7. Andy
Andy
Ihaven't been home twenty-four hours, and already five people have come through my parents' front door.
Ellie arrived first thing this morning with coffee — not the chain stuff, the real coffee that tastes like someone actually cares what goes in the cup. She planted herself at the kitchen table and hasn't moved since, except to refill my mug and hand me tissues when I need them.
She's not trying to fix me or cheer me up or ask pointed questions about what happened.
She's just here, solid and warm and exactly the same as she was when we were teenagers and she'd show up after my ballet recitals with gas station candy and zero judgment about whatever boy drama was currently ruining my life.
"You don't have to babysit me," I tell her around noon, when she's been sitting there for four hours straight.
"I'm not babysitting. I'm hanging out with my best friend who came home." She doesn't look up from the magazine she's flipping through — some teaching journal with a kindergarten art project on the cover. "Besides, I've got nowhere else to be."
That's a lie. Ellie always has somewhere to be. She volunteers at the animal shelter, helps her neighbor with grocery runs, coaches a girls' soccer team for fun. But she's here instead, in Mom's kitchen, reading about finger painting techniques like it's the most fascinating thing in the world.
Ben shows up around one with two pints of rocky road from the shop and a bear hug that lifts me off my feet.
He doesn't mention Jameson, doesn't reference the photos I know he's seen, doesn't ask a single question about what happened.
He just hands me ice cream and tells me the shop still has the booth I used to sit in during my breaks, if I ever want to come by.
"Like it's been waiting for me," I say, and it comes out more emotional than I meant.
"Well, it has." Ben grins — the same grin he had when I was nineteen and sneaking extra chocolate chips into the sundaes when he wasn't looking. "Booth three. Still wobbles if you lean too hard on the left side."
After he leaves, the twins show up. Sarah and Emma, who I used to babysit when they were gap-toothed eight-year-olds obsessed with fairy wings and glittery nail polish.
Now they're twenty-three and run the coffee shop downtown together, and they brought a box of pastries that smells like butter and cinnamon and Saturday mornings from another life.
"We heard you were back," Sarah says, and Emma adds, "We wanted to make sure you knew you had friends here."
They don't stay long — the coffee shop closes at three and they need to get back — but they leave the pastries and a stack of napkins with the shop's logo, and when they hug me goodbye, Emma whispers, "We're proud of you for coming home."
I don't know what that means, exactly, but it makes my chest tight in a good way.
In LA, I could disappear for weeks and no one would notice.
I could spend an entire Saturday without hearing another human voice, rattling around rooms designed for entertaining in a house where no one ever visited.
No one would knock on the door. No one would check if I was okay or bring me soup or just show up because they wanted to see my face.
Here, I've been home since midnight and there are already four containers of different soups in Mom's fridge and a tin of banana bread on the counter that Mrs. Chen apparently walked over at seven this morning because she "heard a car last night and figured it was one of ours coming home."
The doorbell rings again around two-thirty, and Dad gets up from his recliner to answer it. I hear voices in the hallway — Dad's warm greeting, someone else's brisk response — and then footsteps.
Maeve walks into the kitchen like she owns it, which she might as well.
She taught half this town how to hold their shoulders back and point their toes.
She's smaller than I remember, her hair more silver than brown now, but she moves the same way — efficient, no wasted motion, like every step has a purpose.
"Andy." She doesn't do the sympathetic head-tilt thing or the careful voice that everyone else has been using. Just my name, matter-of-fact. "Good to see you."
"Hi, Maeve." I stand up from the table, suddenly aware that I'm wearing yesterday's clothes and my hair is doing something unfortunate. "How are you?"
"Tired. Getting old. Ready to retire." She pulls out the chair across from me and sits down without being invited. "That's actually why I'm here."
Ellie looks up from her magazine, suddenly interested.
"I'm planning to retire in a few years," Maeve says. "The studio needs someone to take it over. I want it to be you."
The words hit me sideways. I blink at her, sure I misheard.
