At one time it would have been a small sacrifice to make, a minute price to pay in return for the gift of life. But over the years, I had found that dance wasn’t just something I did; it was a visceral part of who I was.
A vital part of me. My unique fingerprint in this world. My own snowflake.
It was a miracle that I could walk, fend for myself, that I sat there breathing.
A miracle? Why did it feel like death?
Not the kind that takes a soul and deposits it someplace else—heaven, for a woman such as myself—but the kind that shows all the life surrounding it, while a deep sleep pulled me under.
Alive but dead?
Nemours had successfully killed a part of me. The part that everyone had wanted, and I had despised. Once upon a time, I could do it without thought, and I did, albeit always with passion.
After Brando had sent me to Paris, a change had started in me. Dance had become the third to our whole. A second me, closer than a sister—one that never left me. It either cheered me on or told me the absolute truth, no matter how brutal. Both done out of love—sometimes tough love that brought resentment.
When the rest of the world left me, though, my dance never did. I could rely on it above anyone or anything. It existedinme,forme. A gift from my blood.
Now?
I looked down at my legs and sighed. Then curled my hands into fists that came down so hard on the wood that either its fibers cracked, or my bones did. I wouldn’t cry. I refused. Instead, I swallowed it down, the shattered pieces going down harder than broken glass.
It all made sense, though, didn’t it?
The impact almost killed me—physically. But the poison he was able to slip into my veins? Deeper than the physical? It ate me up, day by day, minute by minute.
Not for the first time, I wished my grandmother, Maja, was here. What would she have said to me?
What would they—the dance world—say about me? Rumors had already begun to swirl. The accident made all the papers—but the outcome?
I swallowed down another shard of glass. The doctors had said no, not possible.
Could they be wrong?
They were wrong about my death. Only Brando Piero Fausti could have been stubborn enough to pull me through that. I knew he did.
Given the look on the doctor’s face when she’d spoken to me for the first time after I became coherent enough to understand, Brando’s odds were different from hers. But I didn’t like the word “no” either, especially when it came to my husband and children.
It drove me to lengths that I never thought I could go. I went there and beyond.
I could walk.
It wasn’t the easiest thing I’d ever done. Learning how to do something so simple again. Something that I didn’t even think about before but had to as an adult—putting one foot in front of the other and have them work in tandem.
It took surgeries and physical therapy, but it all felt like steps to get me to someplace else. Even if that someplace else was a place that existed in my own mind because all of the professionals said “not possible.”
Dancing…dancing was iffy. There was a chance for the medical team to be wrong, but—I wasn’t sure they were.
My body was different. We didn’t know each other. We were complete strangers finding themselves stuck together. During my time under, somehow, we had separated.
Yes, I was able to do all the things I was capable of before, dance aside. I tried to dance, but with a frustration beyond bearing. Then I stopped trying, the wordsnoandnever againtaunting me like a bully in the schoolyard.
I was loathe to let it go, though, that gift in my blood. Almost desperate to keep it.
Without it, I wasn’t me, who I was destined to be.
Did Maja go through the same emotions when her body became too old to handle the steps as she once had? Had she fallen to her knees and sobbed without tears when she couldn’t move as she once had?
Maja had left me letters, but nothing on this. Not a damn thing on letting it go.
