On the second page of the score Vesna recognized her own sentence. She had written it twenty years earlier in a letter to the man she thought she would grow old with. Now twenty-four amateur choristers repeated it beside a piano, emphasizing the word "window." Dalibor, the conductor, told them to sing more softly. He was the same man who had once received the letter.
Vesna and Dalibor had remained in the same choir after their breakup. The town was small, she needed music, and passing years had made their rehearsing together uninteresting to everyone. Both had other partners. The new piece was announced as a setting of an anonymous letter found in an old book. Dalibor dedicated it to everyone who had ever waited for somebody to return.
During the break Vesna drew him toward the corridor. She said the letter was not anonymous and she did not want it performed. He looked surprised, then laughed. He argued nobody could know whose it was. Vesna replied that she knew and that her husband was expected in the audience. She was not ashamed of it. She did not want to explain her former pain with a concert program in hand.
Dalibor said the composition was finished and the choir had worked for months. True, she thought, and he had not asked during any of those months. She asked the board to read her letter, a copy of which she kept in a box of diaries. She did not ask them to declare him a bad man or erase twenty years of shared performances. She asked them to remove one piece from the program.
The rehearsal became an argument. Some members spoke about artistic freedom, others about the right to say no. Vesna sat beside the window, listening to people debate sentences she had once written in tears. The youngest member asked Dalibor why he had not invented a different letter. For the first time he lacked a lengthy answer. The board accepted Vesna's request.
At the concert an old sevdalinka replaced the new piece. Dalibor told the audience the program had changed for personal reasons. Afterward Vesna asked that this explanation not be repeated. He apologized privately, awkwardly, without talking about inspiration. He admitted he had enjoyed imagining he still had a right to their shared language.
Vesna remained in the choir but moved to another voice part the following season because she wanted a new challenge. At home she told her husband everything. He asked whether she wanted him to read the letter. She said she did not want that tonight. He made tea and asked how her new part sounded. She sang a few bars, as quietly as she herself chose.