Chapter 2
Ava
If you can keep a still face while your feet bleed inside pointe shoes, you can hold your tongue when a man yells in your ear. It uses the same emotional muscle.
Not any man, though.
My boyfriend.
A tremor starts in my left hand. I clench my fingers and press my nails hard into my palm. The sensation grounds me. Pain, when you can choose it, is a relief.
Up on the screen, a woman in a red jumper twirls in fake snow.
No more twirls for me. At least not for the next few weeks.
My arch pulses beneath the zinc oxide tape, a persistent ache that started halfway through company class this morning. I pushed through, of course. For professional dancers, pain doesn’t mean stop. It means suck it up.
We are illusionists. We turn agony into art. The trick is to keep your face blank and let your body scream quietly.
Turns out that skill transfers.
My phone lights up on my thigh. I ignore it, but I know it’s Nevin. He thinks I’m wrapping up at the Tramway in Glasgow. He expects me to be in the studio and then on the M80 home to Stirling. Not here, slumped in the dark, watching some tooth-rottingly sweet romcom all by myself.
My heart does a double-beat, a distinct thud-thud.
I haven’t told him about today’s injury yet. As soon as I tell him, he’ll hijack it to smother me. He is going to treat me like an incapable child so he can inflate his own sense of power.
By lunchtime, I had to stop ignoring that something was wrong with my arch.
And then I was sitting in the Green Room at the Tramway, my foot propped up on a chair and a compression wrap numbing my arch, when our head of Performance Medicine pulled up Dr Menzies’ report on her tablet. Only one and a half hours after I had been whisked to the Nuffield hospital for the MRI.
Posterior tibial tendon strain.
‘You can walk, that’s fine,’ she said. ‘But no dancing for a wee while. I’m sorry, Ava. I know it’s a nightmare.’
Understatement of the millennium. Four to six weeks of physio and rest. The tissue is under constant stress in every landing, every plié, every relevé – every single thing that makes what I love possible.
Yesterday, I was Marzipan, one of the Mirlitons in The Nutcracker. First Artist. Named in the programme. A visible role I had fought for. Now they’ll bring in the first cover. Someone younger, whose tendons don’t strain and complain.
Twenty-four years old. In professional ballet terms, my window to prove I’m more than corps material is closing.
Scottish Ballet is full of nineteen-year-olds with elastic bodies and endless potential.
One week out feels survivable. Maybe two.
But six? That’s enough time to become a memory.
A name crossed off the daily cast list on the board, replaced by someone with more facility.
I’ve danced since I was four. Twenty years of missed birthday parties, weekends, boyfriends who couldn’t deal with the schedule. Every choice bent toward this career, this company, this life.
I want the Sugar Plum Fairy. The Snow Queen. I want the spotlight that makes everything I’ve given up make sense. It’s my turn to get a principal role.
My phone hums again. Longer this time.
Not a text, a call.
My thumb moves on its own, declines it, and switches it off. The blue light dies. He’ll ask why I didn’t answer. I told him a thousand times that phones must be in silent mode during classes and workshops. He never listens anymore.
But he used to.
I met Nevin seven months ago in April at my best friend Laurel’s cousin’s wedding in Edinburgh. He knew everyone, made the aunties laugh, kept my glass topped up without asking.
At some point during the reception, he leaned close and muttered, ‘Mum keeps asking when I’m returning to medicine. As if rugby’s a gap year or a stupid delusion.’
It was the only time he lost that cute, boyish grin that day.
I squeezed his arm without thinking. It seemed vulnerable, sharing that. Like he chose me to trust me with something real.
That was the Nevin I thought I was getting. The one who admitted he was bruised somewhere too.
After the party, he drove me home – even though it was over an hour out of his way – and texted first thing the next morning.
By September, I had given up my room in Laurel’s flat in Pollokshields and folded my life into Nevin’s place in King’s Park.
From Glasgow to Stirling, all in the name of whirlwind love.
I’m commuting now. Forty minutes each way if the motorway is clear.
Nevin said it made sense to live together, since we don’t have much time outwith rugby and dancing.
He reminded me that he wanted us to have more time together. Wasn’t that why I had moved in?
What he didn’t say: I would be further from the other dancers. Further from anyone who might ask why I had stopped meeting them for coffee.
That I would be lonely. Isolated.
Laurel’s in Hong Kong, the flat is sublet, and I’m officially out of escape routes. I’ve never lived on my own, and I don’t know anyone in Stirling except Nevin.
The film’s score swells over a romantic montage, strings, and synthetic hope. I wish I could bottle it and take it home to drown out my actual life.
The screaming started about three weeks ago.
