Chapter Two: After Hours

The company had a rule about fraternization between principals and staff — vague enough to be unenforceable, specific enough that everyone understood not to test it in front of the artistic director. Nadia knew the rule. She suspected Damian knew it better, given that he'd broken similar ones before, if the whispers from his old company were true.

Neither of them mentioned it. Not that morning, and not in the two weeks that followed, in which nothing was official and everything had changed.

They kept the mornings. That became the shape of it — arriving before the building woke up, the studio lit only by the...