Lome had been assigned the manuscript as part of a research archive rotation: four weeks with an unfinished work, a short analytical write-up, return it to the collection.
She had looked up the composer's name in the archive index. There was not much: a list of completed works, one brief biography in a collection of mid-century composers she had never encountered. She put the biography aside. The conditions, written at the end of the forty-seventh minute, asked for cold contact.
She read the score.
It took her three days to get through it properly, forty-seven minutes of dense orchestral writing that she had to read slowly, hearing it in parts, going back to re-read sections she hadn't understood. On the fourth day she felt she had it: the long argument of it, the weight of what had been built, the shape of what was missing.
On the fifth day she started the final movement.
She worked for three weeks. She didn't listen to any of the composer's other work. She didn't read the biography she had put aside. She worked inside the piece and nowhere else.
The final movement, when she finished it, was nine minutes long.
She played it through from the beginning on a February morning in her studio, and when she reached the forty-seventh minute and her own notes began, she could feel the seam: the place where the composer's hand ended and her hand began. It was audible. Not wrong. The arguments connected, the logic held. But audible. Two different people had made this.
She sat with that for a while.
Then she thought: maybe that was right. Maybe the piece had always needed a seam. Maybe the composer had understood that the final movement could not come from the same hand without becoming a different kind of wrong.
She opened the biography she had put aside three weeks ago.