Stay After the Last Dance - Her Former Partner Came Back for More Than One Performance. ebook

Cover

Stay After the Last Dance

Her Former Partner Came Back for More Than One Performance.

Laura Bellini

ROMANS

Table of contents

Title page

INTRO

Chapter 1 - The Envelope That Shouldn't Exist

Chapter 2 - The Price of Coming Back

Chapter 3 - What We Didn't Remember

Chapter 4 - The First Step Isn't Coming Back

Chapter 5 - A Signature Beneath Someone Else's Decision

Chapter 6 - The Eight

Chapter 7 - Who Was Watching Through the Glass

Chapter 8 - The Message from Berlin

Chapter 9 - The Voice I Don't Remember

Chapter 10 - The Truth Between Us

Chapter 11 - The Woman with the Red Notebook

Chapter 12 - The Line That Must Not Be Crossed

Chapter 13 - 11:58 PM

Chapter 14 - What You Didn’t Tell Me

Chapter 15 - Other People's Rights

Chapter 16 - Don’t Save Me Without Me

Chapter 17 - The Name That Returns

Chapter 18 - Staying Without a Promise

Chapter 19 - The Last Dance

Chapter 20 - After the Last Dance

Landmarks

Cover

Title page

Table of contents

Start of content

INTRO

The last dance of the night always belonged to me.

Not to the audience who had still been applauding a minute earlier. Not to the technicians coiling cables or the cleaner waiting with her cart behind the side doors. Not even to the company, though they were the reason I stayed after rehearsals longer than common sense should have allowed a thirty-three-year-old woman with a knee that remembered every badly landed jump.

When Przejście Movement Theatre emptied out, I switched on a single light above the stage, closed the auditorium doors, and danced alone.

That night, I needed it more than usual.

A piano recording I had chosen for the new choreography played through the speakers. Slow. Spare. No melody demanding to be felt. I counted under my breath as I shifted my weight from my left leg to my right.

Five, six, seven.

Turn.

Stop.

I didn't trust the eight.

On eight came the moment when a dancer had to let their partner take their weight.

That was why I hadn't created a duet in three years.

"You still stop before eight."

I froze.

The music kept playing.

I didn't have to turn around. A voice I hadn't heard in six years hadn't changed enough for me to mistake it for anyone else's. It was still calmer than it had any right to be. It still carried that irritating certainty of a man who never raised his voice because he assumed he would be heard anyway.

I switched off the music with the remote.

Only then did I look toward the audience.

Adrian Kostecki was in the third row.

For a moment, the fact that he had chosen that particular seat irritated me more than his presence itself. Third row, seat nine. He had always claimed it was the best place to see the entire stage while still being able to read the dancers' faces.

He wore a dark coat and a white shirt open at the collar. His hair was shorter at the temples than it used to be. His face a little sharper. Only the way he sat - leaning slightly forward, forearms resting on his knees - remained indecently familiar.

"The theatre is closed," I said.

"The door was open."

"That's not an invitation."

"I never needed an invitation to step onto this stage."

I gave a short laugh.

"You've managed perfectly well without it for six years."

Something moved across his face. Not regret. Adrian had never given emotions away that easily. It was more like the acceptance of a blow he had prepared himself to take.

He stood.

That was worse.

While he was sitting far away, I could pretend I was watching a projection from an old film. But as he walked down the aisle toward the stage, every half meter he crossed reminded me of things I had spent years sealing inside very neat, very airtight boxes.

His hand against my back before we stepped onstage.

His breath at my ear as he counted the tempo.

His fingers tightening around me seconds before a lift.

The empty dressing room the next morning.

No goodbye.

Adrian stopped at the edge of the stage.

"Did you get Zarębska's message?"

"If you came here to check whether I read my work email, you could have stayed in Berlin."

"So you got it."

I felt the familiar prick of irritation. Anna Zarębska, the theatre's director, had spent the entire day trying to catch me between rehearsals. Her last text had read: "We need to talk about the gala. Urgent." I had ignored it in full awareness that sooner or later I would pay for that decision.

"The gala is five weeks away," I said. "The choreography is ready. So is the cast."

