Save the Last Dance. Fiona Harper

years past that sell-by date—she was sensing the creeping inevitability of that prediction every time she put on her pointe shoes. She almost dreaded sliding her feet into them these days.

       Not tonight. It couldn’t be tonight. Her father would be devastated.

       To distract herself from these unwanted thoughts, she checked her costume. No stiff tutu for this role. Her dress was soft and flowing, ending just below her knees. Layers of chiffon in deep blue, aquamarine and turquoise. And her dark hair, instead of being pulled into its habitual bun, was loose and flowing round her shoulders; only two small sections at the front were caught back to keep it off her face. She resisted the urge to fiddle with the grips, knowing it would probably only make things worse.

       The orchestra began a new section of music. It wasn’t long now. She should try and focus, slow her butterfly-wing breaths and let her ribs swell with oxygen. She closed her eyes and concentrated on pulling the air in and releasing it slowly.

       Behind her eyelids an image gatecrashed her efforts at calm and inner poise. A pair of dark masculine eyes that crinkled at the corners as an unseen mouth pulled them into a smile. She snapped her own eyes open.

      Where had that come from?

       Now her heart was beating double speed. Damn. She needed to get her thoughts under control. Less than a minute and she’d be making her entrance. She shook her head and blew out some air.

       And then it happened again. With her eyes open.

       But this time she saw the smile beneath the eyes. Warm and bright and just a little bit cheeky.

       It must be the stress.

       Weeks of preparing for this moment had finally got to her. She’d heard other dancers mention the strange random thoughts that plagued them before a performance, but it had never happened to her before. No sudden musings on what she was going to have for dinner that evening or whether she’d remembered to charge her mobile phone.

       But why was she thinking of him?

       A man she didn’t even know.

       What was he doing here, invading her thoughts at such a crucial moment? It was most unsettling. The last thing she needed right now. And she really meant right now. The violins had just picked up the melody that signalled her entrance.

       Thankfully, her body had been rehearsed so hard the steps were almost a reflex and it sprang to life and ran onto the stage, dragging her disjointed head with it. There was a moment of hush, a pause in the music, and she sensed every person in the audience had simultaneously and unconsciously held their breath.

       They were watching her. Waiting for her.

       It was her job to dazzle and amaze, to transport them to another world. And, just as she lifted her arm in a port de bras that swept over her head, preparing her for a series of long and lilting steps across the diagonal of the stage, she wished that were possible. She wished that she could escape into another world. And maybe stay there. Somewhere new, somewhere exciting, where no one expected anything of her and she had no possibility of failing to make the grade.

       But tonight, while she made the audience believe she was the Little Mermaid, while they saw her float and turn and defy gravity, she would know the truth. She would feel the impact of every jump in her whole skeleton. She would hear the knocking of her pointe shoes on the stage even if the orchestra drowned out the noise for the audience. She would feel her toes rub and blister inside their unforgiving, solid shoes.

       No, she knew the reality of ballet. It might look effortless from the outside, but from the inside it was hard and demanding. It was beautiful, but it wasn’t pretty or nice. A fierce kind of beauty that asked for your very soul in return for greatness, and then devoured it without compunction.

       She had chosen this path and there was no escape. There was no other world. It was all an illusion.

       But she would fool them all. She would dance like a girl who was full of sadness, trapped in a state of endless longing, wishing for a reality that could never be hers. And she would dance it well. She wouldn’t even be acting, because it was the truth. Her truth.

       No escape. No matter how much you wanted it.

       Truth like the pain of a thousand knives.

      ‘It was marvellous, darling. Absolutely stunning.’

       Allegra air-kissed the woman whose name she couldn’t remember and smiled back. ‘Thank you. But, really, the credit has to go to Damien, for giving me such wonderful choreography to work with.’

       Bad form for a principal dancer to hog all the credit. She was merely the vessel for someone else’s genius, after all. The blank canvas for someone else to paint their vision on.

       ‘Nonsense,’ the woman said, waving her glass of champagne and spilling a drop on the arm of one of the other guests. Neither one noticed. But Allegra saw it all. She saw every last detail of the after-show party in crisp, exquisite, painful detail.

       She saw the Victorian steel and glass arches of the tall hall that had once been part of Covent Garden’s famous flower market, the white vertical struts and pillars so straight, so uniform that it felt they were penning her in. She saw the herds of people milling, champagne classes pinched between their fingers, half of them trying to gawp at her while not getting caught. Most of all she saw the tempting patches of midnight-blue beyond the glass and white-painted iron-work of the roof.

       If colours could talk, she mused, blue would be an invitation.

      Come to me…

       She wrenched her eyes off the night sky with difficulty and focused them back where they were supposed to be. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, bestowing the woman with a gracious smile. ‘I see my father over there…’

       The woman glanced over her shoulder to where her father was half-hidden by the ostentatious champagne bar filling the middle of the room and then smiled widely back at Allegra. ‘Of course, of course. Such a talented conductor and a wonderful man… And it must be fantastic to know that your father is close by on an opening night. What a marvellous sense of support he must give you.’

       Allegra wanted to say, No, actually, it isn’t. She wanted to say that sometimes, having a parent so invested in one’s life was anything but comforting. She wanted to shock the woman by telling her how many times she’d wished her father was a builder or a schoolteacher. Anything but a conductor. Or how much she wished he’d sit in the back of the stalls occasionally, as the other parents did, rather than standing only a few feet beyond the footlights. Maybe then she wouldn’t feel weighed down by his gaze, weighed down by all the hopes and expectations of not just a parent but also her manager and her mentor.

       She didn’t say anything, of course, but smiled softly in what the woman probably took for gracious agreement, then used the excuse of her fabulous father to make her departure.

       Of course, the press loved the father-daughter angle—devastated widower conducts as ballerina daughter tops the bill, just as he’d done for her tragic mother when she’d been alive. They ate it up.

       In her darker moments she silently accused him of loving it, too, of wanting double the glory. Double the adoration. But it wasn’t that, really. He just wanted things to be the way they’d been before, wanted to claw back time and resurrect the dead. Impossible, of course, so he’d had to settle for second best. Even so, Allegra hadn’t failed to see how he’d come back to life when she’d grown old enough to fill her mother’s shoes, dance her mother’s old roles.

       But not tonight. This one was all hers. No comparisons could be made. She would stand or fall in her own right when the reviews came out in the morning.

       She supposed that since she’d used her father as an excuse she’d better go and say hello, so she forged through the crowd, ignoring the people who tried to catch her eye. And there were plenty. She was the star of the show. It was her evening, after all.

       But she didn’t want to talk to them. Not the ones she knew in the