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I stepped toward the strawberries, my fingers trembling as I picked one up.
Maybe this was ridiculous. Maybe it was indulgent and over the top and unnecessary.
But maybe being seen, truly seen, was rarer than silk and sweeter than champagne.
I took a bite. And I smiled.
The taste bloomed on my tongue—dark chocolate and ripe strawberry, decadent and impossible. Like something a girl like me shouldn’t even dream about.
Because we didn’t do decadence in my family. We did clearance bins and secondhand school uniforms. We did patched jeans and “maybe next Christmas.” We did without.
Always without.
The Laveaus didn’t splurge. We survived.
Mom clipped coupons so aggressively she once mailed in for a rebate that earned her seventy-three cents and a fridge magnet. Emmaline grew up learning how to stretch ground beef with lentils, how to calculate the per-ounce cost of shampoo, how to say “I’m fine” when she was anything but. And me? I learned early that if I wanted anything outside the bare minimum, I had to earn it myself.
That was part of why I chose ballet. Not because it was practical—God, no—but because it was beautiful. Because it was discipline turned into art. Pain made into elegance. Suffering into something people clapped for.
I could never take my mother’s pain away. Not really. But I could make her proud. I could be the daughter with her name in programs and reviews, the one who rose from duct-taped kitchen chairs to standing ovations in velvet theaters.
But even that came at a cost.
Shoes that wore through in weeks. Tuition we couldn’t afford. Leotards that fit like armor because they had to. Every pirouette was a prayer that my body would hold up, that I could keep pretending I was weightless.
I’d worked double shifts at cafés to pay for classes. Sold old costumes to younger girls just to cover rent. Danced through injuries I couldn’t afford to treat. Every time I’d laced up, I wasn’t just chasing art—I was chasing survival. Chasing the idea that I could outrun poverty with perfect posture.
And now, here I stood, in a silk gown that probably cost more than my car. In a room Elias had set up just for me. Withchampagne chilled to the perfect temperature and strawberries that didn’t taste like compromise.
And something inside me cracked.
It was small at first. A breath that caught the wrong way. A blink that came too slow.
Then it was everything.
My knees buckled before I could stop them. I sank onto the fainting couch, the silk pooling around my legs, and curled my hands into fists in my lap.
I didn’t mean to cry.
But I did.
Not the polite, teary kind of crying either. No single, artful tear down the cheek. This was full-body, chest-heaving grief. The kind you can't package. The kind that rips you open from the inside and spills everything you've been holding back.
Elias didn’t rush me.
He didn’t speak.
He knelt instead, slow and careful, and placed one hand gently on my knee. Just that. No pressure. No demand.
Just warmth.
And it undid me even more.
Because I realized—I didn’t know how to receive.
I didn’t know how to accept without apologizing. Didn’t know how to be cared for without trying to earn it. Didn’t know what it meant to want something just because it was beautiful.
I’d only ever known how to survive.