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“You push people away,” Jessa said quietly. “Your behavior is becoming riskier. You climbed a fucking bridge with no ropes and laughed about it.”
“It wasn’t about the bridge,” Lena whispered.
I turned to her, eyes narrow. “No? Then what was it about?”
“Maybe about control,” she said. “About needing to feel something to distract from what’s happening in your life.”
“And how would you know?”
Lena flinched, but didn’t look away. “Because I’ve done it, too,” she said. “Different methods, same goal.”
“I’m not you,” I snapped.
“No,” she agreed softly. “But maybe you’re closer than you think.”
And there it was—that quiet, awful truth, hanging between us. Lena knew the edge. Had danced on it for years.
She’d been the golden girl once, too. The darling of Crescent’s winter season, the one critics called “effortless,” even when her eyes were glassy and her hands trembled behind the curtain. It wasn’t until she collapsed during rehearsal—right there on the Marley floor, bones sharp under her leotard and pupils like pinpricks—that anyone knew the truth.
Prescription meds. Painkillers, mostly. But also benzos. Whatever she could get her hands on to make the noise stop.
It had taken a stint in rehab and a year away from dance before she clawed her way back. Clean now. For years, in fact. But I still caught her checking her own hands sometimes, like she was waiting for the tremor to return.
She spoke gently, without judgment. “You’re hurting. I can see it. And I know how easy it is to pretend the fall doesn’t matter if the drop feels like flying.”
The room went thick again, air heavy with unsaid things. I looked at each of them, their eyes swimming with pity, concern, accusation. The therapist scribbled something on her notepad like she had me figured out already—boxed and labeled and pathologized.
“This is fucking insane,” I muttered. “I’m not strung out. I’m not shooting up in alleyways. I haven’t even smoked weed since New Year’s Eve 2019. You know why? Because it makes me paranoid, and I don’t need help with that.”
Teresa tried to chime in—God knows why—but I shot her a glare that made her mouth snap shut again.
“You all want to pretend this is about some bridge stunt,” I said, pacing now, blood pounding in my ears. “Like I’ve gone off the rails. But where the hell were you when things were actually falling apart? When I was trying to hold everything together?”
Marisol looked away. Jessa’s lip trembled.
But Emmaline?
She stood there like granite, arms folded tight, mouth pressed into a line.
“Don’t do this,” I told her. “Don’t you dare.”
She didn’t blink.
“You said we wouldn’t?—”
“I changed my mind,” she said. Her voice wasn’t angry. It wasn’t calm. It was something deeper. Something cracked.
“I’m sorry,” she added. “But they deserve to know.”
The silence after that wasn’t a silence at all. It was a scream with no sound, vibrating beneath my skin, threatening to split me down the middle.
“No,” I whispered. “Don’t.”
She stepped forward.
“Emmaline, I swear to God?—”
“I’m doing this for you.”