Page 14 of Our Strange Duet

I remembered the look she gave me as she’d been all but carried offstage tonight, remembered her fiery fury.

It didn’t make any sense for Meg to tease me with such callous cruelty, but Carlotta?

I nodded to myself.

It made perfect sense for her to go after me. Me, the dancer she’d decided was trying to usurp her.

“I’m leaving,” I announced, snatching up my belongings and heading toward the exit.

“Don’t go!” called the voice, and while part of me felt compelled to obey its plea, the rest of me was too mad to stop.

I stormed out of the dressing room, slamming the door behind me, before I could hear another word out of the supposed Angel of Music.

Chapter 5

“I can’t believe that woman!” I shouted at the walls of my little apartment once I’d returned home.

That my voice carried farther now than it had during any run I’d tried in my dressing room was more insult than I could take.

If I’d thought my walk through the damp spring night would be enough to cool my temper, I’d been sorely mistaken. Every step had irritated me, spinning my anger until I was muttering like a madwoman. By the time I’d let myself in, I was so infuriated, I grabbed a pillow off my tattered settee and screamed into it with all my might.

How dare she!

It was one thing to rail and rage at me in front of the company, but to do this! To take my private conversations, my deepest sorrows and wishes, and to use them as a way to mock me…it was too cruel, too wicked.

I whipped around, pacing with a crackling frenetic energy. I wanted to spring to action, wanted to make demands, wanted to do something. But what could be done?

Monsieur Lefèvre wouldn’t listen to me. Just hours before, he’d threatened to have me thrown out of the company if I dared to step out of line again. Whenever his prima donna was involved, he’d always take Carlotta’s side.

I balled my hands into fists and bit down hard on my fingers, stifling another scream. I hated feeling like this—so helpless, so out of control. I hated the way my heart raced, pounding in my chest as if about to burst. And I hated, hated, hated that she’d used my own words against me, my memories of my father and all the dreams he’d given me.

Some things were sacrosanct.

But not to Carlotta, apparently.

With a sharp exhalation, I flopped down. My insides continued to roil, but I was physically spent. It had been a long day, and tomorrow already promised to be worse.

“You need to calm down,” I said, speaking aloud to myself, pretending it was another’s voice making commands of me.

My apartment felt painfully lonely just then, and, not for the first time, I wished I had someone else living with me. I’d felt so grown-up when I’d told the Girys I was moving out. It had seemed so grand handing over my first rent payment. I pictured myself as a mature, sophisticated woman, able to make her own way in the world, ready for whatever life would throw at her.

But now, I was curled in misery, ready to burst into tears, and desperately yearning for someone with better sense to come along and order me to bed. I didn’t feel grand. I didn’t feel grown-up. I felt like a small girl, lost and alone and aching to be wrapped in a parent’s warm embrace.

“I wish you’d never told me of the Angel of Music, Father,” I confessed in a horrible rush. The words were as sharp as the blade of a razor, slicing my heart as they escaped, but I was powerless to stop them. “I wish I’d never known, never hoped. Why…why would you lie to me?”

The sobs overtook me then, and I scrunched my eyes closed, trying to hold back the multitude of tears.

Lies.

That was all the story had ever been.

Not a pretty fairy tale to tell on long winter nights. Perhaps it had started out that way, a passing fancy meant only to occupy a child’s mind, but my father had continued on with the tale for years, promising that it had happened to him, promising that it would happen to me. And that—that—had been the point where the story had tipped into a lie.

It shamed me to realize how long it had taken to see it, and now that I had, I wished I could go back in time and yell at my younger self for ever being so gullible and foolish, so quick to accept.

“The Angel of Music,” I scoffed. “Oh, Father, how could you? How could—” I stopped short, suddenly aware I was asking the wrong question. “Why would you? Why did I? Why did I fall for such an outlandish story?”

Because you wanted to be extraordinary, a little voice inside my head answered, sounding all too much like the voice from the dressing room. As extraordinary as he was.