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"He's got kids in this room."

"Yeah." She goes.

We find the spot at nine.

It's under the middle of the ballroom floor, if Evelyn was telling the truth, and I have no way on earth to know if she was.

I stand where the parquet makes a black star in the pattern and I put my hand down at my side and I reach.

I still feel nothing.

Not a wire, not a seam, not a held breath.

Six days ago I could feel this whole town. Right now I'm just a woman standing on a floor in a nice dress.

Gage moves in behind my shoulder the way we practiced in the yard, close enough that anyone watching just sees a man with his hand at his date's back.

"Lower and left."

I move.

"Stop. That's it. That's where your hand was Thursday."

"Is anything happening?"

"No."

"Then it's not it."

"It's where it should be." His voice stays flat and even, and I love him a little for how hard he's working to keep it there.

"You're not wrong. You're blind to it. Those aren't the same thing."

Someone laughs across the room, high and delighted, and a child goes by dressed as a hot dog, and the quartet finds the end of the waltz and starts it over.

I take my hand back.

"Dance with me."

He looks at me.

"I said dance with me, Corbett. We've got three hours and I'm not wasting all that time not getting to dance with you."

All of a sudden, six and a half feet of a terrifying man who communicates mainly in grunts and jaw tension puts one hand flat on my back and takes me into the middle of that room like he's done it a thousand times.

And, he can dance. I want that on the record.

"Woah. You’ve got skills. Who taught you this?"

"My mother."

Oh.

"She'd put the radio on," he says. "Saturdays. She got about an hour a week where she could relax."

I don't say anything for a few turns. That's what he needs and I've finally learned it.

The chandeliers are throwing light through all that black crepe and it's coming down on us in pieces. Everything smells like beeswax and cold stone and the cinnamon someone's mulling in the kitchen. Every third face that goes past is wearing something I sold them.