Iain knew, for instance, that what Maeve feared more than anything was an injury. So it was a good threat. Hold her down by the wrist, twisting. Just enough. His weight on those tiny bones. Enough to make her comply. Or her arm, caught up behind her, the pressure on her shoulder. He aimed for the joints.

A bruise, she could live with. Bruises: who cares? Just no sprains. Please. No muscle injury. For God’s sake, a bone, even a little one in her hand or foot, would mean she couldn’t dance for weeks. Something he leaned on when she proved she could take it without crying out, without waking Talia, toddler-sweet and sleeping in the next room and then, later, Rudy too.

He’d thought, briefly, that he could use her fear of waking the kids as a threat. But Maeve can be silent through just about anything.

She curls against the floor now, the way she used to curl up, protecting herself. The music—mostly drums, improvisation music—comes out of a speaker in the wall and it is relentless. She needs it to stop so that she can think. She needs to stop thinking and get up again.

In the end, the marriage left only two marks on her. One, the surgeon’s knife at her belly; and the other, a thin red scar that runs the length of her index finger down into her palm. The wound caused by a shard of a broken mirror.

The mirror from a studio just like this one.

Maeve pulls up and crawls to the corner, slaps the speaker’s power button until it finally cuts and there’s nothing, quiet, and she sits there on the floor and takes a breath.

Her head hurts, some combination of the new altitude and minimal sleep and acoustics. She’s glad of it. It’s a sharp pain, steady, something to focus on that’s not the pain in her hip, her shoulder. She closes her eyes and breathes out, then opens them again.

It’s impossible to avoid yourself in a studio. There’s Maeve, sitting against the wall, knees pulled into her chest, wrapping her arms around herself; there she is reflected in twenty different mirrors. Every angle of her. Every line. Whispering to herself through the silence, in the gentlest way. Lovingly.

He’s gone, he’s gone. He’s gone now.

A weird wave of relief washes over her, half euphoria, half endorphins. Like a rush. She opens her hand and traces the scar from fingertip to wrist. He’s gone.

Her voice growing cold: Iain is gone.

Maeve waits in the silence until her breathing is even. Then she turns on the music, and she gets up.