into my head. I wondered if she’d felt something similar, sitting in the audience and watching us act without her, the path you can’t un-take.
“No,” I finally said, trying to focus. “I’m pretty sure Stevie’s back in Connecticut by now. And even if she was still in the city, I don’t have any way of meeting up with her.…” A second later, though, something hit me, and I smiled.
“What?” Cary asked, and I glanced over to see him looking at me.
“Well,” I said, shrugging one shoulder, “we actually did make a plan, earlier in the night. That if anything happened—if we got separated—we’d meet at Grand Central at eleven-eleven.”
“A very good time.”
“Why, thank you.”
He nodded at the building just ahead of us. “Here we are.”
It was the first commercial building we’d been in all night—which meant we could just walk in, not having to deal with doormen or buzzing residents’ apartments.
We climbed a flight of stairs—Cary still refusing to let me help him—and I saw, at the top, that there were two businesses on this floor. Cary headed toward the one on the left. SWEATYOGA, a sign on the door proclaimed. I followed him but saw the door next to it had FREEDOM OF MOVEMENT etched into it, along with a stylized drawing of a girl doing a turn—a dance studio.
We stepped into the yoga studio, and it was suddenly much warmer. I didn’t think it was just the contrast from being outside, it felt like the heat had been cranked up. Cary immediately unzipped his bomber jacket, and I did the same with mine.
“Hey,” the guy behind the desk said, smiling at Cary, just as the phone rang. “Sorry, just a second.”
I pulled off my coat, draped it over my arm, and picked my hair up off my neck. I looked over to see Cary looking at me. I worried that I’d gotten something on my dress and not realized it, but when he looked away a second later, slightly flushed, I suddenly realized that in all our interactions tonight, I’d always been wearing a long coat. I tried to hide my smile as I shook out some of the wrinkles from my skirt, glad that I was wearing one of my best dresses, that Teri had done my makeup for me.
“Sorry,” the front desk guy said, hanging up the phone again. “I’ll take—” The phone rang again. “Argh,” he said. “Just a sec…”
“Want me to just bring them into the studio?” Cary asked, and the guy’s shoulders slumped with relief.
“Would you?” he asked, as he picked up the phone. “That would be amazing. Thanks so much. SweatYOGA,” he said, answering the call.
Cary nodded for me to follow, and we navigated our way around the people standing around in the hallway with their mats, presumably waiting for a class to start. They looked like anyone going to a yoga class, just wearing less clothes than the yoga classes I’d gone to back home. But since this was clearly some kind of hot yoga, I could understand it.
“It’s this one,” Cary said, opening the door to a studio. He stepped inside, and I followed. I immediately kicked off my ankle boots, then a second later, realized what I was doing. But in all my years dancing, it had been drilled into me, for more than half my life—you never enter a studio with street shoes on.
I decided to leave them by the door—I could just put them back on when I left. I took a step into the studio and looked around—wooden floors, mirrors, mat set up at the front of the room, cubbies filled with yoga blocks and props, a small wooden incense burner perfuming the whole space. Cary hadn’t hit the lights, but with the moonlight and streetlights shining through the windows, there was more than enough light to see.
“It’ll just be a second,” Cary said. He opened the Maverick bag and started pulling out a stack of white towels from it. I was about to offer to help him when I heard music wafting in. At first I thought it was music from another yoga class, but after a moment, I realized I knew it. I knew it better, in fact, than almost any other piece of music. After all, I’d heard it for months every year, over and over again, for more than a decade—The Nutcracker Suite.
I was baffled by why this was happening until I remembered the dance studio that was also in this building—I