The music in his laughter had a way of rounding off the missing notes in her soul.

The line casts emotional healing in musical terms: her inner life is imagined as a melody with “missing notes,” suggesting absence, trauma, or incompleteness that she cannot supply on her own. His laughter—light, spontaneous, and communal—functions like harmony or accompaniment, “rounding off” what is jagged or unfinished in her. The image implies that intimacy can be restorative not through grand declarations but through small, embodied sounds that re-tune a person’s sense of self. It also hints at the relational nature of wholeness in Naylor’s fiction: identity and survival are often shaped in the space between people, where one person’s joy can momentarily compensate for another’s lack.