Page 5

“You look like shit,” Tonya, my current boss and former dance teacher, says the second I walk into her office at the studio.

To some people, this might seem offensive, and sure, it kind of is. But in the dance world, commenting on someone’s appearance isn’t abnormal. I once had a dance teacher tell me he could see my lunch through my leotard, so this is nothing.

Still, I level her with a flat glare. “Gee, thanks.”

“No, seriously,” the older woman says, steepling her fingers beneath her chin. “You really look like shit.”

I slump down in the chair across from her desk, using posture that, years ago at the barre, she would have yelled at me for.

My eyes connect with hers, and I debate whether to tell her what’s been eating at me since I woke up with Beau in bed this morning.

But Tonya is like another mother to me—more of a mother to me than my own mother, truthfully—so I just say it.

“I slept with Beau last night.”

At this, she perks up, brown eyes twinkling, leaning across the desk like closer proximity will make the gossip reach her ears faster.

“Good for you. You know that boy has a truly fine ass. It’s a damn shame he was never put in dance classes as a kid,” she says. “I’m glad you guys worked things out. You’re both too beautiful to be single.”

I press my fingertips into my eyes, pushing hard enough that I see stars behind my lids. I don’t want to tell her the rest, but I know she will find out soon enough.

“We’re not,” I mumble, and when I open my eyes, she’s staring at me.

“You’re not what?” she asks, but she knows the answer. You don’t spend your life teaching preschool to teenaged children, the majority of them girls, without being able to read between the lines.

A sigh escapes me. “We’re not back together. I…asked him to leave again.”

“Why the hell would you do that?”

After the injury that ended my dance career, when Beau and I moved from Utah back to our hometown in Montana, I isolated myself from pretty much everyone.

I was in a dark place. It only started to lighten when I found out I was pregnant.

And then we lost the baby at eight weeks, and I was plunged back into the blackness.

I’d only just begun to start crawling my way out of it.

It wasn’t until a few weeks ago, well over a month after I asked Beau to leave, that I finally agreed to meet with Tonya.

I could tell she had questions about me and Beau.

She even asked some of them, but I only gave her the Reader’s Digest version.

That I needed space to figure out who I was after losing dance and the baby. That I needed time.

She told me I was stupid and that one of her teachers had just quit and that she expected me at the studio to teach a ballet class in the morning. I wasn’t going to go, but I knew she’d just show up at my house and drag me.

So I went. And, to my surprise, it helped. So I kept going. And after a week, she gave me a paycheck. And I felt like a functioning member of society for the first time in months.

It was my first step to putting myself back together, one of the reasons I finally felt ready to go out to a bar in a pretty skirt last night. But even though I’m healing, I’m not fixed enough for Beau yet.

I just don’t know how to tell Tonya that.

“Can we talk about something else? Literally anything else?” I finally ask.

She holds my gaze for so long that I think she’s not going to agree. “Fine.”

A relieved sigh breaks through my lips.

“Someone wants to buy the studio,” she says, and my breath catches in my throat, my heart stopping in my chest.

“What?”

She looks up from where she went back to flipping through papers on her desk. “You said you wanted to talk about something else.”

“Like the weather,” I sputter.

She rolls her eyes. “Wow, we got another shit ton of snow. What a huge surprise.”

“Someone wants to buy the studio?” I ask, voice shaky.

She nods, pulling up an email on her desktop. “An out-of-towner.”

That’s not that surprising, seeing as how she is an out-of-towner.

Tonya grew up in LA and then danced for a company in Boston until she retired.

After she retired, she said she had no desire to see traffic or large groups of people ever again.

She looked for the tiniest town she could find on a map, one that was in the middle of nowhere, and moved there.

It was Larkspur, Montana.

She’d been here for a few years by the time my parents started researching studios outside the metropolitan areas.

They, too, wanted somewhere quieter. And when my mom saw that Tonya Ballard, a dancer she’d admired for years, had started a studio in a small mountain town in Montana, she told my dad that it was where we were moving.

The studio exploded over the years, drawing in locals and others who, like my parents, were looking for good dance studios in small towns. I’m not surprised it drew the attention of a buyer. It has before.

I am surprised that she’s bringing it up now.

“Are you considering selling?” I ask the question, unsure whether I truly want to know the answer.

Tonya fixes her gaze on mine. “I don’t know. I wasn’t, but traveling has its appeal.”

“Traveling,” I echo.

She shrugs. “Owning a business doesn’t allow for much of it, and I miss it. Plus, it would be nice to travel when it’s not for ballet and I can get drunk on wine and not worry about getting yelled at for it. I deserve to be fat and happy.”

My heart seizes in my chest, because on one hand, I agree with her.

Traveling with a ballet company isn’t really traveling.

It’s working, which, as a dancer, means long hours of training and very little time enjoying yourself or the place you’re in.

On the other hand, this studio has been the first thing to actually make me feel like I’m making progress on finding myself again, and Tonya is a huge part of that.

Losing her, losing this place, is something I’m not sure I can handle right now.

She watches me hawkishly, no doubt seeing every emotion I try desperately to keep hidden from my face.

“You know,” she says, leaning back in her chair. It squeaks loudly, but she ignores it. “You could always buy this place.”

I stare at her like she’s grown another head or suggested a six-year-old purchase her first pair of pointe shoes.

“You can’t be serious.”

She shrugs again, looking completely unbothered. “That would be the ideal situation. My star pupil, the apple of my eye, the daughter I never had, taking over my business.”

“I have no money,” I say.

She waves a dismissive hand. “That’s not an issue. You could make payments, get a loan, do whatever.”

“I have no qualifications.”

“You were a professional ballerina. You trained in this studio your entire life. You are a teacher here. How much more qualified do you need to be?”

“I never went to college. I got injured before I even hit my peak as a professional, and I’ve only been working here for a month.”

“Semantics.”

I sit up in my chair. “Not semantics. I cannot run this studio. I can’t even run my own damn life.”

Gray brows lift. “You’re crazy if you think anyone can run their life, Elsie. Life happens and we have to adjust to it.”

“Well, then, I’m not adjusting well.”

“No,” she says, shaking her head. “You’re not, but you’re making progress.”

I’d thought I was, before last night. Well, before this morning. Before I saw the look of crushing hurt on my husband’s face. Before I had to be the one to put it there.

I shake my head. “I can’t buy the studio, Tonya.”

She holds my gaze for a long moment. I can tell she wants to say more, but thankfully, she lets it go.

“Fine, I won’t sell.”

I should tell her she can sell if she wants, that she should travel the world and let foreign men buy her expensive alcohol and stand at the top of the Eiffel Tower and see the tulips in Amsterdam in the spring, but I can’t make myself.

Because although I’ve grown, it’s not enough that I can tell her to leave me, that I’ll be fine here without her. Not yet.

And she knows it.

“I’m still mad at you for making him leave again,” she says, turning back to the stack of paperwork on her desk.

Me too , I think. I’m growing and I’m healing, but not quickly enough. I’m hurting Beau by asking him to keep his distance and depriving Tonya by not letting her leave. I’m failing everyone, and it feels like the world is closing in on me.

“Excuse me,” I say, pushing up from my seat and letting myself out of her office before she notices my expression, heart pounding in my chest.

I’m growing and I’m healing, but I’m not okay. Not yet.