The Lola Quartet

by Emily St. John Mandel

She leaned back on the sofa in the basement where they used to practise, half-lost in the shadows at the edge of the room, staring up at the ceiling, crossing and uncrossing her legs, and when he raised his trumpet to his lips he often thought I am playing for you but he never told her this.

He could lose himself in the music for a while and he sometimes felt that he was a part of something that mattered, a witness to evenings that might be written about later on.

She wouldn’t dive into the ocean tonight but it was nice to think that she could.

“I just came undone,” Gavin said. “I wasn’t expecting it.”