LITMIR.BIZ

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      I didn’t wait for her to respond. I turned and headed for the stairs.

      And with every step I took, I felt lighter. Brighter. As if tethering myself to her downward spiral had made it mine, too.

      How had I not seen that? I wasn’t paying penance. I’d been suffering through a prison sentence, maybe, but it had allowed me to lock myself away. It had kept me from feeling anything. It had made me distant and cold. My father by default.

      And it was time I took responsibility for my own damned life. For what I had made it simply by standing by and letting these things go on.

      My phone rang in my pocket as I stepped outside into the gloomy English January afternoon. I glanced at it, but it was never who I wanted it to be. This time it was my secretary.

      “I don’t mean to bother you while you’re with your family,” he said, sounding harried. “But we’ve received another bid on the Delaney islands. Your brother has taken it upon himself to—”

      “Enough,” I said.

      “Sir?”

      “Give him the islands,” I ordered my secretary. “He can have them. I don’t care. I’m not fighting with him anymore.”

      “As you wish,” my secretary said, and rang off to do as I asked.

      I made a mental note to send him an extra bonus for not mentioning that I’d waffled back and forth about this deal for months.

      I had extended these olive branches before, of course. I’d stepped away from negotiation tables and left deals to Ash. I’d waited for him to recognize those gestures for what they were. I slipped my phone back into my pocket and heard something crash inside, but I didn’t look back.

      None of this was mine. It never had been. It was my mother’s to hold or put down, as she chose.

      I folded myself into my sports car and fired up the engine, but I didn’t drive away. I sat there for a moment. Considering olive branches and grand gestures.

      I had made myself into a martyr. Ash hated me, and I knew he had a right to those feelings, so I’d done nothing, directly. Periodically, when he’d fought me for business, I’d handed over the thing he appeared to want and then I’d sat about, waiting to see if he did something else.

      I’d done exactly nothing on my own. I hadn’t followed up. I hadn’t reached out to him. I expected him to divine from the ether of a business deal that I regretted what had happened between us and wished it could change.

      And when he didn’t respond, because of course he didn’t respond, I used that as further ammunition that I was precisely as wretched and unlovable as my parents had always made me feel.

      I was thoroughly sick of myself, in fact. The only thing martyrs were good for, as far as I was aware, was kindling. And I was tired of letting myself burn.

      I pulled my phone out again and stared at the screen.

      And then I punched in a number I hadn’t called in years.

      It rang once. Again. Then shifted to voice mail.

      I wanted to hang up. Because it was easier by far not to change. It was easier to keep doing what I’d always done. But the only place that had led were these ruins I’d made of myself, my life. This sad wreckage.

      And I was tired of living my life like a salvage operation.

      The voice mail beeped.

      I cleared my throat. I had no idea how to do this.

      Which meant I had no choice but to go ahead and do it anyway.

      “Ash,” I said. I blew out a breath and told myself the only olive branch that mattered was the one I extended with my own arm. My own hand. Not a series of corporate sallies through intermediaries that meant nothing in the end. “This is your brother. I think it’s time we talked.”

      Darcy

      It was a brisk, blustery morning in the beginning of February, and I would normally have felt grim and deeply aggrieved as I walked toward a restaurant behind the New York Public Library to meet my mother.

      But this was a different sort of New Year. I’d decided. I was a different Darcy from the one who’d seen out the last year with more of a whimper than any kind of bang.

      I’d already had my initial discussions with the Knickerbocker. And I knew that I’d made the right decision when their protestations that they would miss me only made me smile. Maybe because I knew that they weren’t lies, necessarily. But that they also weren’t the truth. Not really.

      The thing about the corps was that if you wanted to leave, they were happy for you to go. You needed to go. It was a hard enough life when you loved it.

      Annabelle felt betrayed.

      “I don’t understand this!” she cried, when I told her that I’d informed the Knickerbocker that I didn’t want to renew my contract with them this year. And worse, that I was planning to go over to the dark side, after all. “Why would you blow up your entire life? Is this what happens when you do burlesque?”

      But it didn’t feel like blowing up my life. It felt like living it—at last.

      Winston’s dance company required an audition no matter my résumé, and I thought I should have been far more nervous than I was. I hadn’t auditioned for a new company in a decade. Instead, I felt excited.

      That was the burlesque, I thought, though I didn’t tell Annabelle. It hadn’t blown anything up. It was the key that had opened a lock at the front of a cage I hadn’t known was holding me in. Now the door was open and I could do anything.

      Thinking about burlesque dancing made me think about Sebastian, which I still did far too often. And I might have known, without a shred of doubt, that I’d made the right decision. That I wouldn’t change anything if I could.

      But that didn’t make me miss him any less.

      My mother had come down to the city for some or other charity thing today. She knew perfectly well this was my day off, so I’d had no option but to agree to meet her for lunch when I would have preferred to work on my audition routine.

      I walked into the restaurant, saw her at once, and started weaving my way to the tables toward her. She looked as she always did. Perfectly put together, her hair elegant, her expression haughtily serene.

      I couldn’t help thinking about the odd ties that held us together. Mother and daughter. Obligation and disappointment, love and hope. I understood how those things moved as one and made a whole when it was a dance company. Why did I think a family was so different?

      When she looked up and saw me, a faint frown marred her smooth forehead. I knew she did not approve of what I had chosen to wear for our lunch. My favorite boots, clunky and a little bit motorcycle-y. Leggings without a tunic covering them up, making them the pants she abhorred. And the cropped leather jacket that showed off entirely too much of my body without even attempting to conceal any of it. I could hear her objections from across the room.

      But she said nothing as I sat down opposite her and we exchanged greetings.

      I waited until we’d ordered our food, a sensible salad for her and a grilled cheese for me, because I liked to live dangerously. These days, anyway. Then I sat back in my chair and smiled at her.

      “I’m glad you wanted to have lunch, Mom,” I said, before I lost my nerve. “I have something to tell you.”

      Up went that brow. But I refused to be cowed.

      “I’m leaving the Knickerbocker,” I said.

      My mother stared back at me, her face frozen. “I beg your pardon?”

      “I understand that you

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