I wasn’t brave enough to confront my mother about it until I was ten. She crumpled like a house of cards and told me everything, explaining that my father was a lord of a nearby estate. When my mother was in his employ as a maid, they had an affair.Affairwasn’t the word she used, but I was old enough to glean her meaning. He was unwilling to claim me, and he sacked my mother unceremoniously the moment she told him she was with child.
Still heartbroken after all these years, my mother cried as she spoke about him. I feel guilty about the disdain I felt for her in that moment. I vowed I would never be that pathetic over something as trivial as a man. My next thought was about burning his estate to the ground. We weren’t very much alike, my mother and I.
I left home a few years later, moving to London all by myself at fourteen to study full-time at the Royal Ballet School.
Dancing calmed my racing thoughts. I couldn’t control much about my life, but I could control my body. I loved the rules of ballet, how concrete they were. The ballet mistress hit the backs of my ankles with rulers until I could do the perfect tendu or frappé or plié, and I never could explain to anyone else how I relished every moment.
I worked for hours in front of the mirror, until my muscles were burning and I was soaked through with sweat, but it was all worth it for those few moments onstage, when it truly felt like I was flying.
The days were long and lonely. I missed my mother, we were too dependent on each other, and even though I knew it was unhealthy, I longed for her.
She got sick when I was sixteen. I took six months off from school to return to Brighton and care for her in that attic room of ours. But no amount of love or warm broth could fix her lungs. I soothed her as she coughed so hard her ribs broke, hacking up clot after clot. I held her as she took her final, rattling breaths, and then I returned to London and danced until my feet were bloody and I couldn’t feel anything.
I met Emmett the next summer. He was sitting in the front row, watching me with those big, wounded deer eyes of his.
I found him waiting in my dressing room backstage with an armful of two dozen red roses. I kissed him before I even told him my name. Kept kissing him until the roses were dropped on the ground, forgotten.
Emmett continued attending shows and meeting me in my dressing room afterward. He begged me to let him take me to thetheater or buy me extravagant gifts, but I didn’t want things like that from him. More than anything, I think we both needed someone to talk to about our unyielding grief. He held my hand as I cried about how much I missed my mother, and I pushed his hair out of his teary eyes as he told me about his governess and the father he couldn’t speak to.
It wasn’t love—neither of us held any illusions about that—but it was a life raft when we both desperately needed something to cling to.
Sometimes we’d kiss until our lips bruised and we felt nothing at all. But more often than not, we didn’t touch each other at all. We sat on opposite ends of the room and listened while the other spoke. Emmett had walls a thousand feet high, and I wasn’t much of a climber, but we were there for each other.
I’m still not sure how my father found out about my dancing career, but I suspect it had something to do with the rumors that started flying about me and Emmett.
It had been six months since we’d met, and my name was now regularly whispered in clubs and drawing rooms around town. Prince Emmett andthat ballerina, they’d sneer.
Men sent flowers to my dressing room, hoping to steal me away from the prince as a point of pride, but I never answered the door for any of them.
Then one night my father turned the knob without knocking. I hadn’t seen him in fourteen years, hadn’t thought about him in nearly as many.
It took me a moment to recognize him, but that sneering expression was unmistakable. Sometimes I saw the same look on my own face in the moments I hated myself the most.
“You will stop this now,” he boomed. “You have disgraced our family enough.”
I genuinely had no idea what he was on about, and my blank expression served only to enrage him further. “No daughter of mine will make her living as adancerand amistress.”He spit the words out like curses.
“The dancer part is true, but I’m afraid I don’t know what you’re referring to when you saymistress,” I answered coolly, eyeing him behind me in the mirror.
“Are you telling me the rumors of you and Prince Emmett De Vere are unfounded?”
“I can’t be his mistress, he’s unmarried.”
He didn’t think my joke was very funny.
“You bring disgrace on this family.”
“You made it clear that I wasn’t a member of your family. You wouldn’t even pay for Mother’s headstone.” She wouldn’t have one at all if Emmett hadn’t paid for it behind my back after listening to me cry about it one night.
“Don’t insult me with your insolence.”
“I’m the one being insulted.”
Just then there was a knock at the door, and a ruddy-faced woman in a high-necked blue gown poked her head in. Behind her skirts peeked two little girls, no older than eight and ten.
A mask fell over my father’s face, and he smoothed out his suit jacket. “I thought I told you to wait outside for me, sweet,” he said to the woman.
“I tried, but they had other ideas,” the woman answered with a smile. The two little girls pushed past her, giggling, and stormed into my dressing room. Their hair, the exact same shade of brownas mine, was tied back in ribbons. They had my eyes too; the resemblance took my breath away. It was like looking at myself as a little girl.
