I had blind spots in my opera house. (There were areas I could not venture during the day. There were places I had never thought I would desire to access.) When Christine disappeared into one, there was nothing for me to do but to wait on my side of the mirror in hopes she would enter into the room beyond the secret window. I grew worried that she would give up her ghost hunt before she found my little innovation. Each time I left my post and relocated her, she looked more deflated, her back bending just that slight bit farther. I began to think perhaps she needed a more specific hint and considered ways to use Buquet to direct her to the particular mirror I required.
However, it was unnecessary. The evening arrived when she found my mirror-window entirely on her own.
She had vanished yet again, and I took to the passageways hidden within the walls and followed the familiar route to the dressing room. As I neared it, the blackness in the corridor became less so, a mild glow invading the gloom.
I hesitated, knowing the performance that night had ended awhile ago and not wishing to happen upon any sort of unseemly activity. At length, I rounded the final bend, and I saw her standing in front of the glass. She was there before me, facing me. I came forward, emboldened by the knowledge that she could not see me, and stepped as near as possible to the barrier between us.
It was the closest I had ever been to her—the closest I had been to any other living being in a very long time. Yet the circumstances did not feel alien to me. My wife and I coexisted on opposing sides of glass, after all.
Her eyes were blue and bloodshot and roamed the surface of the mirror with a very thorough intensity. Her hair was dark and wild and spiraled haphazardly about her face. There was a concerned creasing in her brow, a slight tremor to the set of her chin, a faint smattering of freckles strewn across her cheeks. I allowed myself to think up close what I never dared admit from a distance.
Christine was not made from music, but she was, in fact, quite beautiful all the same.