I haven’t heard from Autumn in several weeks now. It makes me curious whether she knows she spilled the beans and it wouldn’t do her any good to hang around me anymore, or if Adagio called her to let her know the scam was off. For her part, I haven’t seen Adagio in a few weeks either. I did block her number. Maybe she got the picture.
In a way, it’s a little disappointing. It might have propped up my ego a bit if she begged forgiveness, but now it only proves she had zero interest in me beyond soaking up my emotions in her amulet. Just another piece in the chess game of her life. I really thought she had changed.
“Hello, and welcome to Sa-Shimmy!” I call to the trio heading in the door, that mechanic I like and two of his techs. They gesture toward their usual table, so I nod. “I’ll be over in a minute with some hot barley tea.”
I pretty much know what they’ll order, but they always look over the menu anyway. So I take my time gathering up one of the small stoneware pots, filling it from the urn behind me, and three cups. A theatrical flair as I pour, lift the pot high, then down again, perfectly synchronized as it stops just below the brim, and they smile at me. I should have learned their names by now.
As expected, they all order the same things they usually do, and I busy myself behind the counter preparing everything. It takes a minute for me to notice, but someone’s skulking near the entrance, and they finally take the plunge. New customer? No, it’s—
Aria fucking Blaze.
What the hell is she here for? I level a scowl at her, but she never looks up, nearly stumbling over more than one chair. Odd to see her so timid, but at least one thing about her hasn’t changed, as much as it did about Adagio: she has on the same old outfit. It does look more appropriate for everyday use, not that strange… jumper thing Adagio had way back when.
And I can’t let myself get so calm about Adagio. Even the mention of her name, finding a familiar color, seeing another one of the sirens needs to make my heart erupt with the sharp, conclusive drumbeat of a death march. Damn it, why does Adagio still bring music into my mind?
“H-hey,” she says, sliding into a stool at the counter. I’ve never seen her so indecisive, but maybe because she was never the one making decisions. “Adagio said—” She coughs and holds a fist to her lips, and she keeps her eyes cast downward. “I heard you had really good sushi, and I thought… I should try…”
“Why are you here?”
Aria sighs hard and squints at the counter’s wood grain. “Adagio’s not herself lately. I’m worried about her. Do you think you could—?”
“Do you know what she fucking did!?” I bark, my face immediately blanching as I cover my mouth. It doesn’t look like the car guys caught that. No idea how they missed it, but a lady who’d been perusing the menu on the easel outside frowns, covers her toddler’s ears, and hustles off.
“Sorry, ma’am!” I shout, probably too late.
I shake my head and fix my stare on Aria again, though she’s only showing me the top of her head. “Look, you should go. I’m not dealing with this shit.”
“But you did this to her!”
About the only thing keeping me from burying my knife in her neck is the whiny tone she uses. She really is worried, and if she has a legit reason for it… well, here comes that little ego boost I needed. “She did this to herself, and I’m asking you again to leave, before I call security.”
Aria holds her hands over her head as if she has an Autumn-level hangover, and only now do I wonder if that shared Blaze makes them related. Except Aria came from Equestria, like me. “I’m trying, I really am. It’s different for us.”
“Different how?” I return to slicing tuna for those guys’ order, but I do keep an ear perked toward Aria. Adagio said something similar once.
“Adagio let that lady screw with you, but it meant she could sing and make all the beauty magic for you. Didn’t you like it?” She sounds as if that makes everything self-evident. But if she knows that much about it, did Adagio tell her? And when? All along, or just now, when Aria started asking her what was wrong?
“I did,” I acknowledge, “but now you’re saying that the end justifies the means. That’s not how most people operate.”
She tightens her grip on her head, and she might even tear some hair out if I don’t stop her. If I want to stop her. “I know, but I said I’m trying.”
“Trying what?”
“To think through how humans… I guess ponies too. How they see things. It’s different.”
Not surprising, but… okay, I’ll give her some freedom here to sing her cadenza. “I’m listening.”
“You’re right, Adagio did all that because it just… it wouldn’t occur to us that going through the anger wouldn’t be worth getting the reward for it. As long as the reward was better. It all comes out positive, right?” She finally looks up with a tenuous smile. “That’s what matters to us: the end state. If it’s better than before, then who cares what happened in between?”
For a second, I pause and flick my knife tip toward her. She can’t help flinching. “If you saw her agonizing over something like that, would you feel bad for her?”
