He looked up. "I was looking for... a sound."

Lucía, a librarian with hair the color of wet ash, came to his workshop. She didn't need an instrument fixed. She needed an answer. A man had left a poem in a book of Neruda’s. She had fallen in love with the handwriting, the scent of coffee on the page, the stranger who had underlined the word "ternura."

Don Octavio smiled, his milky eyes turned toward the ceiling. "You don't find a bat. You stand still in the dark and let its frantic wings brush your cheek."

"It’s not a book," he said. "It's a map of echoes."

And in the downpour, without a single word, they listened to the frantic, perfect fluttering of each other's hearts.

There, under a broken streetlamp, stood a man. He was soaking wet, holding a copy of the same Neruda book, looking as lost as she felt. He was the bat, and she was the belfry.