My neighbor has been reviewing piano practice I stopped doing six months ago

Mrs. Alvarez has rated my piano practice for three years.

She lives in the apartment below mine. The first note appeared under my door two weeks after I bought a used upright piano.

“Scales: too fast. Song: promising. Pedal: criminal.”

I went downstairs to apologize for the noise. Mrs. Alvarez said she was not complaining. She had taught middle-school music for thirty-eight years and could not help listening with professional concern.

After that, a note arrived every Sunday.

She never knocked. She slid one sheet of lined paper under my door after my four o’clock practice. She praised clean transitions, circled measures she could hear me avoiding and once wrote, “You cannot solve a difficult bar by beginning again before you reach it.” That sentence followed me into several parts of my life.

We were not exactly friends. We spoke in the lobby and carried packages for each other, but the notes were our real conversation. I left replies on her mat. She responded in red pencil.

Six months ago, I injured my right wrist unloading a cabinet at work.

The injury was not dramatic, but playing hurt. A specialist told me to rest it and return slowly. I closed the piano and spent Sunday afternoons sitting beside it, feeling as if the room had lost a useful language.

The first week of silence, Mrs. Alvarez left no note.

The second week, she asked whether I was away.

I wrote that work had become busy.

The third Sunday, I played a recording of myself practicing through a speaker beside the piano.

I intended it as a joke, or maybe a temporary reassurance. The recording was from the previous winter, full of mistakes Mrs. Alvarez had already corrected. Forty minutes later, a note appeared.

“You are rushing the left hand again. Also, the same cough at 4:22? Open a window.”

She had not recognized the recording.

I played another the next week. Then another.

The strangest part was that her notes changed. She heard improvements that were not there. One Sunday she wrote that I sounded patient. Another week she said the pauses felt less frightened. I began to understand that she was listening not only to the piano but to the shape she believed my week had taken.

I kept the deception because I missed being expected.

My wrist has improved. I can now play for ten minutes at a time, badly and honestly. I have not done it at four on Sunday because the real playing would expose six months of impossible continuity.

Yesterday, Mrs. Alvarez stopped me by the mailboxes. Her former students are holding a small retirement dinner next month. She told them about the adult beginner upstairs who never quit. She wants me to play one piece.

I said I would think about it.

She smiled and said, “You have already practiced it enough.”

I could decline without explaining. I could choose a simple piece and let the false history remain. Or I could tell her that the music she reviewed was old and that the progress she heard existed mostly in the way she chose to hear me.

The injury is not what embarrasses me. I am ashamed that I turned her attention into a service I could keep receiving without giving her the truth.

Do I confess before the dinner, or is there a way to restart our Sunday conversation without making Mrs. Alvarez feel foolish for every generous note she wrote?