The Window

A blind cellist who stopped playing. A mother who escaped at sixteen. A father who came back from the wrong war.

They all end up in the same Boston building — separated by two floors and twenty-two years of silence. In the apartment above, Daniel sits in the dark with his cello unplayed. Below him, his mother Elizabeth tends to a life she built from nothing after running away at sixteen. Neither knows that Michael Moran — the man she left behind, the father Daniel never met — has spent twenty years trying to find his way back.

And in a practice room at the New England Conservatory, a pianist named James Hartley is learning a piece he cannot explain his obsession with: Schubert's Ständchen. A serenade written to be heard through glass.

Published June 29, 2026

For readers who love: quiet devastation, estranged families, music as memory, and stories that stay with you long after the last page.