Daphne turned to her. "Are you going to make me sign?"
Evelyn closed her eyes. For a long moment the office held nothing but the sound of children shouting in the yard and the tick of the clock on the wall. Then she shook her head.
No, she said. "I won't force your hand. I can't. Not for this." She picked up the letter and folded it in half, then in half again, until it was a small white square. "But you must understand what your refusal will cost us both. He will come for the home, Daphne. He will come for me, and he will come for you, and he will not stop at a letter. I am telling you this because you are old enough to choose, and choosing means knowing the price."
I know the price, Daphne said.
Evelyn nodded, and slipped the folded letter into her drawer, beside the place where the silver shoes waited in the dark. "Then we will pay it together," she said, "and God help us both."
The audition was arranged the way all of Odette's plans were arranged: quietly, at midnight, in the empty hall, with no one told who did not need to know. She had telephoned Helena Marsh herself, from the pay phone at the corner store, and had spoken for eleven minutes in the low, certain voice of a woman who had once commanded stages. When she came back, her eyes were bright.
She has heard of you, Odette told Daphne. "The video reached her. She wants to see you dance in person, in her studio, on Thursday. Not a promise. A look. That is how these doors open β not with a fanfare, but with a look."
Daphne spent the three nights before Thursday preparing Grace's waltz the way she had never prepared anything. The hall at midnight was hers again β Odette had seen to that, a key turned, a door left unlatched, a blind eye arranged with the night watchman who owed Odette a favor from twenty years ago. Daphne danced in borrowed shoes from Odette's studio, soft leather slippers that were a size too large and stuffed at the toes with tissue, because her mother's silver shoes were still locked in Evelyn's drawer. The borrowed shoes squeaked faintly on the polished floor, and she learned to love them anyway, because they let her move.
She did not dance the waltz the way she had danced it at the gala, in a burst of feeling. Odette had taught her better than that. She danced it in pieces, then whole: the turn that had always wobbled, steadied; the arm that had always flown too high, brought home; the pause before the final phrase, held a heartbeat longer, so that the music seemed to lean into it. Odette watched from a folding chair with her hands folded and her mouth a straight line, and corrected her without mercy and without cruelty, the way a master corrects a pupil she believes in.
Again, Odette would say. "Your mother did not rush the ending. Neither will you."
On Thursday, Tasha covered for her. Tasha, who had become a general in the small war of Daphne's life, invented a story about a dentist appointment and walked Daphne out through the kitchen door in the grey morning light, carrying a bag with the borrowed shoes and a dress Odette had found at a thrift shop β plain, dark blue, with a skirt that moved. The bus ride to the conservatory took forty minutes, and Daphne spent all of them with her hands clasped in her lap, watching Charleston slide past the window and trying not to be sick. Odette sat beside her, upright as a queen, and after a while she said, "An audition is not a judgment, Daphne. It is a conversation. You will speak, and they will listen, and whatever they answer, you will still be the girl who danced. No room can take that from you, not even a beautiful one."
Daphne nodded, but her throat was tight. She thought of her mother, who had danced in kitchens and church halls and anywhere a floor would hold her, and who had never once auditioned for anything, because no one had ever offered her a door. Daphne was walking through a door her mother had only dreamed of, and the weight of that felt like a hand on her back β pushing her forward, and holding her steady, both at once. She closed her eyes and ran through the waltz in her head, step by step, the way she had done a thousand nights on the kitchen floor, until the bus slowed and Odette touched her arm and said, "We are here. Breathe, child. Then dance."
The Charleston Conservatory of Dance was a white building with tall windows and a staircase that curved like a shell. Inside, the air smelled of rosin and clean wood, and girls in leotards moved through the halls with their hair pulled back and their chins up, the way girls move when they have never had to apologize for taking up space. Daphne felt her thrift-shop dress and her borrowed shoes like a costume she had not earned. Odette took her arm, firmly, and walked her up the stairs.
Helena Marsh was waiting in a studio with a wall of mirrors and a piano in the corner. She was forty-eight, with silver threading her dark hair and a dancer's posture that age had not softened. She shook Daphne's hand and looked at her with eyes that missed nothing.
I saw the video, Helena said. "I don't usually audition from videos. But there was something in yours that I couldn't leave alone. Dance for me, please. Your mother's waltz, I understand."