The map in the piano
When Nell's grandmother left her the old upright piano, nobody in the family could understand why. Nell had never played. She had spent one summer at her grandmother's house, when she was nine, and she remembered the piano mostly as a place to hide birthday presents and stray cats.
The movers carried it up three flights of stairs and set it against the only wall in her apartment that was long enough. For a week it stood there like a polite guest who did not know when to leave. Nell put a lamp on it, then a plant, then a stack of unopened mail.
On a rainy Sunday she lifted the lid for the first time. The keys were the yellow of old teeth, and one near the middle made no sound at all. Curious, she opened the front panel to look at the hammers. Tucked behind them, folded into a square no bigger than her palm, was a sheet of thin blue paper.
It was a map, drawn in pencil. There was the house she remembered, the crooked fence, the pond at the bottom of the field. A dotted line ran from the back porch past the pond to a small circle beside the largest oak. Next to the circle, in her grandmother's neat handwriting, were four words: For when you're ready.
Nell sat on the floor with the map on her knees for a long time. The house had been sold two years ago. The new owners, she remembered, were a young couple with a baby and a dog. She could write to them. She could explain. It would sound ridiculous.
She wrote the letter anyway, three drafts of it, and mailed the last one on Monday before she could change her mind.
The reply came nine days later, in a thick envelope. Inside was a photograph of the oak tree, a small tin box sitting on a folding chair in front of it, and a note. We found it exactly where the map said, the note read. We didn't open it. It's yours. Come for coffee when you collect it.
Nell put the photograph on the piano, next to the plant. Then, for the first time, she pressed one of the keys.
The passage appears when you press Start.