On April 8, a woman in the front row told us before we began that she had stopped lessons at twelve and still remembered being told she had no ear. She said it as a warning, perhaps to lower our expectations. Iris asked whether she wanted to listen first or try the opening pattern with everyone.
"Try," the woman said. "But slowly."
"Slowly is on the plan," Iris told her.
I stood beside the piano with my shortened introduction in my hand. The room was not ours. We had moved chairs, checked the sticking key, and put a handwritten sign by the correct door. In two hours we would put everything back. I found that I could welcome people without apologizing for any of it.
There were people who remembered notation and people who remembered only the fear of it. One man kept naming the notes before pressing them, arriving late to every beat. I gave him two notes instead of four. Iris worked with another pair on hearing when a phrase felt finished.
At the break, someone asked whether we offered weekly sessions. The answer waited on my tongue in its old form: of course, we could arrange something, we were hoping to build. I took a drink of water before replying.
"We're considering another workshop," I said. "We haven't booked a series. If you'd like information, you can leave your details without committing to anything."
Iris heard me from the registration table. She gave no approving signal. She simply handed the interested person the list, as though this were how we had always done business.
Near the end, the woman from the front row played the opening pattern without stopping to apologize. It was uneven, and one note sounded twice. She finished, looked at her own hands, and laughed. I didn't tell her she had recovered the child she used to be. I asked whether she wanted to try once more.
When the last participant left, we stacked chairs and checked under them for pencils. Iris found a scarf and sent a message to the group before I could suggest keeping it for next time. There was no next time yet. There was a scarf, a possible owner, and a room we had to leave tidy.
We counted the receipts at the table by the door. No promised payment went into the total. We deducted the room, the materials actually bought, and the preparation and teaching payments we had agreed. Iris checked my addition while I matched the registration list.
There was a modest surplus. Not a deposit on a permanent studio, not a month's protection against canceled pupils. Enough, with paid registrations for another session if they came, to make a second workshop possible without either of us secretly carrying the other.
"One more?" I asked.
"One," Iris said. "Same terms. We choose a date I can manage around work, and we don't announce more until we see what this one does."
We looked at our calendars. I had to move nothing to make the chosen date fit. She had to check one obligation before confirming, so we wrote provisional beside it. I no longer heard that word as an insult to a plan.
"I want to keep doing this," she said while closing the ledger. "Not the old version. This."
"So do I."
She hugged me before we carried the last bag to the car. It was brief, awkward around a folder, and freely offered. I did not ask whether we were all right now. We had paid each other correctly and agreed on what would happen next. That was a better answer than one she might give because I looked hopeful.
At home I put my mother's music notebook beside the lesson plans. Its ladder exercise might be useful for another group, with a clearer explanation than either Caleb or I had received. I secured the loose cover and left it open to the page I wanted.
The wall in the teaching room remained bare. The recovered painting had been returned to the Grant family; there was nothing left for our workshop to earn from it. I put the ledger away, sharpened two pencils, and wrote the next lesson's starting time on the plan. Then I sat at the piano and worked out how to begin.