“Next thing you know, we’ll be tracking prints right into your room—” He lurches forward, drawing the flashlight off his tool belt like a pistol and flicking it on. “There it is! Under your bed! Hiding in your suitcase!” The light glares in her eyes.

She pulls back. In her suitcase?

Still in her seat, Anna blanches. “Stop being an idiot, Dan. You’re blinding her.”

A prickle rises on Maeve’s arms, the back of her neck. If Dan leads tracking expeditions, he probably has his share of souvenirs—even a bear claw or two. Maeve feels her throat tighten.

But he switches off the light and turns to the others, only looking for a laugh. He stumbles again, and there’s something of the lumberyard in it—not so much the woodcutter, but the falling tree.

She tries to shake it off. He’s drunk. They’re all drunk.

Except Maeve.

She stands and walks to the far end of the lobby. At first, she just wants some space: she’s afraid she might scream and wants to remove herself before it happens. She extends an arm to rest on the back of a chair and squeezes her eyes shut.

She doesn’t want to cry, not here. All she can see are Talia and Rudy: Rudy’s small face in a rearview mirror. Talia’s fingers tight around Maeve’s arm, reaching for her from the back seat as Maeve drives down a highway at night. They didn’t go through all of that, everything it took to leave Iain, to finally be free, only for her to die up here in the mountains and abandon them.

When she opens her eyes again, she can see herself reflected in the plate-glass window. Pale, a silhouette. She pulls up straight, as though she is not lost in the center foyer but standing at the barre. Far behind her, there is the flicker of the fire, the others grouped around it.

She begins to warm up.

“What are you doing,” Anna calls.

Maeve keeps her eyes locked on her own reflection, her pelvis tucked. Toe pointed, calf tight, tendu-tendu-tendu.

“I’m going to work,” she says. “They won’t let me leave, so I’ll do it here.” Out into second position, down into a plié, up into a rise. “If Sim can work, then so can I.”

She keeps the warm-up sequence brief, just getting herself in order before moving into the open and taking up space.

At first, the others are silent, uncomfortable, but after a moment Maeve can hear the murmurs of conversation start up again behind her. The clink of the ladle in the soup pot.