The piano keys felt cold under my fingers. Like tiny ice cubes arranged in perfect order, waiting to melt into music. But I couldn’t play. Not today.

“You haven’t touched the piano in weeks,” Mari said, placing a cup of coffee beside me. Steam rose in lazy spirals, disappearing into the dim light of my apartment.

I nodded, running my fingers along the ivory without pressing down. “The keys don’t respond like they used to.”

“Or maybe you’re the one who’s not responding,” she replied softly.

She was right, of course. Ever since that night at the embassy, when I discovered the microfilm hidden inside my piano - slipped between the felt hammers by someone I trusted - the music had abandoned me.

“Have you heard from him?” Mari asked, settling into the armchair by the window. Outside, Tokyo’s autumn rain painted everything in shades of gray.

“Chen?” I kept my voice neutral. “No. Not since he disappeared.”

Chen had been my student for two years. Every Wednesday afternoon, he would arrive precisely at three, bow politely, and sit beside me at the piano. His fingers were clumsy at first, but he had persistence. What I didn’t know was that the musical scores he brought each week contained coded messages. That my piano lessons were providing cover for something far more sinister.

“The authorities came again yesterday,” I told Mari, finally lifting my hands from the keys. “They think I was involved.”

“Were you?”

I looked at her - really looked at her - for the first time that morning. Her face was carefully composed, but there was something in her eyes. A question? A accusation?

“You know,” I said slowly, “Chen asked me once why I became a piano teacher. I told him it was because music speaks when words fail. He smiled and said sometimes silence speaks louder than both.”

Mari set down her coffee cup with a soft clink. “And what is your silence saying now?”

The rain outside grew heavier, drumming against the windows like impatient fingers on piano keys. I stood up and closed the lid over the keyboard, the sound echoing with finality.

“It’s saying that some songs are better left unplayed,” I answered. “Some keys should remain untouched.”

Mari rose to leave, pausing at the door. “They’ll keep looking for answers.”

“Let them look,” I said. “The truth is like music - it changes depending on who’s listening.”

After she left, I sat alone in the growing darkness, thinking about Chen, about trust, about the secrets we keep and the ones that keep us. The piano loomed before me like a black monolith, holding its silence.

I never told anyone that I had found a second microfilm, weeks before the authorities discovered the first. Never mentioned that I had destroyed it, protecting both Chen and myself from truths too dangerous to reveal.

Some keys, after all, are meant to stay silent.