She glanced around, checking the stage and the wings as casually as she could. Then she saw him standing on the edge of the stage, chatting with the rehearsal pianist. He had changed the tights and tank top he’d worn for company class for sweatpants and a snug white T-shirt. As he talked to the pianist, he ran a hand through his sweat-dampened hair, a gesture she now recognized as something he did when he was anxious. She watched from the wings ashe gave the pianist a nod, then left the stage and headed into the audience, where he settled himself a few rows behind Peter and the staff. He couldn’t see her, but knowing he was there made her feel less jumpy. Knowing he was there, when he would rather have left as soon as he could, made her heart swell and squeeze again.
Out in the theater, Peter stood, and the hum of conversation died swiftly. Justin, who’d been stretching near center stage, got to his feet and shook his legs out, then came over to her.
“Here we go,” he said. “I’ll make sure to hold on tight during those pirouettes, don’t worry. Chookas!”
Heather looked at him blankly.
“It’s Australian formerde,” he said. “Chookas.”
“Oh, uh, chookas,” she repeated, and Justin wandered away toward stage right. On the day of the performance, there’d be a small hunting shack where Albrecht would hide his hunting horn and his sword, concealing proof of his true noble identity.
Peter cleared his throat, and Heather’s pulse quickened as he looked around the theater expectantly and addressed the company.
“Ladies and gentlemen, are we ready to begin?” There was a murmur of assent, and a moment later, the pianist began. Even without the full force of the strings and woodwinds, Adolphe Adam’s overture was a jolting, dramatic way to start a ballet, and the sound of it didn’t help settle Heather’s pulse. She stood in the wings at stage left, fiddling with the waistband of her skirt, eyes on the floor, too nervous to make eye contact with the other dancers assembled in the wings.
The first act pas de deux went off without a hitch. Despite their rocky start together, Justin was a gifted partner, and he’d learned to read her body and adjust to her musicality. At one point in the pas de deux, before they were to launch into a series of leaps in a wide circle around the whole stage, Heather waited a half a second longer than the choreography called for, to give the impression that Giselle couldn’t tear her eyes away from her beloved’s face. Justin didn’t miss a beat: he held her gaze until she broke it, then madeup the extra time getting into the jump so they could hit the height of the leap together and on the music.
As Heather returned to the wings, she could just make out Peter swiveling in his seat to speak to Marcus, who nodded and gave his boss what looked like a genuine smile. Heather wanted to catch his eye, seize that smile for herself, but she kept moving. She couldn’t risk staring too long at Marcus with Peter sitting right there. But a few moments later, as she took her place in the center of the stage to begin her solo, she looked out into the audience and let her eyes adjust to the darkness until she found him in her peripheral vision.
He was a blur of white with a fuzzy brown splotch on top. She couldn’t look directly at him, but she could see him there, and she knew that, like everyone else, he was watching her. The pianist played the high trill notes that signaled the start of the solo, then she began. The variation called for a series of double attitude turns that always felt like slow-motion flying when they went right.
Somewhere in the middle of the third attitude turn, Heather’s nerves fizzled out, and with them gone, she felt nothing but the pleasure of dancing. Nothing but the firmness of the ground pushing back against the bottom of her pointe shoe and the lightness of her skirt catching the air and floating around her as she moved. The joy of it was crisp and sweet, like the warm Portuguese tarts Marcus had brought her the night they’d been to the hospital. Somewhere in the middle of the fourth turn, she realized she didn’t much care what the other dancers saw when they looked at her. It didn’t matter, actually, if they spotted minute technical errors in her jumps, or thought her arabesque was too low, or whispered about why she’d left New York. She was free and alive and exactly where she was supposed to be.
The thought fueled her muscles, buoyed her jumps and made her feet faster and more precise than usual, her body anticipating each note and clinging to every last balance as if it was unbearable to let go.I am exactly where I’m supposed to be. She had worked all her life to be on this stage, alone in the spotlight. Heather belongedhere, and nothing—no man, no magazine, no ex-future-mother-in-law—could steal that from her. She had been broken and betrayed, but she’d found the courage to break free, and that’s what she was now: free, whole, and more powerful than she’d ever known.
The knowledge rocketed through her, knocking the air from her lungs for a moment, but she took a deep breath and recovered, focused on the rest of the variation. The middle of the solo featured Giselle’s famous hops on pointe, which she executed on her left foot, taking a long diagonal path from upstage all the way to the lip of the orchestra pit. When she’d first started learning the role in New York last year, she had struggled with this section of the choreography, but today it was easy. Today, she felt steady and controlled, even though her heart fluttered wildly from the exertion and the exhilaration of her realization.
When she came to the end of the variation, a series of sixteen piqué turns in a wide circle around the stage, it was easy to let loose, and Heather whipped her body around as fast as she dared, covering the entire stage in one swift, sweeping loop of turns. Her skirt swirled around her thighs, and the room blurred as she spun like a joyful tornado, half abandon, half precision. She moved so quickly she was ahead of the music, the pianist racing to catch her as she finished the turn combination with a quick double pirouette, then bent one knee to the ground so she landed the turn in a deep curtsy.
The music halted, and a split second later, the theater exploded into applause. Every single person in the theater, including the pianist, was clapping, and a boy in the corps, who she knew by sight but couldn’t name, put two fingers into his mouth and let out a loud wolf whistle. Heather rose and tucked her back foot demurely behind her, even as she grinned in a very undemure way. She looked around the theater and permitted herself a small laugh, then let her eyes drift as discreetly as she could toward the audience.
Marcus was there, no longer blurry, but sharp and crisp and beautiful. She had been wrong: not every single person in the roomwas clapping. Marcus was beaming, his face lit up by a huge smile and the crinkles around his eyes deeper than she’d ever seen them. But he was stock still, as though he was too awestruck, too in the moment to break it by clapping for her. For a split second, she met his eyes and knew he’d seen it all. Not just the steps, but the truth behind them.
He’d seen it all along, and now she could, too.
Chapter 16
When Marcus stepped out of the shower that evening, there was a text waiting for him.
Alice, 5:23PM: Are you home?
Marcus checked the time as he rubbed a towel over his hair. He was due at Heather’s in an hour.
Marcus, 5:25PM: Yeah, what’s up?
Alice, 5:25PM: Be there in 10.
Marcus, 5:26PM: Are you ok?
She didn’t respond. By the time he buzzed her into his building barely ten minutes later, Marcus was a little worried. The look on her face as she entered his apartment did nothing to assuage his concern. Alice had changed from her leotard and tights into a pairof baggy jeans, but her hair was still in a bun, as if she’d rushed from rehearsal without showering.
“Is everything okay?” Marcus asked.
“No. Everything is not okay. I’ve just come from seeing Ricky. He’s been fired.”
Marcus frowned at her. “Why? What happened?”
Alice fixed him with a steely look, and a sense of foreboding crept over him. When she spoke, she enunciated every word clearly and pointedly. “Ricky was seeing Kimiko. For a few months, apparently. Somehow Peter got wind of it, and ...”
