afterward, quietly. 'All of it. This is what it was building toward.'
He did not ask, this time, what the elegy was for. He thought he knew. He thought they both did.
He stayed until the afternoon. She played the fifth movement three more times, each time making small adjustments, then wrote the final notation in pencil in the manuscript and sat back and looked at the completed score.
She put her hand on the last page.
'Done,' she said.
It was the most complete-sounding word he had ever heard.