Page 25 of The Knockout

Grace

Everly

Are you sure you can’t come home this week?

Grace

I’m sure.

Everly

Not even for a few days?

Grace

Sorry, sissy. I’m back to the flat after the show tonight, and I might just sleep for a week.

Everly

What if I put Kerrigan on the phone?

Grace

Using your daughter to guilt me isn’t fair, Everly. Lennon is going to her parents’ country home for the week, which means I have the flat to myself. I’ve got Aunt Nattie’s last three books sitting on my Kindle, and I plan on drinking a bottle of wine and falling in love with my next Natalie Sinclair book boyfriend. I don’t care if I see a single soul this week.

Everly

Lennon is going home. Why can’t you?

Grace

Her family is sending a helicopter. She’ll be on it for thirty minutes. Not the same thing.

Everly

But it’s our birthday . . .

Grace

It is, and you’ll be spending it with your incredibly sexy husband and beautiful kids.

Everly

He is sexy, isn’t he?

I shake my head and smile at my sister. I miss her like I’d miss a limb.

Grace

Love you, bad twin.

Everly

Miss you, good twin.

“A word, Miss Sinclair?” Jeffrey Jenkins, our director, startles me as he crosses the dressing room. He was a star twenty years ago. A visionary dancer with more natural skill and grace in his fingertips than most people could ever hope to have in their entire bodies. What he doesn’t have now, and probably didn’t have then, was patience, tact, or respect for the women he works with.

“Yes, Mr. Jenkins?” I look up at him through the reflection in the mirror as he moves behind me. His hands rest on my shoulders, and my stomach drops.

---