Just be yourself, Lisa, she said. It’ll make life a whole lot easier.

Lynda Roth entered my life as my jazz piano instructor. An immense musical talent with a renegade past, she was a deeply kind, outspoken woman who enjoyed Scotch and cigarillos and once considered becoming a rabbi. I was a former programmer, a beginning writer, a lapsed Catholic living in a gated community with a husband, daughter, and son.

That our relationship deepened into intimacy was…unexpected, beautiful, tumultuous.

How was I to make sense of those years in the middle of my life?

The wild joy, the nearly unbearable grief, the eroticism, the heart-stopping conflicts: I wrote them out as scenes and fragments, some on index cards, others on snippets of paper, and spread them like scattered pearls throughout my office. I studied them for weeks. What do you want to be?

An intimate narrative, they said, structured in three movements — Allegro, Adagio, Allegro con brio — because this is also a love story of music, and thematically it’s a perfect fit.

Okay, I said. But where does the story begin?

Under a vast blue sky, the air rich with beached sea kelp, salt. That first birdsong afternoon.