And she actually has to think for a moment. She nods. “Yeah, right then, but when it turned out good later, no.” Then she returns to clutching at her skull. “But I know it works different for you. It’s not easy, but I can try to see it how a human would. Adagio wouldn’t have thought to.”
“I’m still not convinced she wasn’t trying to do the… siren thing.”
“Siren thing?”
As if she doesn’t know. “Suck out my life energy.”
“Shit no. She wouldn’t do that to you.” A big gulp follows, and she looks up once more, her eyes glistening with tears. “Something’s broken in her. Bad.”
This is another scam, isn’t it? Adagio appeared equally sincere, and I fell for it once. I set my knife down. “Fine. All your cards on the table. Your Autumn game is spent, so what’s your next play? Adagio herself? Not gonna work. She tried that, too, acted like she was some vulnerable thing turning over a new leaf. I don’t buy it anymore.”
“You… you can use your geode on me if you want.” Adagio offered me that as well. If I’d taken her up on it, could I have headed all this off? Even if I had it with me, what would it prove now? That Aria genuinely believes what she’s told me? For all I know, Adagio has her fooled, too.
And it finally dawns on me: For all that Adagio falsely set me up with Autumn, she didn’t invent what she was saying about doubles. She brought up my geode after that, and if I’d used it, I would have immediately seen through any lie. At that point, she probably even hadn’t planned to use Autumn yet.
Aria takes a steadying breath. “I’m trying. Trying to see it your way.” She watches my hand as if I’ll touch her, read her thoughts. I go back to cutting fish. “Do the same for me, please.”
I roll my eyes, huff a breath out my nose. And nod.
“When you’re young, just a hatchling—filly—ugh, kid, whatever.” Finally, a bit of that Aria attitude. “Did you ever have a teacher give everyone a lesson that was so obvious that there was no point in it? Like… I don’t know, what do humans learn? ‘If you see a fire in the building, then evacuate in the other direction.’ Well, who the fuck wouldn’t?”
She waits. I’ve got a nice layer of rice spread out, on goes the tuna, a little sesame oil, a little vinegar. “Still listening.”
“As hatchlings, we’re told, ‘Your job is to make your prey love you. That’s how you live. That’s how you gain magic. That’s how you influence them to anger, violence, hatred. It will always lead to a full amulet.’ Lesson one, first day of school.”
Nothing new there. But she isn’t finished. “And?”
“Lesson two: ‘They fall in love with you. You don’t fall in love with them.’ Which is completely stupid, because it never happens. Family’s a little different, but barely. More like tolerated. But sirens don’t love. We can’t.”
Three plates ready. I dish them up and arrange them on a tray.
“And it’s not just that we can’t. It’s that if we did, it would mean something’s gone wrong. Very wrong.”
Everything settles into place in my brain, the dissonant chord that resolves to a clear triad. “It’s gone beyond tolerating. You love her, don’t you?”
Her lips buckle into a weighty frown, and her tears come freely as she nods. “I don’t want to see her hurt.”
Shit.
Am I falling into her trap? I do feel bad for her—her only—and I have time to make one more quick roll, then I slide it onto Aria’s plate as I take my guests their order. I shouldn’t, but maybe it atones for all the assumptions I made earlier. “Damn, this is good,” I hear her mumble on my way.
When I get back, I put a hand on her shoulder, and I catch her flicking a glance to see if I have my geode on. “So you’re messed up, too?”
She shakes her head, but her eyes widen like a grade schooler asked to solve a calculus problem. “No. That’s just it. I should be, but it’s not screwing with my head. Maybe because she’s family and some of that comes naturally. I don’t know. I don’t get it. But something changed after our amulets shattered,” she says, pulling her neckline down and running her fingers over her jewel, its facets partially regrown, same as Adagio’s.
Shit.
“Does she love you back?”
“Adagio’s hurting. Bad. Yeah, she loves me. But there’s a difference between loving someone and being in love with them.”
Shit shit shit. And of course next comes the one thing I would have welcomed three weeks ago but don’t want to hear now. I should never have let her sit down and talk to me.
“She’s in love with you. And it’s breaking her.”
“Breaking? She seemed fine to me.” She can’t be worse off than any other failed relationship. Just none of them know what that is. They’ll get through it.
