I feel my jaw drop but I have been so caught up with him that I don’t see Angelina circling like a shark. Before I can respond, she pulls him away and unleashes a stream of Spanish too angry and fast for me to decipher. First, he’s rolling his eyes but then he’s trying to placate her. I realize I’ve been standing frozen on the dance floor, my eyes wide and my mouth gaping. Before long, the new set starts, and Horatio asks me to dance.

Two things are true at once that night: I never want to leave and I am longing to be away from the excruciating sight of G with another woman, someone young and beautiful and delicate. I grab a glass of wine with Cali and tell her what happened. The words are out of my mouth before I can worry about the fact that she’s probably closer to him than to me.

“Are you surprised?” she asks. “You’ve met him.”

“What does he mean he wants to keep me?”

Cali rolls her eyes. “Oh, well, that’s a bit of a familiar refrain. For a lot of people, Buenos Aires is a stopover, and that makes G a stopover too. He gets very attached to the people in the studio. And then, he’s always having a dramatic falling-out with someone. Not just the women either.”

“Is he . . . ?”

“Oh no, I mean, not that I know of. I don’t know, nothing about G would really surprise me. He never talks about his past in anything other than riddles. Rumors abound, as I’m sure you can imagine. People gossip about him all the time. Especially in the dance community, which is pretty tight-knit.”

“Ugh, how awful.” My skin crawls with the idea of people talking about me behind my back, the whispers I came thousands of miles to escape.

“Are you kidding?” Cali says. “He lives for it.”

Penny Has a Daughter

FAILURE TO thrive. That’s what they called it when Ava—out of NICU and home at last—still wasn’t gaining weight or hitting her developmental milestones. It seemed like such a gentle term for something so terrible, a catchall phrase that encompassed none of the visceral stress and fear of having an unhealthy baby. Failure to thrive, as though she were a houseplant who’d been potted in the wrong soil. Health is, ultimately, what all new parents wish for their children, and it eluded poor, tiny Ava.