After takeoff, Maya kept the folder closed. Clouds covered the ground, and the window reflected her face back at us. She asked whether the woman’s story meant Dad’s unfinished song should stay exactly as he left it. I had been wondering the same thing for months without admitting it. Daniel’s notes filled the margins with arrows, questions, and possible endings. Maya’s green measures altered the melody he had written.

The promise she made beside his hospital bed was simple: she would finish the piece. Grief had turned it into a rule that every note must sound like him. Whenever her teacher suggested a change, Maya defended Daniel’s draft as if revising it would erase him. I had encouraged that caution because I could not bear another thing becoming different. Neither of us had noticed that we were asking a sixteen-year-old to imitate a man she loved instead of composing as herself.

I told her about a conversation Daniel and I had during his last week at home. He worried Maya would treat the score like an exam he had assigned. He wanted her to argue with it. I had withheld that because his exact words felt like one more fragile object to protect. Maya was hurt, correctly, that I had decided which memories she could handle.

She put on the headphones and listened to the recorder. Daniel’s voice counted four beats, played an uncertain phrase on the piano, then laughed when he missed the landing. Maya replayed the laugh. A flight attendant offered water, and we both shook our heads because we were crying. After a while, Maya took out her green pencil. She did not change a note. She wrote a question in the margin beneath one of his, placing her handwriting beside his instead of under it.