Nesta arrives on the train in the early afternoon and walks from the station to Voss's apartment, which she has been walking to for twenty-six years and could find in any light. The route is pleasant. She does not think of it as going to see the phenomenon. She thinks of it as going to see her sister.
Voss is at the door before she knocks. They embrace. They make tea. They talk. This is the truth that took Nesta the longest to understand: the visit is real regardless of what she cannot perceive. Voss is present. Voss asks about her job, about her neighbor's ongoing renovation project, about whether Nesta has been sleeping. The sound (whatever the sound is) does not displace Voss. It coexists with her.
There are moments, though. They happen without warning. Voss will be mid-sentence and then she goes still, very briefly, and her eyes go to a middle distance that is not the room. The stillness lasts two or three seconds. Then she returns. She does not explain and Nesta does not ask. In the early years, Nesta asked. The explanations were accurate but not helpful. She has learned to receive the stillness as one receives rain: it is not about you, it is not addressed to you, it is simply a condition of the air.
After dinner they walk along the canal. The evening is cold and pleasant. Voss tells her about a book she has been reading, a history of notation systems for music, and the conversation moves from that to a composer they both remember from childhood and from there to their grandmother, who is where the conversation always arrives eventually.
What Nesta has understood, slowly, is that she does not need access to what Voss hears in order to be close to her. This took twenty years to understand properly. The distance she felt in the beginning was not the distance the sound created. The distance was her own insistence on hearing it.
She takes the last train home. Voss waves from the platform and then turns and goes back through the station, and Nesta watches until the window takes her past the curve. She turns on her phone. She finds a message from a friend. Outside the train window, the dark countryside passes. She listens, with both ears, to the sound of the train, and there is a lot of room in the listening.