She stood on the inn’s quaint terrace, overlooking the Duomo. The city was blue from twilight, as tempting and warm as a freshly made bed. It was tourist season, the crowds below loud yet languid, and, twinkling through the trattoria lights, she could hear the plucked notes of street musicians performing pieces she knew backwards and blindfolded with amateurish arnestness.

She sighed. The air, scented with a thousand blooming bougainvillea, tasted faintly of rose water.

She had always been willing to give up her roots.

Her freedom.

Her privacy.

She had trained for so long, since well before she could read, that these basic aspects of personhood had never felt like hers to begin with.

But only in the past months, since she was appointed first violin, had her body begun to feel the weight of all it carried. And she knew, from the extra hours she spent alone in the conservatory practice rooms, that her music felt the toll as well. Success, she thought, gazing across the Arno River, came to you like a luxury gown. A gift, yes. But one incomplete, unwearable, without adorning it with still more glittering sacrifices.

Over the past year alone, there had been Aspen for the music tent. To be paired with glossy nude lipstick and smiling interviews.

Salsburg for the festival season. To be paired with starched white collars and indefatigable fingers.

London for Wigmore Hall. To be paired with sequined evening dresses, leather-soled stilettos, and the eyes of a thousand connoisseurs waiting for her hands to falter.

She had come to Italy for the Ravello Festival on the Amalfi Coast.

Instead, inexplicably, she had taken the train north.

On her first night in Florence, she never left the hotel room. She lay naked on the duvet, ordering room service and feeling the warm air of the ceiling fan blanket her weary skin. Enjoying the simple pleasure of having nowhere she needed to be, no one she needed to be, and nothing she needed to wear. She slept late. Woke late. And the next morning, lunched late, leaving her hotel at two for a plate of pici al pesto.

Caring only for comfort, she wore the same clothes she had on the train: a heavy cotton set, thick enough to obscure every inch of her. Which, she supposed, was its own kind of sacrifice. For two hours, she walked along the Arno River, feeling only heat.

When she returned to the inn that afternoon, she stopped at a small cashmere factory and bought herself a sweater thin enough to let in the Tuscan sun.For the next three weeks, she wore nothing else.

The weave was softer than any life she had ever imagined for herself.

As revealing as music.

As certain as any concerto.

She bought another. And another. Asking herself with every new addition to her suitcase, what was the point of a life dedicated to beauty if she didn’t live in it?

Perhaps, she thought, thread could carry melody as well as any string.

She spent those last weeks of August running her hands over her cashmere body until, for the first time in fifteen years, her calluses softened. Playing that final night in her hotel room, Vivaldi hurt more than it had since childhood. But never before had she felt it so keenly. She played without stopping, marveling at her own sound as though she had only just awoken, amnesiac, in her body, and decided, in her mind at least, she had found a place to call home. A gift that, like a worn heirloom sweater, required absolutely nothing from her in return.

She made it to the Ravello Festival.

There, sitting in the anonymous audience rather than on the stage, listening to her family tune their instruments without her, she wore her Malo sweater.

The cashmere was so thin that, when they played, she could see the goosebumps spreading across her forearms.