I grinned. “She used to make me do the same thing.”
“She did?”
“Yep.”
“Did you do it, or did you try and cheat?”
I laughed, the sound filling the room and echoing back at me. “Sometimes I did it, and sometimes I tried to cheat, but she always caught me.”
“Cheating is wrong,” Hannah said with a frown.
I tried to twist my lips back into a serious line, but I failed. “You’re absolutely right. So, why don’t you do those twenty-five times while I talk with your mom.”
I eased off the bench as she set her hands back on the keys and started over at the first mistake.
Tristan wiped her face with her hands and then wrapped her arms around herself as I joined her at the doorway. She was swaying again like she had Friday night when I’d walked her home.
“She’s very talented,” I said honestly.
Tristan nodded.
“You said she’s only five, right?” I had to double-check because her age definitely didn’t fit with what I’d just heard.
“She’s just turning five this month.”
“That’s pretty incredible. Like savant-type incredible.”
Tristan chuckled. “No, but she takes it seriously right now.”
“Elana was teaching her. She was teaching a lot of kids, right?”
She nodded.
“Can I help by taking over some of the lessons? Until you figure things out?”
“What? With Sheldon and Hannah?”
“With as many as I can. I mean, I only know four instruments myself, but I think I could figure out enough to at least help the others get by. How many did she have on the books right now?”
“Twenty.”
I tried not to groan. Had I just signed myself up to help twenty kids learn to play an instrument? In the middle of a not-quite musical crisis of my own? In the middle of helping my sister and fighting an attraction to a woman who didn’t seem to want anything to do with me?
I cleared my throat. “Twenty, huh?”
“You can’t do them,” she said, and surprise hit me to my core, and I knew it registered on my face when she looked away and added on, “Like I said earlier, I can’t pay you.”
“I don’t want your money. I just want to help.”
“Why?” she asked, the sadness back in her voice.
“Because Elana would want me to.”
“Did she ask you to do this?” she asked quietly.
“What do you mean?”
“In the things she left you. Did she ask you to do this? Because if she did, she shouldn’t have, and I refuse to hold you to it,” she said, frustration rolling through her.
