Page 21 of Iron Debt
She stood where I’d left her, arms still folded, weight still on one hip. Her expression had changed – subtly, in the way that Isobel’s expressions changed, which was to say that someone who didn’t know her would have seen nothing at all and someone who did would have seen everything. Her eyes were bright. Her mouth was set in the tight line it made when she was proud and furious in equal measure and wouldn’t dream of naming either.
“You’ve been lying to everyone,” she said.
“Which part?”
“The limping.”
A beat. The radiator ticked.
“How long?”
“Weeks.”
She nodded. Not the surprised kind. The confirming kind – the nod of a woman who had suspected and was now filing the confirmation in whatever mental system she used to track the girls who’d passed through her studio and out into the world.
“Then you already know you aren’t trapped,” she said. “Not physically.”
“I am, though. Just not by the knee.”
She looked at me. I looked at the floor. The silence between us was not the silence of the cliff path or the silence of Lachlan’s study – it was the silence of a room where two women understood each other completely and one of them was waiting for the other to decide how much truth she could carry out the door.
“The men,” Isobel said.
“You know.”
“I know enough. Cairndhu’s a small town with a very large shadow, and you’ve walked into the middle of it.” She uncrossed her arms. “Are they hurting you?”
“No.”
“Are they going to?”
“I don’t know.” I paused. “Not in the way you mean.”
She heard what I didn’t say. She had always heard what I didn’t say – it was the quality that had made her a great teacher and an uncomfortable friend, the relentless attention of a woman who believed that people told you everything about themselves without opening their mouths, and that the mouth, when it opened, was usually the least reliable source.
“You’re dancing better than you were before the injury,” she said. It was offered without softness. A fact. Isobel dealt in facts the way other people dealt inencouragement, and the effect was identical and more durable.
“I know.”
“Whatever is happening to you out there –” she gestured vaguely at the frosted windows, at Cairndhu, at everything beyond the studio’s walls – “is feeding something. Whether that’s adrenaline or anger or something you haven’t named yet, I don’t know. But the body knows. It always knows before we do.”
I held the barre. The wood was warm under my hands. Outside, through the frosted glass, I could see the shape of the car, and the shape of the man beside it.
Ewan was standing outside.
Not sitting in the car with his magazine. Standing on the pavement, his coffee cup held in both hands, his collar turned up against the cold. He was very still. His phone was in his pocket. His magazine was on the bonnet of the car, pages flat and damp with the drizzle he didn’t seem to have noticed.
I counted how long he’d been standing there. The clock on St.Jude’s wall said I’d been inside for an hour and twelve minutes. His coffee cup was no longer steaming. The puddles on the pavement said the drizzle had been falling for at least twenty minutes. He’d been standing in it for all of them.
He wasn’t watching the street. He wasn’t watching anything. He was simply standing, facing the studio, waiting. He’d decided the waiting was the thing that mattered.
Fourteen minutes. At least fourteen minuteswithout moving, without his phone, without the performance of being occupied. Just standing in the rain and waiting for me to come out.
I didn’t examine what that did to me. I didn’t examine the way something tightened behind my ribs or the way the wordwaitingsat differently in my vocabulary than it had an hour ago. I tucked it away in the same place I kept the body heat in the car, the morning walk on the cliff path, the wordcorrectionsitting in my stomach. The collection was getting crowded in there.
I thanked Isobel. She held my face in both her hands – small, strong, smelling of rosin and the lavender hand cream she’d used since I was ten – and she looked at me the way only Isobel looked at me. Not like a prize. Not like a problem. Like a dancer.
“Come back,” she said. “Whenever you can. The door’s open.”