"I — what?"
"The ballet studio. I want you to run it."
"Maeve, I haven't danced in years. I don't know if I can?—"
She cuts me off with a wave of her hand. "The dancers are all under ten. They don't need a prima ballerina. They need someone who believes in them. You can do that, can't you?"
The question catches me off guard. Not can you teach ballet. Can you believe in them. Can you see a little girl who loves to move and tell her she's worth something, tell her she can be something, tell her that loving dance is reason enough to keep dancing.
"I don't know," I say, and it's the most honest thing I've said all day.
Maeve nods like she expected that answer. "How about you drop by tonight around six and see? Just watch. That's all I'm asking."
I don't have anything else to do. My evening stretches ahead of me, empty in a way that used to terrify me but now just feels honest.
"Okay," I say. "I can do that."
Maeve stands up, her business here finished. "Good. I'll see you at six."
She leaves the same way she arrived — purposeful, no lingering, no unnecessary words. The kitchen feels quieter without her, like she took some of the air with her.
"Take it," Ellie says the second the front door closes. "You know you want to."
"But I'm rusty. I haven't danced in?—"
"I'll go with you. Let's just see. If we get there and you still don't want it, we leave and you tell Maeve no. No pressure."
No pressure. When's the last time someone said that to me about anything? When's the last time someone presented me with an option that came without strings attached, without a list of rules, without a dozen people weighing in on what I should choose?
"Okay," I say. "Yeah. Let's go see."
Ellie grins and goes back to her magazine, and I'm reaching for my coffee when my phone rings. The sound makes me jump — I've been ignoring it all day, letting it go to voicemail, not ready to deal with whatever's waiting for me out there in the world I left behind.
I check the screen. Vinny.
Of course it's Vinny. Jameson's probably not answering his phone, and now Vinny needs to track him down like a lost piece of equipment. I should let it go to voicemail. I should turn the phone off and pretend the outside world doesn't exist for another day.
Instead, I answer.
"Where is Jameson?" Vinny's voice comes through the speaker like nails on a chalkboard — fast, clipped, the tone of a man who sees people as line items on a spreadsheet. "He's not answering his phone. He has commitments, he has obligations, he has?—"
I listen to him talk, this voice that's been the soundtrack of my erasure for three years.
"You know, Vinny," I say, and my voice is calm, steady, the calmest it's been in days. "I never got the chance to tell you, but go to hell."
I hang up. Don't wait for a response. Don't explain. Just end the call and set the phone face-down on the table.
The silence in the kitchen is profound.
Then Ellie starts slow-clapping, her face split by the biggest grin I've seen all day.
"That's my girl," she says.
The relief is immediate and physical, like I've been holding my breath for three years and finally remembered how to exhale. I think about all the times Vinny called me during dinner to give Jameson his schedule for the next day, talking over me like I wasn't even there.
The memory surfaces without warning: Sunday mornings at the farmers market, back when we lived in that tiny apartment and had to count every dollar twice.
Jameson would carry all the bags — three tomatoes, a loaf of bread, maybe some cheese if we were feeling fancy — and he'd pretend they were too heavy, staggering under the weight of our microscopic grocery haul.
"I don't know if I can make it home," he'd say, dramatically shifting the bag of produce.
"This bread might be the end of me." And I'd laugh until my sides hurt, right there in the middle of the market, not caring who was watching or what anyone thought about the girl giggling at her husband's stupid jokes.
That man wouldn't have let Vinny talk to me like that. That man would have hung up on Vinny himself, would have told him exactly where he could stick his lists and his rules and his line-item view of our marriage.
But that was before. Before the fame took over, before other people started making decisions about our life, before I learned to smile and nod and swallow whatever I actually wanted to say.
"Feel better?" Ellie asks.
"Yeah," I say, and I'm surprised by how true it is. "Yeah, I really do."
We spend the rest of the afternoon talking about nothing important — Ellie's kindergarten class, the new family that moved into the house on Maple Street, whether the coffee shop twins are ever going to change their menu or if they're committed to serving the same six pastries until the end of time.