Aria blinks. “It’s like… an infection. Something that’s not supposed to be there. Something that can’t be there. Your body fights it, and it makes everything go bad. Unless you have help.” Then she lets out a sigh that segues into a sob. “Adagio’s in love with you,” she repeats.
“I don’t believe you.” And I don’t even know why I said that. I could be under Adagio’s control and wouldn’t even know it, but it doesn’t seem that way. She isn’t exactly subtle—once you know what to look for, she can’t take you by surprise anymore. How would she have even fallen in love with me in the first place? When I think back now, she acted that way from the first time I saw her at the cafe. If it started that long ago, it doesn’t make sense. “She only thinks she’s in love with me, unless she’s lying about all of it.”
She shook her head the whole time I said that. “No, she is, and… you’d understand better if she had a reason to. It’s all—” she wafts a hand, fans her fingers out “—gibberish to me. But it’s still there, plain as day.”
“But—”
“No, it’s like seeing the sun in the sky. I might not know how it works or why it’s there, but that doesn’t make it go away, and I still know what it is.”
She might pop if I turn her down. Something’s off, though: if she wants in on Adagio’s scam, it wouldn’t be enough. Two sirens feeding off one person’s emotions? From what I’ve seen, it works the opposite way, a bunch of people for just one of them. No way does Aria get anything out of it. I feel like punching the counter, but I settle for returning to my spot behind it and washing my hands so I can get started on the next order. “What is it you expect me to do? Make her stop loving me? If telling her to go fuck off—” I cover my mouth with my hand towel, but again, the car guys don’t appear to notice. Or don’t care. I lower my voice to a harsh whisper. “If that didn’t work, I don’t know what will.”
“I don’t know,” she says, the tears spreading to her voice. “I just know things can’t stay the way they are now.” She grabs a napkin and wipes her eyes, leaving a little smear of mascara. “Please talk to her. Then you two can figure it out.”
I get the sudden impression that I’d rather deal with Autumn. But Aria’s right: if I can break this off before it screws Adagio up, then better for all of us. I need to calm down first, though. “I’ll think about it.”
She has so many words swelling in her throat, but she finally decides on one: “Thanks,” she says quietly. Not even with a smile. She really doesn’t think I’ll help her. And that hurts the most out of everything that’s come out today. Maybe Twilight shouldn’t answer me.
So she flops out of her chair, all that siren grace of movement vanished, and shambles a few steps toward the exit. “Hang on,” I call, holding out the sea urchin roll I just finished on my knife blade. “One for the road.”
A more genuine smile sprouts, and she savors it in two bites, then sucks at her fingertips. “Thanks,” she repeats, some of the weight gone from her face.
Once she’s out of earshot, I lean toward the glass terrarium on its sideboard along the wall. “What do you think?” Ray watches her go, blinking one eye and ignoring the cricket wriggling in front of him.
I really didn’t feel like opening the restaurant today. There’s too much going on. If I had the time, I’d stay at home and spend the entire morning crying, but not all for bad reasons.
Twilight answered—Twilight answered me—and I didn’t notice the book glowing until after I got out of the shower. For weeks, I’d meant to tear that page out, but I kept forgetting, and she…
Now I am going to cry, whether or not it’s at work. Good thing I don’t open for another ninety minutes.
Twilight felt awful and said I should have simply come through the mirror to visit her if I needed help that badly and couldn’t wait on her to realize I’d written to her. She promised to add it to her daily checklist, so she’d see any messages promptly. I told her it wasn’t necessary, but I know how she gets.
She wrote that I’m a good friend, reliable, sweet, thoughtful.
I’ll need a tissue for this.
I hadn’t really noticed that it’s getting close to my birthday. Twilight contacted the girls, the ones from this world, and set up a party. Not just the other Rainbooms, but everyone who had become special to me. Wallflower Blush, Trixie, the Crystal Prep crew… too many to name. And she’ll bring Starlight Glimmer with her, too. It led to a renewed flurry of texts, and I asked Applejack about the lullaby, and she said yes, it’s an old family song. She had no idea how it would have made its way to me, but it’s nice to find that origin, something about where it’s from, where I’m from.
Twilight even confirmed she knows an Autumn Blaze over there, similar but without the addictions dragging her down, still prone to rapid mood changes, but friendly and well-adjusted overall. And definitely not my mother—she’s a kirin, a race that’s lived secluded for long enough to make that impossible.
