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“What do you think?” Mia hadn’t moved from the doorway.
“It’s a pretty place. Lots of light.” I walked to the back of the room where sunlight poured in through the large windows and highlighted the tracks of dust on the grimy hardwood floors. It needed some TLC, but I could see the possibilities. I stared out at the wild shrubbery in back, backing up to a chain link fence. Though there wasn’t much of a yard, unsurprisingly, the stone patio was a nice surprise. “Why do you have a key?”
“Because I’m buying it.”
“Huh?”
“I’m purchasing it. It’s going to be mine. Well, ours, if you want to come on board.”
I turned and stared at my sister across the enormous studio. The fact that it was a former dance place wasn’t lost on me. It made me wonder if the two halves of my life were on a collision course.
But of course they weren’t. Sometimes a cigar was just a cigar, and sometimes an old, abandoned dance studio with windchimes hanging from the ceiling fixture was just that.
“Yours and mine for what? You better start ‘splainin’, Lucy.”
“You know I wanted to do that shelter,” she began, moving around as if she couldn’t keep still. Another sure sign of nerves. “A safe place for people to go after a traumatic event. Not just for counseling necessarily, but for anything they need. There are a couple smaller studios that branch off this one. Here, and here.” She walked from one door to another without opening them and turned back to me. “They could just be quiet places. Somewhere without judgment, without having to think beyond the next moment. There’s another room over there, a smaller one, that might work for a counselor’s office.”
I didn’t know what to say. I was pretty sure I’d lost my voice entirely.
“It’s just in the planning stages right now, but I sorta put an offer together. The owner rejected my first one, so I talked to Tray’s dad, and he helped me figure out what I should counter with if I decide to try again. I needed you to see it, to tell me if you feel what I do.”
“What do you feel?” I whispered.
“Hope.” She gripped the barre with her good hand. She’d gotten her cast off a couple of days ago, but she was still being careful with her injured arm. “I’m probably projecting, because this is where I’d hoped to open. This neighborhood, I mean.” She tipped back her head, studying the ceiling windchimes as I had. “I wanted a storefront, not somewhere tucked too far away in a building no one could find. There isn’t anything but that one door, but that’s enough. We can paint the name on the glass, make sure it’s really visible. And your section is to the left of the building. You probably didn’t see the staircase around the side. The second floor has a small storefront, big enough for your display window—”
“What display window?” My head was spinning, my chest too tight. “What are you talking about?”
“Your bakery. Well, it doesn’t have to be a bakery. You can make whatever you like. A café, maybe? That could work too. But I thought the space would be perfect. Your cooking soothes you, so maybe it would soothe someone else. They could leave here, go upstairs, get a cup of tea and a cookie. Or not. I just want to offer comfort.” She lifted her hands and let them fall. “In whatever form that takes. For everyone, it’s different.”
“A bakery.” Already I could see it. Cheerful pink, yellow, and blue cupcakes in the window. Pies and cakes in a revolving tower. A fancy lighted case for all the other goodies I could create. “Mine?”
“Yours.” Her eyes dampened and she cleared her throat. “If you wanted it, that is. I’m sorry, I forget to ask. Just assumed.”
“As if I could say no.”
“You can. You can always say no. It’s your choice.”
I wasn’t ready to think about choices, to let my mind wander from today to that night a few weeks ago. One had nothing to do with the other, and I didn’t want all this good tainted by what had happened in the club. Somehow that had turned into good too, with what was happening with me and Gio. I didn’t know all his secrets, and he didn’t know mine—or Mia’s. We were living on borrowed time, and any day now, the thing we had going could end. Maybe that was why it was so precious. Temporary or not, it was very good.
So was this, and that was what I had to focus on. Not times when I hadn’t had a choice. Or when Mia hadn’t had one.
Making the choice to be happy, to live in the moment, was the hardest of all.
“If I’m going to be a partner, I have to pay my share.”
“I have the money. I want to get us going. When the profits start rolling in, then we’ll talk about you paying me back, if you still want to.”
“I will,” I said quickly. “I won’t lean on you. That money is yours, Ame.”
Her face pinched, as it always did when I slipped and called her by her given name. She’d been Amelia once, before the kidnapping. Years later, she’d changed her name legally to Mia to try to escape some of the stranglehold of her past.
I didn’t know if that was possible. Some events dug hooks so deep in you, you spent the rest of your life trying to fill the holes. And what I’d been through didn’t compare to what she’d endured.
To think I’d once harbored some sort of sick envy that she’d gotten all the attention and I hadn’t. Now I knew bad attention was worse than none at all.
“It’s ours. You’re my family. My blood.” She walked forward and took my hands. “Without you, I wouldn’t be standing here today. You gave me a reason to fight.” She reached up and brushed my hair out of my face. “You’re so beautiful, and smart, and talented. Looking at you, I know everything was worth it.”
My eyes stung and I gazed at our loosely linked fingers. “I haven’t always made good decisions, Ame. You wouldn’t think so highly of me if you knew.”
