She revealed a small folder she had kept for decades with the travel-stamped photograph of two young women smiling beside a piano. The back of the photo carried the same shaky handwriting as the page Mateo had found. Suddenly the partitura was not just a recovered composition but a thread connecting lives scattered by migration, storms, and time. People traded stories—of a ferry that missed the tide, of a radio that played a hidden recording in the small hours, of a wedding where the merengue had made strangers into partners.