When she talks to herself like this—derisive, angry, mean—it’s Iain’s voice she hears. Her husband. Ex-husband, ex. Ex, for God’s sake.

Still—after all this time.

His voice that leaves her dizzy, leaves her nauseous, spinning. But drives her to get up again.

And again. An old habit she just can’t shake.

When she met Iain, he was the artistic director with a company in New York. Maeve was a visiting principal, a classical dancer from Canada—a national company—only there for a month-long intensive. Right away, there was a connection. He knew her so well. Without, it seemed, even trying.

A relief, at first: it’s not a life everyone understands. She’d had boyfriends in high school and even after that, nice men who used words like relax, who told Maeve that she didn’t have to keep getting up, she didn’t have to measure herself obsessively, she didn’t have to be perfect. But in Maeve’s world, none of that was true. They meant well, all of them, but they drove her rageful. They drove her to tears.

Iain wanted her driven and exhausted. He wanted her perfect, too. He loved her best when she was most unhappy, when she was a slave to it. No one else had ever known Maeve inside out. Not like that.

When she didn’t return from New York, her company director screamed breach of contract down the phone line. The LA Times referred to Iain as a strategist and Maeve as Nouvelle Vague’s latest acquisition; The New Yorker teasingly called him a poacher, Maeve his trophy. Her photograph in Rolling Stone. In Vogue.

And suddenly there they were, five years on.

Talia came along, an accident. A happy accident?

Yes, Maeve thinks now. She squats down on the studio floor and rounds her back, feeling the stretch between her shoulder blades, knees hugged into her chest.

Yes. She has thought it over a lot. Despite everything, she is glad to have them, Talia and Rudy both. Despite what they did to her body. Despite the way they tied her down. The way they tied her to Iain. They are a passion.

Such a passion, in fact, that she has to leave them to focus on anything else, and the leaving itself is so sharp and painful that just thinking about them makes it so Maeve can hardly breathe. Iain knew this about her, that love would be her weakness, long before Talia was born. I know you. He could sense it in her, he said, the same way he’d known everything else that made her tick.

I know you.