The Ballerina's Secret

He looked. Because apparently there was some truth to Chance’s accusations. Maybe he’d stared. Maybe there’d even been some ogling.

He found her attractive. So what? He was only human. It didn’t mean he wanted to pursue anything. It simply meant he was a normal, red-blooded male.

Of course he hadn’t felt much like a normal, red-blooded male in a while. A long while. But what he saw when he looked through that window stirred an undeniably primal reaction in him. He had to suppress a groan.

Eyes closed, arms fluttering like a butterfly, Tessa moved across the floor on tiptoe. Like those times she’d been chastised in rehearsal, she moved with complete and utter abandon. Only now, alone in the semidarkened studio, there was no one there to rein her back in. No Russian. No Madame. Just Tessa, dancing for no one but herself. It was one of the most beautiful sights Julian had ever set eyes on.

A strange, dull ache formed in the center of his chest. He felt as though he were witnessing something he shouldn’t, some inherently private moment. Maybe it was the way she danced with her eyes closed. Or maybe it was the stillness of the lonely studio. Maybe both. He wasn’t sure. All he knew was that every stretch of her arm, every lithe arabesque, seemed to impart a secret. A secret born in pain and longing. She moved with such melancholy grace that it almost hurt to watch.

“Why is she still here?” he asked and wondered if Chance noticed the sudden edge to his voice. God, he hoped not.

“It’s something she does.” Chance shrugged, seemingly oblivious. “She practices. Pretty much every chance she gets, not that it’s doing much good. This is the fourth time she’s auditioned.”

She practices every chance she gets? After a full day in the studio?

“That doesn’t sound like your typical dancer to me.” As if Julian actually knew the first thing about ballet.

Chance shook his head. “She’d never work out.”

“People improve. New dancers get chosen all the time.” Julian lifted a brow. “You did.”

“Now you’re comparing her to me? I thought you’d barely noticed her.” Chance let out a laugh. “She’ll never get chosen. She can’t handle it. It would be too much work.”

Julian watched as she traveled the entire length of the room on her toes, with the tiniest steps imaginable. She looked like she was floating on a cloud. Or through a dream. He swallowed. Hard. “She doesn’t strike me as someone who’s afraid of hard work.”

Chance’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t know, do you?”

Julian tore his gaze from the window. Finally. “Don’t know what?”

“Tessa can’t hear. She’s deaf.”

It took Julian a minute to process what Chance was saying. Even then, it didn’t make any sense. “What do you mean she can’t hear?”

“She had an accident a year or so ago.” An accident. Chance dropped his gaze. He knew full well that Julian was no stranger to accidents.

“What kind of accident?”

Chance cleared his throat. “A ballet accident. Her partner dropped her during a lift, and she hit her head. He wasn’t just her dance partner either. He was also her fiancé.”

Julian thought back to the moment she’d crashed into him before rehearsal, the utterly blank look on her downturned face when he’d told her not to worry and the brush-off she’d given him when he’d tried to help her up. He remembered the way her head hadn’t moved at all when he’d spoken to her on the train. She hadn’t been slighting him. She’d never heard a word he’d said.

He shook his head. No. It just wasn’t possible. “How does she even do it? How does she know what’s being said in class? How does she dance?”

“She reads lips, and she counts the beats.”

She reads lips.

Without realizing what he was doing, Julian ran his fingertips across his own lower lip. Then he made contact with the scar tissue near the corner of his mouth, and his hand fell away.

He glanced at the window again, even though everything within him told him to turn around. Turn around and walk away. While he still could. None of this was his concern. In the silvery light of the mirrored room, Tessa’s eyes fluttered open. Her gaze fixed with his, and Julian knew it was already too late.

Chapter Four (#u4521553f-a801-56bb-9676-e3e5fdc19c0a)

Conductive hearing loss as a result of ossicular chain discontinuity due to head trauma.

Tessa glanced at the words printed on the bright orange sticker on the tab of the file folder in the nurse’s hands.

Her diagnosis.

It had taken her doctors—four of them in all, led by Dr. Meryl Spencer, an auditory specialist at Mount Sinai—ten days and a total of three different hearing tests to settle on one. It was really just a fancy way of saying what everyone suspected. When she’d fallen and hit her head, she’d sustained damage to the delicate bones in her middle ear. They were no longer connected properly, which prevented sound from being conducted to her brain. It was impossible to tell the extent of the damage, or whether or not her hearing loss was permanent, until her body healed.

In the words of Dr. Spencer, it was “a waiting game.”

So Tessa waited.

And waited.

All in all, she’d been waiting for thirteen months. Thirteen months of adjusting to a life of silence—a life without the sound of laughter or the voices of the people she loved or the Manhattan street noises that Tessa hadn’t realized were so ingrained in her consciousness until she no longer heard them. A life without music.

But she’d adjusted. She’d done it. Through it all, she’d never lost the one thing she loved most of all. She’d never lost dance.

Tessa wasn’t waiting anymore. She hadn’t been waiting for a while now. She was getting on with things. So thirteen months was probably an exaggeration. She wasn’t sure when she’d given up the notion that she’d ever hear again, but she most definitely had. What kind of person would hold out hope after all this time?

“The doctor will be with you in just a moment.” The nurse offered Tessa a soothing smile and slid the file folder into a plastic chart holder on the door to the exam room.

“Thank you.” Tessa nodded.

Once the nurse was gone, Mr. B, who’d accompanied Tessa to the after-hours appointment, relaxed and settled into a comfortable ball. Seconds later, when Dr. Spencer opened the door, the little dog popped back up.

“Hello, Tessa. And hello to you, too, Mr. B. It’s good to see you both,” the doctor said.

“You, too.” Tessa exhaled a calming breath. Everything’s going to be fine. There’s a simple explanation for all of this.

Right. Because traumatic head injuries were so often classified as simple.

That was never the case. Literally never. Not even a year after the fact.

“Thank you for seeing me on such short notice.” Tessa shifted, and the paper on the exam table made a terrible, crunching sound. She winced.

Dr. Spencer’s brow furrowed, and she pulled an otoscope from the pocket of her white coat. “Your email said you’d been experiencing some auditory symptoms. Why don’t you tell me what’s going on, and I’ll take a look inside your ears?”

Auditory symptoms. What an innocuous way to describe the chaos in her head. “I can hear all of a sudden, but it’s not right. The noises are distorted. Too loud. Too...” Too much. Much too much.

The doctor asked her more questions and examined her ears using the otoscope. When she was finished, she slipped the instrument back inside her pocket and smiled. Tessa hadn’t seen Dr. Spencer smile much before, if ever. Her bedside manner was usually polite, efficient and a little on the brusque side. Then again, maybe there’d just never been anything about Tessa’s case to smile about. Until now.

“It seems as though there’s been a change in the connectivity between the bones of your right middle ear. That’s the most likely possibility. It’s good news, Tessa. Potentially very good news.”

Tessa swallowed and glanced down at Mr. B, who was wagging his tail. Good news. It didn’t feel so good. “But what does it mean, exactly?”