I love them all, but then love is the other reason I want to curl up and cry. Three days later, and I still haven’t contacted Adagio. How do I even start? I have no idea what to do, but it won’t go away on its own. And I kinda promised Aria.
This might be a three-tissue problem, to mangle a bit of Fetlock Holmes, but it’ll have to wait. I toss the used one and wash my hands again so I can get back on course for opening time. Like the soloist, finding her center in a quiet moment before the curtain reveals her to the audience.
Musical thoughts without Adagio here. It doesn’t feel right.
Just as I finish lugging a bag of rice out from the storeroom, someone taps at the door. “We open at ten!” I shout.
“Can I come in?” At least I think that’s what I heard, but she said it so quietly.
“Mall restrooms are across the hall.” That’s usually the issue.
“No, I wanna talk about Adagio.”
Great. Not Aria’s voice, so the other one… Sonata? I always have trouble coming up with her name. I bet she and Wallflower would make good friends.
So I turn the lock, and yup, Sonata, ponytail and all. But she’s not wearing her usual thing either. Kind of a sweaterdress, off one shoulder, in a maroon color, and it looks good on her. “Sit at the counter, pardon me if I work as we talk, I assume Aria sent you,” I rattle off as I return to my post.
“Naw, I came on my own,” she answers, “but I did leave her a text in case she wants to join me when she wakes up.”
That gets a raised eyebrow. “Aria doesn’t know you’re here?” Sonata shakes her head, takes a seat, and starts spreading out the bud vases and mini menus gathered at one end of the counter. Nice of her to help. “Thanks. And I don’t know if she’ll want to come. She must be about ready to kill me by now.”
“Kill you?” Sonata asks, leaning back as if to dodge a punch. “That’s pretty extreme, and Adagio would get mad at her for doing that.”
Right, Sonata’s kind of… out there at times. “It’s just an expression.”
“Oh,” she grunts. “Yeah.”
Something tells me this could prove to be an ordeal. I wipe down my cutting boards, dry off my freshly cleaned knives, and check my container of salt. Running a bit low—I’ll need to open a new one after lunch. “So what’s your angle?”
“Hm?” That went completely over her head, for some reason.
More direct, then. And I’m curious anyway. “Do you love Adagio?”
“Oh, yeah, of course I do!” she replies, her eyes lighting up.
“Aria felt weird about it.”
Sonata shrugs. “I’ve always loved her. She’s my big sis! But I guess Aria didn’t realize it til now.” She giggles, a snorty laugh. “She’ll get used to it.”
“You don’t seem worried,” I remark as I tie on an apron.
“I think things’ll turn out fine, ’cause you’re the kind of person who always helps.”
To hear her say that… it’s almost as nice as what Twilight wrote. “Well, you must have something to say. Are you mad that I haven’t talked to Adagio yet?”
She smiles, but gently, the wind that dies down after a storm. “I had some ideas.”
I’m trying really hard not to channel Adagio. The old Adagio. “About what?”
And she… starts to undress? “Whoa, whoa!” I say, grabbing her wrist as she tugs the top of her dress down. At least she has a strapless bra on, but I manage to stop her before she exposes more than a little of it.
Sonata points at the red jewel gleaming below her throat. “Look at that and tell me what you see.”
Besides cleavage, I suppose. But her gem… a small red me stares back, distorted in the curved surface, curved where it shouldn’t be. Some of the facets have flattened out again, some of the edges sharp, some of the cracks filled in. “I don’t get it,” I say. “You left your old ones behind when they broke. Adagio told me they’d regrow, but why would these still have cracks?”
“They… kinda have to restart from what state they were in before,” she answers, still completely at ease, not at all how Aria was.
“Oh. Well, it is growing again. Is that what you wanted me to notice?” I ask, and thank goodness she pulls her neckline back up.
Sonata nods, and for the first time, I do look her in the eye. Despite her outward brightness, there is a lingering fog, and of course there is, if she loves Adagio like she claims. “We’re born with them, and they grow, and sometimes they get damaged, and they heal. You remember what they do, right? They take in emotion.”
“Yeah,” I reply as I peek at my watch. I guess I still have some time to spare, and talking to Sonata is completely different than I assumed.
Then there’s another tap at the door, and Sonata takes the cue: “C’mon in, Aria!”
As Aria ambles over and sits next to Sonata, she casts a curious glance at her sister.
