Maya stood in the twilight of the former Jantar cinema, now our school stage. The mirror, cracked like a dried-up lake, reflected her in several nervous versions. In the cello case something quietly chimed, as if the instrument was breathing along with her. For weeks she had been drawing lines in her notebook, her little seismograph of feelings and peace. Every performance was an earthquake and every other person's gaze a microdrill in her stomach. Today, the graph was jumping before she even touched a bow or looked at the audience. Underfoot she felt the gentle resonance of the boards, as if they remembered old ovations and arguments. The phone vibrated incessantly, but messages from Kacper were short and unfamiliar. She couldn't decide whether she was more angered by the silence or the insistent monosyllables. In her notebook, she signed a zigzag of long words: fear, shame, anger and then longing. The pen squeaked and it made her laugh, if only for a second. A yellowed poster hung on the wall: "Not a crowd of hearts", the ironic patron saint of rehearsals. - 'Cool diagrams,' said a girl in a navy blue sweatshirt she hadn't seen before. - Nina, new to the team; this building supposedly remembers sounds, like a vinyl record. - What do you mean 'remembers'? - Maja reflexively covered her notebook with her arm until the paper squeaked. - That when you feel something strongly, it stays in the board, in the pipes, in the dust. There are corridors under the stage that the technician doesn't tell the first-timers about; do you want to see? Maja was already about to refuse when a sheet of paper slipped out of the score like a leaf. The inscription, crossed out and patient, sounded calm and simple: 'If you can hear, hear me'. Her heart struck once, hard, for this was the sentence Simon had once said before he left without saying goodbye. She felt shame for trying, anger for keeping silent, and something even lighter that refused to be named. - 'Okay,' she said after a while, tucking the note deep into its case like a secret. They walked down the metal stairs, where the air had a taste of dust and curtness. It was dark under the stage, but the wood tinkled a quiet chord, in tune with her pulse. Maja switched on the recorder on her phone and put it on the bar, next to her notebook. The line graph suddenly moved of its own accord, as if a drop had fallen on the paper, even though it was dry. The phone vibrated rapidly; a new voice message from 'Unknown' had just arrived on the screen. The voice whispered her name and described exactly yesterday's zigzag, line by line. Then, in the distance, the lock clicked, the light flicked three times, and someone stepped over them on the board, exactly in the rhythm of her heart.