STARR TO STEP AWAY INDEFINITELY FOLLOWING FATAL COLLISION

On the night of November 19th, three hours after Luca Starr walked off the stage at Kennedy Hall to a standing ovation nobody in the room seemed willing to end, the family sedan carrying him and his parents left Route 15 in heavy rain and struck the guardrail three-quarters of a mile west of Leesburg. The first responder on the scene, a volunteer firefighter named D. Reyes, described the car as "quiet, in a way a car should never be." June Starr, 51, and Marcus Starr, 54, were pronounced dead at the scene. Their son, in the back seat, was airlifted to Inova Fairfax in critical condition. He was still wearing his stage clothes.

He survived. The bones, remarkably, did too. Surgeons at Inova confirmed hairline fractures to three fingers on the left hand and one on the right, all set cleanly, all expected to knit within six to eight weeks. "Physically," the lead trauma surgeon told reporters on Tuesday, "we expect a full recovery. The bones, the tendons, the architecture of these hands, those, we can rebuild." He paused before the second half of the sentence, and every reporter in the room seemed to know it was coming. "The nerves are another matter." The impact, the team believes, produced a diffuse traction injury across both brachial plexuses, the trunk of wiring that feeds the arm from the shoulder down, and a complication the neurologists have been reluctant to name in a single word. In the medical summary released to the family, and obtained by this publication with their consent, the phrasing is careful: "persistent tremor at rest and on intention, chronic neuropathic pain, and marked allodynia, a condition in which even the lightest tactile stimulus is registered by the patient as burning." A cotton bedsheet. A shirt cuff. The felt of a key. All of it, for the foreseeable future, will read to him as fire.

Prognosis, in the neurologists' language, is "guarded and long." The tremor may fade with time and therapy; it may not. Pain of this kind, once it settles into a nervous system this young, tends to make a home. He will, they expect, walk, write, dress himself, do everything the world asks of a pair of hands that are not required to be miraculous. What he will not do, what nobody in any room this week has said aloud, and what everybody in every room this week has understood, is play. Not the way he played. Not soon. Perhaps not at all.

The room he was practicing in eight weeks ago is now surrounded by cameras that will not be answered. Reporters camped on the shoulder of Evergreen Mill Road were asked, by a neighbor and then by a county deputy, to move along. Someone left an untuned upright on the Starrs' front lawn with a note taped to the fallboard reading WHENEVER YOU'RE READY. It rained. The note ran. The piano is still there.

Management confirmed this morning that the remainder of the 2016 season, twelve dates across three continents, including the long-anticipated September concert billed only as The Symphony, has been cancelled in its entirety. "Refunds are being processed for every ticket, without exception, and without a request required," the statement read. "We ask for patience, and for privacy. Luca has lost more than an audience can imagine, and we would ask, gently, that you do not try to." The statement was six sentences. None of them contained a plan.

Those close to him say he has not spoken publicly since the accident. He has not, according to two people present at the hospital, opened a piano, not the practice upright in the recovery wing, not the concert grand at the Kennedy that the venue has kept unlocked "in case," not the Yamaha at the family home in Loudoun County that his mother polished with a cotton diaper every Sunday of his life. A nurse on the recovery ward told a colleague, quietly, that on the second morning he had reached for the sleeve of his own hospital gown, felt it graze the back of his hand, and pulled the arm away as though it had been held to a stove. He has worn cotton gloves since. His sister, asked whether he would play again, answered through a spokesperson with a single sentence: "That is not the question we are asking him."

The last thing he said from a stage, three words, half whispered into a microphone at Kennedy after the final encore, head down, eyes closed, as though he were making a promise to somebody standing behind him, was "I'm gonna play."

It is, for the moment, the last sentence of his career.