“Your daughter hasn’t told you anything, has she?”
The ballet teacher said it quietly, with her back against the closed classroom door, like she was afraid the girls inside would hear.
Behind that door, I could hear piano music and the soft thump of feet landing in unison. Twelve girls in black leotards. Twelve buns. Twelve sets of arms lifting at the same time.
None of them was my daughter.
“Told me what?” I said. My voice came out higher than I wanted. “Where is she? Where’s Audrey?”
The teacher looked at me for a long moment. Then she looked past me, toward the big front window of the studio, and the street outside.
“I think you’d better sit down, Mrs. Hale,” she said.
I didn’t sit down. I couldn’t.
Because in that moment, every terrible thought I’d been pushing away for a month came rushing back at once. Every late night. Every closed bedroom door. Every time my daughter wouldn’t meet my eyes. And the picture I couldn’t get out of my head: Audrey’s fingers gripping Derek’s sleeve through an open car window, and the way she let go the second she saw me.
To understand why I was standing in that hallway with my heart slamming against my ribs, I have to go back to the beginning. To a little girl, and a dream, and a Sunday dinner where we said yes to something without thinking twice. 