Normal conversation. The kind that doesn't require emotional labor or careful word choice or thinking three steps ahead about how something might be interpreted.
At quarter to six, we walk downtown to the ballet studio.
It's exactly the same. Same building, same peeling paint around the door frame, same hand-lettered sign that's been there since I was eight years old.
Inside, the mirrors still cover the entire north wall, the barre is still mounted at the same height it's been for twenty years, and the wooden floor still creaks in the same spots.
It smells like floor wax and kid sweat and the faint mustiness of a building that's been home to thousands of hours of little girls learning to love their bodies, learning to move through space like it belongs to them.
This is where I learned that I could be graceful. Where I learned that I could be strong. Where I first understood that there was something inside me that was mine alone, something I could control and shape and pour all my feelings into.
Standing here now, it's like meeting a version of myself I haven't seen in years.
Maeve's class is in session — seven little kids between the ages of six and nine, all of them in pink leotards and tights that are already getting runs.
One of them has her hair in a bun that's more wishful thinking than actual technique.
Another is wearing a tutu that's definitely not regulation but is clearly her favorite thing she owns.
"Let's see your pliés," Maeve calls, and the girls line up at the barre.
They're terrible. Wonderfully, joyfully terrible.
One of them keeps losing her balance and giggling about it instead of being embarrassed. Another is doing some kind of freestyle spin in the corner that has nothing to do with the exercise and everything to do with the sheer joy of moving your body because you can.
They stumble and wobble and get back up without anyone telling them to, and not a single one of them is worried about doing it wrong. They're just dancing.
I watch them and something cracks open in my chest.
These kids don't know yet that the world will try to make them smaller. They don't know that someday someone will tell them their dreams aren't practical, or that loving something isn't enough reason to keep doing it.
Right now, they just dance because it makes them happy. Because their bodies feel good when they move. Because they can imagine themselves as swans or princesses or whatever magical thing they want to be.
I remember that feeling. Standing in this exact spot twenty years ago, wearing a leotard that was hand-me-down from my cousin, believing with every cell in my body that I was going to be a ballerina.
Not because anyone told me I could, but because when I danced, I felt like I could fly. Like I was exactly who I was supposed to be.
When did I stop believing that? When did I learn to want less?
The tears start without warning. I don't realize I'm crying until Ellie presses something soft into my hand — a towel from the studio, one of the small ones they keep by the barre for the kids. I wipe my face and it comes away wet, and I have no idea how long they've been falling.
These aren't the same tears I cried in the car outside the set, or on the floor of that empty house in LA, or in my parents' arms last night. Those were tears of breaking, of everything falling apart, of grief so big I couldn't breathe around it.
These are different. Quieter. The kind that come when you see something beautiful and it reminds you of something you lost, or maybe something you forgot you had.
"Look at that one," Ellie murmurs, nodding toward a girl who can't be more than six.
She's attempting some kind of arabesque that defies several laws of physics, but her face is pure concentration, like she's performing at Lincoln Center instead of a small-town studio with mirrors that need resilvering.
"She's fearless," I say.
"They all are. That's what makes them magic."
Maeve walks over to us, having watched her students attempt a grand jeté that looked more like enthusiastic hopping.
She's smiling — not the sympathetic, careful smile everyone's been giving me all day, but the real one.
The one that says she already knows the answer to the question she's about to ask.
"Well?" she says.
I look at the kids, still dancing, still spinning, still believing they can be anything.
I think about the little girl I used to be, the one who stood in this same spot and knew, absolutely knew, that she was going to dance forever.
I think about the woman I became, who learned to stay quiet and stay small and be grateful for whatever scraps of a life other people decided to give her.
I think about the choice in front of me — not just taking over a ballet studio, but remembering who I was before I forgot what I wanted.
I smile at Maeve, through the tears, through the mess of everything I'm feeling.
"Yes. I'll do it."