Lyrics of the Heart

Megan had been driving for four hours when the trees finally opened up and she saw the lake. The Retreat House sat at the far end of it, a big Victorian pile with white trim and a wraparound porch, all lit up gold in the late afternoon sun.

St. Mark's Cathedral Retreat House. Home for the next eight days.

She pulled her old Corolla into the gravel lot and sat for a minute. Her hands were still on the wheel. Three years since she'd written anything worth sending to her own slush pile, and she was hoping a week of no cell signal and a lot of hymnals would fix that.

Well. Hoping was strong. Praying, maybe. Fitting, for this particular gig.

She grabbed her bag and her laptop case and headed up the porch steps.

Sofia was in the lobby, fussing with a clipboard. She looked up and lit up at the same time. "Megan! Oh my gosh, come here!" She set the clipboard down and hugged her hard. "You look fantastic. Divorce agrees with you, and I hate that it agrees with you."

"Sofia." Megan laughed into her shoulder. "You cannot say things like that in a house of God."

"It's a retreat house, not a church. Different rules." Sofia held her at arm's length. "Twenty-nine looks good on you, is all I'm saying."

"Twenty-nine looks exactly like twenty-eight, but with better skincare." Megan looked around the lobby. Wood paneling, a huge stone fireplace, a staircase curving up to the second floor. A piano somewhere out of sight, being tuned. "This place is gorgeous. How did you get them to give you a whole week?"

"A centennial and a very persuasive canon. Don't ask me twice." Sofia picked the clipboard back up. "Okay. Room assignments. You're in seven, top of the stairs, lake side. Dinner's at six. Opening session at seven in the rehearsal chapel."

"Rehearsal chapel. Fancy."

"It's a converted sitting room with a very expensive organ in it. Don't tell Canon Vladek I said that."

Megan was reaching for her room key when she heard footsteps on the stairs.

She looked up. And stopped.

Gabriel Mendez was coming down the staircase with a guitar case in one hand and a duffel over his shoulder. His hair was shorter than it had been in college. His shoulders were broader. He was wearing a sweater that looked like it cost more than her car payment, and he was smiling at Sofia, and then he saw Megan, and the smile dropped right off his face.

"Megan?"

"Gabriel."

They stared at each other across the lobby. Eight years. Eight years since senior year, since the amicable ending and the we'll keep in touch and the not keeping in touch. She was twenty-one then. Twenty-nine now, apparently, and still recognizing that face across a room like a slap.

"You know each other," Sofia said slowly, looking between them.

"We went to college together," Megan said. Her voice came out flat. Competitive, even. She hated that it came out flat.

"Choir," Gabriel added. He set his guitar case down. "She wrote the better descant for the spring concert and never let anyone forget it."

"You wrote a descant that broke the soprano section, Gabriel. It was a crime against altos."

"Oh, here we go!"

Sofia looked at Megan like a woman watching weather come in. "So. This will be a fun week."

Megan picked up her bag. "Lovely to see you, Gabriel. Truly. Enjoy the retreat."

"You too. Hope the creativity's flowing."

It was not. It absolutely was not, and he knew it, because everybody knew it, because she'd told Sofia on the phone three weeks ago that she was creatively dead and wanted to hide in the woods about it. She climbed the stairs and did not look back. Mostly.

* * *

The rehearsal chapel filled at seven sharp. Eight writers, folding chairs, a piano in the corner with its lid propped open like a mouth. Canon Vladek stood at the front, a tall man somewhere in his fifties with gray hair and a voice that carried without trying.

"Welcome to St. Mark's," he said. "For those who do not know me, I am Vladek, and I have the great fortune of serving as canon at the cathedral whose hundredth birthday we are celebrating next spring."

A polite ripple of approval.

"The task is simple. One hymn. One winner. The winning hymn will be sung at the centennial mass, published in the diocesan hymnal, and the composer will receive the commission. Full text and music. Paid."

Megan felt her spine straighten. Paid. She had a mortgage now, just hers, just enough, and a freelance editing income that went up and down like a swing set. A paid commission from the diocese would mean six months of not checking her bank app with one eye shut.