And the first time he raised his voice, I raised mine to match.
Stupid. So bloody stupid. I told him that shouting wasn’t going to make me agree with him, and for about three seconds, I thought I had cracked it.
Nevin glitched and went quiet. He looked at me as if I had grown a second head.
Then his face shifted into a furious shape I didn’t recognise, and the silence that followed was worse than any yelling.
He didn’t speak to me for three full days. Not a word. As if I didn’t even exist.
The next time he shouted, I stayed still.
And still.
And still.
He is under a lot of pressure. Rugby is tough. Especially in a new team where everyone has to prove themselves. And it’s fine. I can take it. You won’t last five minutes in ballet if you can’t handle someone shouting at you.
Nevin’s anger has a rhythm. You have to wait for the downbeat. I learned the choreography until the edges of me eroded smooth enough to slide past his temper without catching. Mostly. Dancer’s discipline, repurposed. I move quietly, hold my breath, and wait for the storm to pass.
I need these ninety minutes here today to process the injury. To calibrate before I re-enter the shitty production that is my life.
Could I call someone? Not really. Dad is offshore rotation. Mum is in Ireland with her boyfriend Derek. And at twenty-four, I’m expected to stand on my own two feet.
Second position. Feet apart. Stable. Haha.
Shame I’m currently one tendon snap away from falling on my arse for good.
The jitter spreads to my shoulder. I keep my hands folded in my lap, fingers laced. The position they teach you for the curtain call when you’re not the one taking the bow.
The wet comes first. Then the heat behind my eyes. I press my knuckles to cheek, breathe through my nose. Count the inhale. Four counts in, hold for four, release for four.
It doesn’t work. My body knows I’m lying.
My chest jerks once. Salt tracks down my face, and the screen blurs.
Eventually, the credits roll. The music signals the end of my ninety-minute ceasefire with reality. I pocket my phone and wipe my face.
As I push to my feet, my right protests with a sharp complaint from the injury that holds my career hostage. I distribute my weight, favouring the left side. Left foot firm, right foot light. Towards the exit doors. Towards the car, the drive home, the questions. The inevitable yelling.
The rear row comes into view. Someone still sits there, alone in the shadows.
A mountain of a man squashed into a seat that’s far too small for him.
Arms that belong on someone who should be throwing cabers at a Highland Games.
The low light catches the red in his hair and his beard.
He is enormous. Doorframe-dwarfing enormous.
But his shoulders curve inward, knees angled out, elbows tucked. All that mass, apologising for itself.
My brain files the observation and keeps walking. But my heartbeat has other ideas. It trips once, and I pretend not to notice.
He stares straight at me, and my breath snags.
Shit.
I know him. That’s Nevin’s teammate. One of the Stirling Rebels. I’ve seen him at the matches, always on the periphery. Never loud. What’s his name again? Something with an S…Struan? Sean?
There’s no escape. He holds my gaze with a puzzled look. As if he knows he has seen me somewhere but can’t remember where. Does he recognise me?
He could have witnessed everything. The whole miserable breakdown. Icy panic pricks my skin. He is a Rebel. He has Nevin’s number in his phone.
Oh God. No. God, no.
One text from him – Saw your missus at the flicks, pal, looking a state – and the interrogation awaiting me at home upgrades from ‘Level 1: Suspicion’ to ‘Level 4: Inquisition’.
And I won’t survive Level 4 tonight.
I don’t speak or smile as I walk in his direction. I straighten my spine. He is watching me, but he isn’t leering.
My finger lifts to my lips. It’s not a beg, more a conspiratorial signal between two people who are both currently pretending to be invisible.
I saw nothing. You saw nothing.
His expression shifts – a look that says he understands what wasn’t said – and he gives a single, slow nod.
My lungs unlock with one shaky exhale as I limp through the doors. I don’t know his name, but I know this: he let me keep a secret. He built a wall between me and the world without saying a word.
The wind carries the bite of frost settling on Stirling’s rooftops, and the car park is a sea of slick, black tarmac under the orange glare of the lamps.
My dad’s discarded Volvo waits under a sputtering light.
The key scrapes in the lock, and I slump into the driver’s seat.
My fingers find the ignition, and the engine turns over with a protesting cough.
I slip into first but keep my foot on the brake.
The tendon screams at the pressure, a line of agony shooting up my shin.
I fumble the phone from my coat pocket and switch the ringer on.
The screen explodes in a cascade of green bubbles. Nineteen questions, demands, accusations. Each one more erratic than the last. My thumb scrolls, a mechanical, numb movement through the escalating anger.
Then the final one. Sent three minutes ago:
I know you’re not at the studio