“They take in emotion to make magic and store it for us to use,” Sonata says, pretty much ignoring Aria, “but if they need to heal, they use that magic up. And you’d know how emotion and magic aren’t that different, huh?” She lets out another snort-laugh, and Aria rolls her eyes. “So what do you think we’re taught as hatchlings? Make your prey love you.”
A grin crescendos across my face, and I jut my chin toward the new arrival. “Aria went over this with me. A tiger can’t change its stripes.”
For a moment, Sonata’s eyes go cloudy, but then her body jolts, almost imperceptibly. “Yeah, like that. Except we’re sirens, not tigers.”
I want to laugh, and it probably wouldn’t even make her mad, but I owe it to her to take her seriously. “Keep going. I follow you so far.”
Sonata gives me a cymbal-clash smile. “Good! We can skip all the school stuff. So we’re trained to target negative energy, and we use that to cast negative magic, and it just keeps feeding itself that way, right? You get out what you put in, and the gems quickly get to where they only bother taking in negative emotions and magic. Then that becomes what we are.”
Makes sense. Though listening to a scientific lecture from Sonata is a bit odd. She’s like a savant or something. “Can it even take in good emotion anymore?”
Her eyes light up as if a music historian finding a prized centuries-old instrument in a dusty attic, and she leans forward, just inches from my face. “No, it can’t really use that. Unless it has to.”
Has to? And why does that have her grinning maniacally?
Oh…
“They got broken!” I blurt out.
“They got broken,” she confirms with a nod. “It’s totes not life-threatening—” she flicks a wrist at me, a conductor urging me on to the next passage “—unless it doesn’t heal at all. Then we prob’ly would die. But there’s always emotion around, and there’s always magic around—in Equestria, anyway—so it always can heal. But in an emergency like that, all completely shattered…”
She claps her hands together, an actual cymbal clash this time. “Smash,” I say for her. “It can’t be particular about what kind it absorbs.”
“Right!” she says, and… taps a finger to my nose? “Now it rebuilds itself with all that positive magic and feelings of friendship you blasted us with. And that becomes part of what we are.”
But then… “Wait, wait. Aria said you have a whole different mindset, a different way of seeing the world. And what Adagio did was pretty damn devious.”
Aria frowns. “Hey, I already—”
“I know, I know,” I cut in, holding my hand up to stop her. “She didn’t mean it that way, but it still was.”
That seems to placate Aria a little bit, and Sonata shrugs. “Some things are too much part of us to change completely, some things are just our nature.”
“So the tiger can change its stripes, but only so much.”
“Yup,” she says, beaming and punctuating it with an exaggerated nod. “Except we’re sirens, not tigers. I already told you that.”
I do laugh this time, but she only gives me a blank stare. Aria puts a hand on Sonata’s shoulder and shakes her head. “Did you know about all this?” I ask Aria.
“Not until last night,” she drawls. “Sonata’s the one for figuring out technical things, and after I told her what we’d talked about, something clicked with her. She jabbered at me for over an hour, and I guess it makes sense.”
Then I glance back and forth between both of them. “So… do you like what it’s done to you? I don’t hear anything about undoing it all and returning to your old selves.”
“I’ve always loved them!” Sonata answers right away, bouncing like a child eager for approval of the exquisite handmade birthday card they have for a parent. Yeah, I guess maybe she didn’t change all that much.
“You?” I say to Aria.
She can only get one shoulder to participate in her shrug. “We all seem a little happier. Except for Adagio, lately. But we could see we got along more like all of you, from when we last bumped into each other at that concert—what was it? Past Crash?”
“PostCrush. Adagio coach you to say that?”
Aria laughs a little, but it barely carries any mirth.
“So what does all this mean about Adagio?” I ask. I didn’t really intend to muse that aloud. She got bombarded with love, she internalized it. “Is this one of those fairy-tale love potions? She’s shot with Cupid’s arrow, and then she’ll love the first person she sees, or the first person she thinks about, or—” Sonata’s eyes have gone wide. “Shit, it was my magic. I was the one singing at the end. That’s the only reason she’s focused it on me.”
They look at each other for a moment, an audience hearing a new twist on a familiar piece and wondering where the conductor will go with it. But Aria shakes her head. “No,” she says, “or Sonata and I would be head cases for you, too. Or maybe for one of the other girls in the band.”
