Billy did follow along. He didn't always know which words were which when Goodnight said them, but English no longer looked just like a jumble of things he didn't understand. Like learning to speak it, learning to read it was a long process. But it made Goodnight smile, and it made Billy's life easier.

He was still looking at the page, slowly reading along from the point Goodnight had left off, when he tuned into the music as well.

"How can you tell?" he asked. "Maybe the piano's just better tuned than other places."