Chapter 17
Aurelia
Three weeks.
Twenty-one days. Five hundred and four hours.
That’s how long it had been since Atlas Thorne walked out of my apartment with my key in his pocket and my heart under his boot.
People say time heals all wounds. Those people are idiots. Time doesn't heal wounds; it just allows the scar tissue to harden, turning you into something calcified and brittle.
I was brittle.
I walked through the corridors of the Fine Arts building like a ghost haunting my own life. I attended classes. I took notes. I smiled at professors. I was the perfect, diligent student my mother had always wanted.
And I felt absolutely nothing.
My reflection in the studio mirror was a stranger.
She was thinner—gaunt, really. Her cheekbones were too sharp.
The circles under her eyes were dark enough to be bruises.
She moved with mechanical precision, hitting every mark, executing every turn, but there was no fire.
The passion Madame Ivanov had praised me for weeks ago had vanished, extinguished by a check for fifty thousand dollars.
"St. James," Madame Ivanov barked, clapping her hands. "Stop. You are lagging on the tempo."
I stopped mid-pirouette, landing heavily. "Sorry, Madame."
"Do not be sorry. Be present. Where is your head?"
My head is in a truck driving to Ohio. My head is in a cabin in the woods. My head is screaming.
"I'm just tired," I said flatly.
"You look like a corpse," she observed bluntly. "Go home. Eat. Sleep. The Winter Showcase is in two days. If you faint on stage, I will leave you there."
"Yes, Madame."
I grabbed my bag and walked out. I didn't argue. I didn't care.
I walked home through the biting cold. The snow that had once seemed romantic—a blanket for secret kisses and midnight walks—now just looked like gray sludge.
Everywhere I looked, I saw him.
A black Ford truck drove past. My heart hammered until I saw the driver was an old man.
A guy in a Sterling hockey hoodie walked out of the coffee shop. I nearly tripped over my own feet trying to see his face. It wasn't him. It was never him.
Because Atlas was gone.
He had vanished. Dropped out of school. Cleared out of the Hive. The rumors were wild. Some said he got signed by a European team. Some said he got a girl pregnant. Some said he just snapped and went home.
Only I knew the truth.
He took the money.
The thought was a physical sickness in my gut. It twisted and burned. He had looked me in the eye and told me I was a job. A ticket. A transaction.
I know how to control my heart rate. I know how to perform.
I stopped on the sidewalk, clutching my chest. It felt like I couldn't breathe. The betrayal was so precise, so surgical, that I almost respected it. He had played me perfectly.
"Aurelia?"
I looked up. Sloane was standing in front of me, holding two grocery bags. She looked concerned. Everyone looked concerned lately.
"Hey," I whispered.
"You're standing in a puddle," Sloane pointed out. "In suede boots."
"Oh." I looked down. "So I am."
"Come on," Sloane sighed, shifting the bags. "I'm making lasagna. You're coming over. And you're actually going to eat it, not just move it around the plate to make art."
"I'm not hungry."
"I don't care. You're withering away. It's depressing. And if you don't eat, you can't hate him properly. Hate requires calories."
I let out a weak, hollow laugh. "I have plenty of hate, Sloane. It sustains me."
"Good. Let's fuel the fire."
We walked back to our dorm. Sloane chattered about her sculpture project, about the drama in the art department, filling the silence I couldn't bear to inhabit.
When we got inside, she poured me a glass of wine.
"To surviving," she toasted.
"To survival," I echoed.
I drank the wine. It tasted like ash.
Two days later. The Winter Showcase.
The St. James Performing Arts Center was sold out. My mother was in the front row, wearing diamonds and judgment. My father was beside her, looking at his phone.
Backstage, the air smelled of hairspray and anxiety. Girls were stretching, sewing ribbons, pacing.
I sat in front of my mirror, applying heavy stage makeup. The black eyeliner. The crimson lips. The mask of the Black Swan.
I looked fierce. I looked dangerous.
I felt like I was made of glass.
"Five minutes to curtain!" the stage manager shouted.
I stood up. I adjusted my tutu. I checked my pointe shoes.
Just perform, I told myself. Just do the job. That's all you are. A performer.
The music started. The curtain rose.
I stepped onto the stage. The lights were blinding. I couldn't see the audience. I couldn't see my parents. It was just a black void beyond the footlights.
I started to dance.
The music swelled—Tchaikovsky’s dramatic, pounding score. It usually made my heart race. Tonight, it felt like a funeral march.
I moved through the choreography. Piqué. Arabesque. Jeté.
My body knew what to do. It was muscle memory. But my mind was drifting.
I remembered the studio. Atlas holding me while I cried.
I remembered the cabin. The firelight on his skin.
I remembered the way he looked at me in the tunnel. I'm unkillable.