"Rules," Vladek continued. "You may write alone or in pairs. The text must be original. The tune must be original. You will have the week. Submissions by Friday noon, sung through by the full choir Saturday, and the decision announced Sunday after morning prayer."

Pairs. Interesting. She glanced around the room, doing math. Most of these people were strangers to each other. Strangers she could evaluate.

Then she looked left. Gabriel was three chairs down, already looking at her, wearing the expression of a man doing the same math.

No. Absolutely not.

"The chapel and the garden are yours," Vladek said. "The piano is tuned daily. Meals are communal, and I strongly encourage you to argue about your work at the table. Good arguments make good hymns. Questions?"

A hand went up near the front. "Can we hear last year's winner, for reference?"

"You may not. It was not good." Vladek folded his hands. "This is why we are here."

Megan bit down on a laugh. Across the room, Gabriel didn't. She heard it, clear as a bell, that same laugh she remembered from a practice room eight years ago.

So. He was here to win. She was here to win. Fine. She'd written her first hymn at twenty-two in a dorm room that smelled like burnt popcorn, and she'd been getting better ever since, divorce and all. She could beat him.

She was going to beat him.

* * *

Dinner was pot roast and an atmosphere you could have cut with a fork.

Megan sat at the far end of the long table with two retired music teachers and a very quiet man named Anders who wrote organ preludes. Gabriel sat at the other end. They did not speak. They did, however, keep making eye contact over the bread basket, which was worse than speaking.

"First retreat?" one of the retired teachers asked her.

"Yes. Well, first hymn retreat. I've done fiction weekends."

"Oh, what do you write?"

"I edit, mostly. Novels. I used to write more." She smiled the smile she used at parties. "Life happened."

"Life happens," the woman said solemnly, and passed her the carrots.

At the other end of the table, Gabriel was telling a story. She couldn't hear the words, just the shape of it, and the laughter around him. He'd always been like that. Rooms tilted toward him. It had been one of the things she liked about him at twenty-one, and it was apparently still one of the things she resented about him at twenty-nine.

Fine. Everything was fine.

After dinner, the group scattered. Sofia cornered Megan in the hallway. "You and Gabriel. I had no idea. I swear on the clipboard."

"It's fine. Ancient history. Amicable."

"Amicable," Sofia repeated, in a tone that suggested she'd filed that word for later use.

"I'm going for a walk before it gets dark."

The garden path ran down toward the lake, gravel and lamplight and late-summer air. Megan walked it twice and got exactly nowhere with a first line. Every phrase she tried sounded like it was a greeting card with a cross on it.

She came back inside around nine, meaning to go up to her room. Instead she heard the piano. Faint, from the rehearsal chapel, down the hall. Someone playing the same four chords over and over. Not a hymn. Not quite anything yet.

She drifted toward it without deciding to.

The chapel door was half open. Gabriel sat at the piano, jacket off, playing with one hand and writing on a legal pad with the other. The progression went up, hung there, and came down wrong. He frowned and did it again. Same wrong landing.

"It's the third chord," Megan said, before her brain could file any objections.

He turned on the bench. "How long have you been standing there?"

"Thirty seconds. The third chord. You want a minor there, not a suspension."

"A minor is what everyone would do."

"Everyone would do it because everyone is right." She came in, arms crossed, because apparently she was doing this. "You're setting up an expectation and then robbing it. On a hymn. Congregations don't like being robbed. They like coming home."

He looked at her for a moment. Then he played it both ways, back to back. Her way, then his way.

"Say the last line again," he said.

"So they rob it. Congregations don't like being robbed."

"No, the coming home part." He played the minor version again, slower. His mouth twisted. "Okay. Okay, that's better, and I hate that."

"You'll survive."

"Will I?" He swiveled on the bench. "So what's this, then? You just wander hallways critiquing progressions, or are you entering the competition too?"

"Too? Gabriel, why else would I be here?"

"I figured editors come to these things to network."

Megan laughed, sharp. "You figured wrong. I'm here to win."

Something shifted in his face. She saw it land, the word win, and she watched him decide to rise to it.

