I didn’t keep in contact with any of my mom’s previous students after my mom died, but I wouldn’t be surprised if none of them had gone on to become a professional ballerina. This profession was a difficult one. Most would work their whole life and still not get their big break.
My mom was good. Better than me. The video recordings of her in her teenage years proved as much. But she got into a bad car accident when she was eighteen, ending her dance career before it could even begin.
Instead of letting this one life event bring her down, she decided to open a dance studio, hoping to share her love for the art with other dancers who might have had the same dream she once had.
She never got quite as reputable as Nadir Abernathy, but I sometimes thought Nadir and my mom would have gotten along well had they ever been given the chance to meet. That wasn’t possible now.
A notification dinged in my phone, disrupting the music and bringing me out of my musing. I grabbed my phone and closed the music app before looking at the text message I just received.
Speaking of the devil.
Nadir had been messaging me nonstop for months now, ever since I told her I took on this job. She didn’t think I should have taken it. She thought the job was beneath me. And she was pretty vocal about it.
Nadir was nothing if not hard-headed. She wanted me to move back to England and join the company. She thought I could win them over with my audition.
Admittedly, I knew I could.
I was arrogant, but I had earned the right to be.
There was a reason why I never made any lasting relationship from my time in London. A lot of the dancers were intimidated by me. Others were jealous. And there was just something about putting twenty petty girls in a room together, all competing against one another for ten hours training a day, six days a week, that really, really sucked.
That was the one thing I missed the least of my life back in London.
Before I could read what the text message said, my phone rang. I smiled when I answered the phone.
“Hello.”
“So you’re not dead after all,” Nadir said on the other end of the line, her voice dry. I smiled a little and looked out at the dark auditorium. I had been ignoring her for the last two weeks, knowing she would have been more insistent now that my contracted work was ending.
“I’m doing well. What about you?” I asked.
She scoffed. “Don’t act all sweet with me. You know it won’t work.”
I laughed. “I’m not trying. I am cute.”
She didn’t say anything for a beat, but I could almost imagine the glimmer entering her eyes. Nadir didn’t smile. Not as long as I had known her. I thought that made her so much more intimidating. But when she found something amusing, this glint would enter her blue eyes, and there would be a ghost of a smile taking up on her face.
“Okay, girl. What are you doing now?”
I rolled my eyes. I was Emilia when I danced one of her numbers perfectly, but I was “girl” when I had done something to annoy her. It had been almost a year since I’d last seen her, but that hadn’t changed.
“I am sitting on stage,” I answered.
She made a small disapproving noise on the other end. “You don’t have to sit. You could dance. With your talent, you could dance anywhere in the world you wanted. I can make that happen.”
“I know you can,” I said softly.
“But you won’t come back,” she said, resignation in her voice. Nadir probably knew me better than anyone else in this world. During the six years I had been away from my family, I had come to see her not exactly like a surrogate mother, but close. If she had a maternal bone in her body, I knew she would have shown that care to the girl who moved away from the only home she had ever known to the dark and dreary city of London.
But there was a reason Nadir never had kids. She had only a very small tolerance for children. I didn’t exactly find this to be a flaw.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I really was. I hated disappointing her.
“What happened, Emilia? You used to get this spark in your eyes after performing. What made it go away?”
I shrugged, even though I knew she couldn’t see. She was wrong. That spark didn’t go away. I just got worse at keeping up with the facade.
She sighed. “Like most athletes, there are only a number of years you can actually do this job. This is even more true with ballet. You know this. Ballet might be dominated by women, but it’s run by men. And if there is one thing the ballet world values over most anything else, it’s youth. You can’t dance forever, Emilia.”