she finished the first movement in the second year, the slow movement in the fourth. the third, the finale, was to be quick — rondo, perhaps, or a set of variations. she had the tempo. she had the key. she had the first six bars, sketched on a separate sheet, and the date she would begin writing the score: the first monday of advent, 1981.
the monday came. she sat at the piano, opened the page, and could not, that morning, hear the rest of it. she sat at the piano on the second monday, and on the third. by january she had stopped sitting at it. the slow movement she did play — sometimes, alone, with the door shut — and it would seem to her then that two movements were perhaps enough, or that the silence that followed the second was the third movement.
the score sleeps in the lower compartment of the piano stool, under the bench's hinged seat, in the same envelope as the sketches for the finale. she has played the first two movements in her head, end to end, perhaps a thousand times. she has never, in fifty years, played them at the piano together.