Page 136 of Just Like Home

“Ouch,” Charlotte said, handing the phone back to Brinley. “I guess Maude isn’t a fan anymore.”

Brinley only stared. “Isn’t this the equivalent of a burned bridge?”

She shrugged. “I mean, I wasn’t planning on going back so, I guess it doesn’t matter.”

“But, Charlotte, you didn’treallythink you were going to stay here forever, did you?”

The words landed squarely on Charlotte’s shoulders, and something that could only be described as panic settled inside her. That feeling only worsened when she remembered that her plan to buy the studio had been a faulty one.

Had she simply been prolonging the inevitable?

Seconds later, Cole was at her side. “Is everything okay?”

She forced herself to nod, but the fear that had found her wasn’t going away. She’d been confident in her decision to leave, but that was when she thought she had a plan. If she’d burned her bridge at the balletandshe wasn’t going to be able to buy the dance studio—what was she doing here?

She scanned the room and realized the entire Harbor Pointe High School football team was staring at her, waiting for her to get back to their rehearsal.

From the corner, her phone rang. “Brinley, could you supervise while they run through this a few more times?” Charlotte asked.

Brinley nodded and moved to the front of the room while Charlotte grabbed her phone and slipped out into the hallway. Her hands were sweaty and her mouth had gone dry.

Her mother’s face stared back at her from the screen of her phone. She declined the call.

She found the article on her own device and read a little more closely this time.

Quotes from her mother, from the other dancers, from Martin—all expressing surprise and hurt that she’d left the way she had.

“We really had no warning,” Artistic Director Martin DuBois said. “She was here one day and gone the next.”

“She really let us all down,” one of the dancers in the company said. “It was a selfish thing to do.”

Anger rose up inside her. Selfish? She’d given everything to that ballet—everything! And they were callingherselfish?

And then Maude mentioned Julianna.

The recital in which Page will perform honors Julianna Ford, a former ballerina who left the professional dance world as abruptly as Ms. Page appears to have done. Ford was killed in a car accident in May, and Page’s mother, renowned dance instructor Marcia Page, speculates that her death may have contributed to her daughter’s rash decision.

“I can see no other logical explanation,” Marcia Page said. “I only hope that when she comes to her senses, there’s still a place for her in ballet.”

Charlotte had been ignoring these kinds of comments from her mother since the day she drove out of Chicago—why were they hitting her so wrong now? Because text messages were personal and this was out there on the internet for everybody to read?

She didn’t like people commenting on her personal life. Especially people who didn’t really know her. To Martin and the other dancers and Maude and even her mother, Charlotte was a dancer, nothing more. What gave them the right to say anything about what she was doing now?

What gave them the right to make her fear her choice was the wrong one? Or rather, to confirm the fear that had been niggling at her for weeks now.

“You okay?”

She turned and found Cole standing in the hallway behind her.

Her phone buzzed, and Marcia’s face lit up the screen again.

Her mother had more quotes in the article.

“I really thought my daughter was smarter than this—throwing away her career after she worked so hard to get where she was—well, maybe I’ve been giving her too much credit.”

“Charlotte?”

Maybe this was what she deserved. Maybe after what she’d done—the mistake she still kept from Cole—ending up alone with nothing was unavoidable.

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