"Good," he said. "Because I've been sitting here all evening thinking the competition needed one more person worth beating."

She turned and walked out before her face could do anything about that. Down the hall, up the stairs, into room seven, where she sat on the bed and realized she'd written two lines in her head on the way up.

The worst part was that they were good.

* * *

The next morning, Sofia announced the exercise like a woman announcing a verdict.

"Pairs," she said, clipboard up. "You'll walk the garden together. One of you writes a line. The other has to answer it with a line. Back and forth. No arguing about theology, Anders."

Everyone laughed. Then she read the pairings off the clipboard and Megan's stomach dropped.

"Megan and Gabriel."

"You're kidding," Megan said.

"Garden's big," Sofia said, serene. "You'll survive."

Gabriel was already holding the door open. Of course he was. He gestured her through with a little bow, and she walked past him because there was no dignified alternative.

The morning was cool and the lake was flat as glass. They went down the gravel path, past the roses Sofia's volunteers had planted, and stood there like two people at a funeral neither wanted to attend.

"Rules," Gabriel said. "You start."

"My day starts. The sun comes up."

"That's a line?"

"That's a placeholder. Give me a second."

He laughed. She hated that it still worked on her. "Fine. The sun comes up and finds us here."

"Answering my line with my own words. Weak."

"It's collaboration."

"It's theft." She looked at the water. "Fine. The light comes down the water like it's looking for someone."

He went quiet. She watched him actually turn it over, which surprised her. In college he'd riffed everything fast, easy, half of it garbage. This was slower. Cautious.

"And finding us," he said. "Okay. My turn. Who is it looking for?"

And that was somehow the question that broke everything open, because she heard herself say, before she could stop it, "Not my ex-husband, that's for sure."

Gabriel turned. "You got married?"

"Twenty-three. Divorced at twenty-seven." She kept her eyes on the lake. "Four years. You'd know if you'd ever answered a single Christmas card."

"I answered one. You'd moved."

"Apartment, twice. Job, twice." She shrugged. "It's been a lot of moving."

"When did you stop writing?"

"How do you know I stopped?"

"Megan." He said her name the way he used to say it in the practice rooms, patient, like waiting was a thing he was good at. "You just told me your placeholder line was about the sun coming up. You used to be better than the sun coming up."

She laughed, and it came out wrong, wet at the edges. Great. Fantastic.

"He was a musician," she said. "That's the short version. Cellist. Very serious, very talented, very broke. And I edited novels, which paid actual money, and somewhere in year three he decided that made me the enemy. Not a partner with a job. The enemy." She picked a leaf off a rose bush and shredded it. "Every deadline I took was a betrayal. Every hymn I didn't write was, apparently, also a betrayal, because I'd given up on the real work, his words, and was just typing other people's commas."

"Your commas are excellent, though."

"Thank you. That's the support I needed at the time."

"You know what I mean."

"I know." She sighed. "The last year we were married I wrote nothing. Nothing at all. And when it ended I told myself I'd write every day, like grief was going to be this great fuel, and instead I sat in my condo with a mortgage and a red pen and six weeks of nothing worth sending anyone. Hence here."

Gabriel didn't say anything for a while. They walked further down the path, past the bench, to where the gravel gave out on grass.

"I peaked at twenty-three," he said.

She stopped walking. "What?"

"You heard me." He put his hands in his pockets, stared at the water. "Vladek told everyone, told the archdiocese, told whoever would listen, that I was the real thing. Twenty-three. And I believed him. And then I turned twenty-four, and twenty-five, and nothing got better. Nothing got bigger. I've been writing the same anthem for six years with better chords." He shrugged, and it looked like it cost him something. "Vladek called me in February. Asked me to enter this. And I said yes because I need him to be right about me. I need to be that guy. I don't know how to be anything else."

"You're twenty-nine."

"Old enough to know."

"You're twenty-nine," she said again, "and you're standing in a garden with someone who hasn't written a hymn in three years, telling her you peaked. Do you hear how that sounds?"

"Like I'm awful?"

"Like you're scared." She said it gently, which surprised her. "Gabriel. The chord last night. You played the safe version