But was I really wrong?
Was it really just my mind playing tricks?
I told myself I was going to the water station near the backstage corridor.
But I did not go to the water station. I moved through the wings and past the crew station and through the door I’d noticed during blocking rehearsals—the one that led to the service corridor that ran along the back of the VIP level. I’d been told during orientation that the corridor was restricted during show hours. I was aware I was breaking a rule. I was aware this was reckless and possibly very stupid and that the smart thing to do was to go to the dressing room and drink water.
Yet, I pushed through the door.
The service corridor was dim and my heels were loud on the concrete floor. I told myself I would walk to the end of the corridor and back and that if I saw nothing, I would accept that I had imagined it, and I would go back to my life and leave the door closed where it belonged.
I made it approximately thirty feet.
The door at the far end of the corridor opened.
He came through it the way he moved through everything—without hurry, with that total and unnerving economy of motion, like a man who had never in his life taken a step that wasn’t deliberate. Dark suit. White shirt. The same quality of stillness that had stopped me in the middle of a choreographed number from fifty yards away.
He looked up and saw me.
We both stopped.
The lighting was inadequate and the bass from below was a low, constant pressure and somewhere a door was drifting shut with a hydraulic hiss, and the man who had held me while I cried was standing ten feet away looking at me with an expression that I could not read and that frightened me slightly because of how much I wanted to.
For a full three seconds, neither of us moved.
Then everything I had spent two weeks folding and flattening and putting in closed rooms came open at once, and what came out of it wasn’t relief or want or any of the softer things I might have expected.
Anger.
“You left,” I said.
He continued to look at me.
“You shouldn’t be in this corridor,” he pointed out, his face impassive.
“You left without a word. Without—there wasn’t even a note, there was just—” The money, I didn’t say. I hadn’t decided about the money yet. “You disappeared. Like it was nothing.”
“You were safe.”
“I didn’t feel safe. I felt—” I stopped. I felt discarded, I didn’t say. I felt like something you dealt with and then tidied away. “Who are you? You still haven’t—I don’t even know your name.”
His silence told me what his words didn’t: It was intentional.
The flatness of it hit me like a door.
“I protected you.” The control in his voice was absolute, but there was something below it, something compressed and pressurized. “Those men—”
“Were going to come back, you said so yourself, and then you left me with nothing but—” I stopped again, because we were circling the envelope and I wasn’t ready for that yet. “You had no right to make decisions about my life.”
“I don’t. And that was why I had to leave,” he declared. “It was the safest choice. For both of us.”
“Foryou,” I said. “Don’t dress it up as something you did for me.”
Something flickered in his face. He moved, and then the corridor had rearranged itself and he was closer than he’d been and thewall was at my back and I wasn’t entirely certain when that had happened.
He wasn’t touching me. He was a careful foot away, close enough that I could smell the specific, expensive quiet of his cologne. Close enough that I was acutely aware of how much space he occupied.
“You know nothing about my world,” he said. Quiet. Precise. “About what you walked into that night or what it costs to be connected to it. I left because staying was more dangerous to you than disappearing. You want an apology for that. I won’t give you one.”
