ENOUGH

The lights burned white-hot above the stage, but all she could feel was the ache blooming in her left hip from the landing three minutes ago. No one would have seen it. No one ever did.

Arms too low on the arabesque. Fix it. Fix it now.

She lifted them a fraction of an inch, the correction so small the front row would never register it, but she felt it settle into her spine like a verdict. The music swelled and she turned with it, chasing the counts she'd run in her head ten thousand times before she'd ever run them on a stage.

Chassé, chassé, grand jeté —

The jump came clean. It always came clean. It was the only part of this she still, somewhere underneath everything else, loved.

Applause was already starting before she landed, a ripple of it rising through the dark like something alive. She let herself hear it for exactly one breath. Then it was gone, folded back under the running list she kept without meaning to, the one that never stopped, not during rehearsal, not during sleep, not now.

Right foot turned out enough? Shoulders down. Chin too high on the second turn — he'll say I was showing off.

The final pose held. The crowd rose. Somewhere past the footlights she could make out shapes clapping, a blur of color and noise that meant nothing, that had never once meant anything, because there was only one face in that theater that mattered and she couldn't see it yet, not until —

The curtain began to fall.

She held the smile. She always held the smile until the velvet cut the audience from view, because the smile was for them, and it cost her nothing to give it. What came after the curtain was the only performance that counted.

The fabric dropped low enough to break the sightline. She let the smile go.

Her chest was already tight before she found him — second row, aisle seat, where he always sat so she could never lose him in a crowd, so she would always know exactly where to look and exactly who was looking back. His hands were still now, resting on his knees. Not clapping. He never clapped until they were alone and he decided whether she'd earned it.

She found his eyes.

Something moved behind them — not warmth, never warmth, but something close enough to it that a stranger might mistake it for pride. Excitement, coiled tight, the same look he got watching numbers change on a screen when a deal was going his way. And underneath it, waiting, patient as a held breath: the anger. It was always there. It was only a question of how deep tonight, and how long she'd have to wait to find out.

Please, she thought, though she'd long since stopped believing anyone was listening. Please let it have been enough.

The curtain touched the stage floor with a soft, final sound, and the dark swallowed her whole.