Oh yeah.
“I don’t suppose you two suddenly caring about Adagio a lot feels like a compulsion either, huh?”
“Naw,” Sonata replies, slouching and looking far more serene than I’ve ever seen her.
“But what if she—?”
Now Aria holds up a hand. “I think you need to ask her that.”
Probably. I slump over the counter, a pipe organ with all the air deflated out of its bellows. “Your place or here?”
“Come by after work,” Aria says with a grim smile.
“It’ll be late.”
Finally, Sonata loses that chipper affectation and blends in better with her sister. “She doesn’t sleep much now. It’ll be fine.”
I take a long breath in, a diva ready to belt out that high note and hold it until her lungs burn. And let it out in a small huff, anticlimactic as possible. “Alright.”
“But one thing first,” Aria says, her voice as hard as stone. “Do you love her?”
All the warmth oozes from my body, and for an instant, I imagine I can feel her soft lips on mine again. Then I remember what she did, and the heat returns with reinforcements. “I don’t know. I’ve only been hanging out with her for what, a few months? That’s pretty quick to make a call on whether I love her.”
Again, they glance at each other, lips pursed.
“I do—I did enjoy being around her. I can honestly say that.”
Sonata screws up her face like a kid about to throw a temper tantrum. “But do you love her?” she barks. “If she has someone to share that with, it won’t be such… such an open wound. It’ll heal.”
They can’t put me on the spot this way! “No,” I say, its bitter flavor hanging on my tongue. “Maybe I could, if I spent time with her again, and if she stopped pulling this shit.”
“Maybe isn’t good enough,” Aria replies, the gentle one now, oddly enough. “Can you love her, yes or no?”
As if they understand the first thing about love. “You can’t ask me to make that promise. Even if I did feel it right now, what am I supposed to do? Vow to love her forever?” Aria starts to open her mouth, but I smack my hand on the counter, give the downbeat for my solo. “No. You don’t get to demand that of me. People fall out of love all the time, and even if I could genuinely say I loved her right now, I can’t guarantee how long it’d last.”
Fuck, I called that earlier, didn’t I? If you could have the one thing you most wanted in life, how long would it make you happy?
But I’m not through ranting. “If I say I do, and a year from now we break up, what then? She’ll go mental for good? Well, more mental than she is already. You want me to carry all that on my shoulders!?”
“Then break it off now,” Sonata says, her voice gone all stentorian and yet so small. “Make her stop loving you.”
“It’s not in our nature,” Aria chimes in. “Sirens don’t love, duh. But this one does, and she doesn’t know how to handle it, and we don’t know how to help her, so either shut her down so she won’t love again or else be the one who can help her by going through it with her.”
“Shut her down so she can never love again,” I growl through gritted teeth. “And you think she’s broken now? What kind of life do you call that?”
I already know the answer. But Sonata supplies it: “A siren life. Smash her gem so it’ll grow back again, and we’ll make sure, for realsies, she’s around the right kind of emotions when it happens this time.”
The right kind. Bullshit.
“That means smashing ours too,” Aria says. “They’re just as… infected.” She tries to sneer at that word, but she can’t bring herself to. They would have already done it if they really wanted to. If they really thought it was better that way. “If you can’t love her, then break her and let her rebuild like a good siren. She won’t stop you. But she deserves to hear it from you.”
Shit. I actually agree with her. On that point anyway.
“Alright. Give me your address, and I’ll come by after work.”
Of course Sonata instantly seems carefree again, jouncing in her seat. She reaches for her phone and holds it out, so I sit mine next to it, and it downloads her contact info. “Oh,” she adds, her toothy grin blaring like an entire brass section. And on the edge of my vision, I see a little bit of her jewel flaring warmly, the skin around it turning to scales. “Can I try one of those salmon rolls Adagio is always raving about?”
I let a smile of my own work its little melody into the day’s theme. “Sure. Why don’t you two stick around for lunch?”
If there’s one saving grace to everything, it’s finally sinking in that maybe Twilight is right. Maybe I’ve actually become a better person. After immediately condemning Adagio the first night I saw her in that cafe, I didn’t react that badly to Aria. And Sonata didn’t put me off any. They’ve all changed.
But as I start slicing fish, an idea settles onto my heart. I need to stop by home to feed Ray, but I also need to pick some things up before I go see Adagio tonight.