A wave of grief hit me so hard I stumbled.
I missed a step. Just a fraction of a second. I recovered instantly, flowing into the next movement, but I knew. Madame Ivanov knew.
I pushed harder. I spun faster.
I reached the coda. The thirty-two fouettés. The moment of triumph.
I started to whip. One. Two. Three.
I spotted the balcony. The empty balcony where Atlas had watched me rehearse.
He’s not here. He’s never coming back.
My focus shattered.
I fell out of the turn on rotation twenty. I didn't crash, but I wobbled, putting a hand down to steady myself.
The audience gasped.
It was a tiny mistake. To a layman, it was nothing. To a St. James, it was a catastrophe.
I finished the dance. I hit the final pose. I smiled the fake smile.
The applause was polite. Enthusiastic, even.
But as the curtain fell, I saw my mother’s face. She wasn't clapping. She was frowning.
I walked off stage. I walked past Madame Ivanov.
"You were distracted," she said quietly.
"I know," I whispered.
I kept walking. I walked to the dressing room. I didn't change. I grabbed my coat and threw it over my tutu. I grabbed my boots.
I ran out the back door.
I ran into the snow, still wearing my pointe shoes, the satin disintegrating in the slush.
I ran until my lungs burned. I didn't know where I was going. I just needed to outrun the failure. I needed to outrun the memory of him.
But you can't outrun a ghost that lives in your own chest.
Atlas
The noise of the mill was deafening.
Clang. Hiss. Grind.
It was the soundtrack of my childhood. It was the soundtrack of my father’s failure. And now, it was the soundtrack of my life.
I pulled the lever on the press, watching the steel sheet flatten under ten tons of pressure. It was mindless work. Repetitive. Brutal.
Perfect.
It had been three weeks since I left Burlingham. I was back in Ohio. Back in the trailer park.
I lived in my mom’s trailer. She was gone—checked into Sunnyvale, paid for in full by the check burning a hole in my conscience. The trailer was empty, cold, and smelled of stale cigarettes and despair.
I worked double shifts at the mill. 6:00 AM to 10:00 PM. I came home, ate a sandwich, slept for five hours, and did it again.
I was a robot.
"Thorne! Break time!" the foreman yelled over the roar of the machinery.
I wiped the grease from my hands onto my coveralls and walked to the break room. It smelled of burnt coffee and sawdust.
I sat at a plastic table, staring at the vending machine.
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
I ignored it. It was probably Jax. He texted me every day. Where are you? Come back. The team sucks without you.
I never answered.
But the buzzing persisted.
I pulled it out.
Jax: Turn on ESPN. Now.
I frowned. I didn't want to watch hockey. I hated hockey. Hockey was the lie that had gotten me into this mess.
But my thumb moved on its own. I opened the ESPN app on my phone.
The headline hit me like a physical blow.
STERLING SENTINELS CLINCH CHAMPIONSHIP BERTH IN OVERTIME THRILLER.
I tapped the video.
It was the highlights. Sterling vs. Harvard. The game I was supposed to play in.
I watched the grainy footage. The team looked sloppy. Disorganized. Without a captain to anchor the defense, they were scrambling.
But they won.
Jax scored the game-winner in overtime. A messy, ugly goal off a rebound.
The camera zoomed in on the celebration. The pile-up. The joy.
Then, the camera cut to the stands.
The camera panned over the cheering students. The mascot. The band.
Then it stopped on the Owner's Box.
Arthur St. James was there, clapping politely.
And next to him... Aurelia.
She was wearing a black coat. She wasn't clapping. She was staring down at the ice with an expression so hollow, so devastatingly empty, that it stopped my heart.
She looked like she was dead.
I paused the video. I zoomed in on her face.
Her eyes were dark circles. Her cheeks were gaunt. She wasn't the fiery girl who had danced on the balcony. She wasn't the brat who had thrown a vase at me. She wasn't the woman who had made love to me by candlelight.
She was a shell.
Hate heals, Arthur had said. She'll move on. She'll have a good life.
She didn't look like she was healing. She looked like she was haunting the arena, looking for me.
I dropped the phone on the table. The screen cracked.
I put my head in my hands.
"You okay, kid?"
I looked up. Old Man Miller (no relation to the coach), a lifer at the mill who had lost three fingers to a saw in '98, was watching me.
"Fine," I grunted.
"You don't look fine. You look like you're trying to figure out how to jump into the furnace."
"Just tired."
"You're not tired," Miller said, sitting down opposite me. He opened a thermos of soup. "You're running."
"I'm working."
"Same thing, for guys like us. We work to forget." He pointed a stump at me. "You're that hockey player, ain't ya? The one who got the scholarship?"
I stiffened. "Was."
"What happened? Get hurt?"
"Something like that."
"Girl?"
I flinched.