Page 19 of The Dangerous Dance

I'm thinking about this — about transitions and truth — when the doorway fills.

He's wearing a coat that's good quality and slightly wrong for the neighborhood, which is the same thing I clocked about my own coat in the first week and have since corrected. He's taken the collar up and he's carrying a bag that is the prop of someone who planned to have a reason for being here. He looks, to anyone who doesn't know what they're looking for, like a businessman who's come to the wrong building and is about to ask for directions.

Petya notices him. "We don't take walk-ins."

"I apologize," he says. His voice is the same as the warehouse — low, unhurried, carrying the same calm that I found more difficult to deal with than if he'd been aggressive. "I'm looking for Petya Volkov. I was told she runs the studio."

"You were told correctly." Petya crosses her arms and examines him with the professional skepticism she applies to everyone who enters this space without an established reason. "What do you want."

"I'm scouting for a production company," he says. "Contemporary classical crossover. We're looking for trained dancers, semi-professional level, for a short-run engagement in the spring." He says it with the ease of someone who prepared the lie long enough ago that it's had time to settle into something that sounds like fact. "A colleague suggested your studio. Said you work with serious students."

Petya's expression shifts fractionally — not convinced, but interested in the possibility of being convinced. It's the word serious that does it. She has no tolerance for being flattered but a specific responsiveness to having her standards acknowledged. I file this away about him: he read the room before he walked into it. Or he reads rooms instinctively, which amounts to the same thing.

"We have serious students," she says. "We don't audition on short notice and we don't work with companies whose terms I haven't reviewed."

"Of course." He produces a card from his coat pocket and extends it toward her. "I'm not here to audition anyone today. Just an introductory visit. I'd like to watch the class, if that's acceptable, and speak with you afterward."

She takes the card. Looks at it. The name on it will be false — I know this without seeing it — and the company name will be real enough to survive a brief check, because he's careful. He was careful enough to plant a tracker on a trained operative while she was trying to break his grip.

"Fine," Petya says, with the air of someone extending a provisional tolerance rather than a welcome. "Sit. Don't speak while we're working."

He sits on the bench along the far wall, the bag on the floor by his feet, and he watches. I have moved, during this exchange, through approximately the same amount of the sequence I was working through before he arrived, which is to say not very much, because my body has continued performing while my attention has been elsewhere. This is one of the things years of training produces — the ability to run the body on autopilot while the mind does something else — and I am grateful for it now.

I do not look at him.

I look at myself in the mirror, and I work through the transition Petya has been correcting, and I think about what he's doing here and what his presence means for how I need to handle the next twenty minutes.

He watches the class for thirty-five minutes. I know this because I track time the way I track most things — constantly, without effort. During those thirty-five minutes he stays on the bench, he doesn't speak, he doesn't take out a phone. He watches with the same structural quality I noticed in the warehouse, cataloguing, assessing, and — I observe this in the peripheral of the mirror — he watches me more than he watches anyone else. Not in the way that men watch women in mirrors when they think the mirror is one-directional. In the same way he watched me on the warehouse floor. Like he's trying to solve something.

When Petya calls a water break, I get my bottle and sit on the floor near the centre of the studio, which puts me at a specific angle relative to the bench — not close, not performatively distant. Dara goes to talk to Cora, Brigid stretches against the barre, and Petya goes to stand near the door with the card in her hand.

He crosses the studio.

He moves the way I remembered — quiet for his size, deliberate without being slow. He stops at a reasonable distance and crouches down to be closer to eye level, which is either a calculated choice to seem less imposing or a genuine instinct toward it, and I find I can't tell which, and I find that interesting.

"You're good," he says.

"I know," I say.

Something moves at the corner of his mouth. "The hip is a problem."

I look at him. "You know ballet."

"I know what a problem looks like." He meets my eyes steadily. Up close and in proper light he looks older than the warehouse, which is to say he looks like himself — the tiredness is there, and underneath the tiredness there's something else, something that sits in a person after they've made decisions they can't undo and have decided to keep going anyway. "You found the tracker."

I keep my expression exactly where it is. "I don't know what you mean."

"The tracker I placed on your hem at the warehouse." He says it without accusation, almost without inflection. "You found it and you've been leaving it at home when you go out at night. My man has been watching an empty apartment."

"Your man lost me," I say.

"Yes." He nods once, acknowledging it as a simple fact. "He did." His eyes don't leave mine. "You're going to keep working against us."

"I'm a dancer," I say. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"You know exactly what I'm talking about." Still no heat in it. Just the same steady quality, the same patience that bothers me more than aggression would because aggression I know how to meet and this I keep having to recalibrate against. "What I want to know is why. What they've told you, or what they're holding over you, or what you believe you're doing that's worth the risk."

I look at him for a long moment. "You held a woman once," I say. "Against her will."