"Not all of it."

I looked at him more carefully.

No.

Absolutely not.

"Anna invited you?"

"She called me three weeks ago."

Three weeks.

My fingers tightened around the remote.

"And she decided it wasn't worth mentioning to me."

"She decided you'd refuse before you heard the proposal."

"Correctly."

Adrian climbed the side steps onto the stage. I didn't ask who had given him permission to cross that line. The answer was obvious.

He had.

He stopped several meters away from me.

Far enough to preserve some semblance of propriety.

Too close for me to forget what it had been like to dance with him.

"The foundation will pull its funding if the anniversary gala doesn't meet its sales target," he said. "The main sponsor wants something they can sell to the media. Zarębska proposed reviving Pomiędzy."

This time, I said nothing.

Pomiędzy had never been just another duet. We had performed it more than seventy times over two seasons. It was the first production after which people started recognizing my name. The first one that brought Adrian offers from abroad.

And the last one we ever danced together.

"No," I said.

"Julia."

"Don't say my name as though we're halfway through a conversation."

"We are halfway through a conversation. The first half just ended six years ago."

I turned away from him.

That was a mistake, because I caught our reflection in the mirror covering the side wall of the studio.

We were standing exactly where we used to begin rehearsing the final sequence. Him half a step behind me. Me turned sideways. Even the distance between us was almost identical.

"I won't dance with you," I said.

"That's not the only reason I came."

I looked at him in the mirror.

Adrian reached inside his coat and pulled out a flat cream-colored envelope.

My breath caught, not because I recognized the handwriting. I couldn't; the envelope was turned the wrong way.

I recognized the seal.

The small embossed logo of the former Sokołowska Foundation, which had closed two months after our last performance together.

"Where did you get that?"

He didn't hand me the envelope.

"From an archive that supposedly doesn't exist anymore."

I stepped closer.

"What's inside?"

"Something I should have shown you six years ago."

Anger came faster than fear.

"Then show me."

His fingers tightened around the paper.

"First I need to know whether you still want the answer."

"To what question?"

Adrian watched me for several seconds. This time, none of his old certainty was there.

There was something much worse.

Hesitation.

"Why I really left."

Suddenly the vast, empty room felt too small.

Somewhere above the stage, one of the technical lights went out. I heard the dry click, and we were left with only the side light - the same one beneath which, only minutes earlier, I had been trying to make it through the eight.

I looked at the envelope.

Then at the man I had spent six years teaching myself not to ask anything.

"You have three minutes," I said.

Adrian shook his head.

"Three minutes won't be enough."

"You're not getting more."

For the first time that evening, he smiled, but there was nothing light in it.

"Then I guess I'll have to stay after the last dance."

Chapter 1 - The Envelope That Shouldn't Exist

“Then I guess I'll have to stay after the last dance.”

For several seconds, I stared at Adrian, trying to decide whether I wanted more to snatch the envelope out of his hand or open the side door of the stage and remind him that six years ago he had been much better at leaving buildings than staying in them. I chose a third option. I walked to the control desk, stopped the last track on the playlist, and switched on the work lights. The white fluorescent strip above the stage killed what was left of the theatrical atmosphere. We were left with the black dance floor beneath our feet, rows of empty seats, and a truth that - judging by his expression - was going to look considerably less romantic under full lighting.

“You started your three minutes almost a minute ago.”

“You still do that.”

“Do what?”

“You make rules the moment you're afraid someone else might make them for you.”

I crossed the distance between us so quickly that he instinctively drew back the hand holding the envelope.

“Don't analyze me. Not after six years.”

“I'm not analyzing you.”

“You just did.”

“I remember.”

That one word sounded worse than anything else he could have said. I had prepared myself for excuses, evasions, maybe even apologies. Not memory. Memory meant that what I had spent years sealing into a closed wound still had a definite shape for him too. That he hadn't vanished from my life and turned me into some random name from an old program.

At least not completely.

I held out my hand.

“The envelope.”

Adrian looked at it, then at me.

“I want to give it to you. Just not here.”

“We're past the age when the place where you hand someone documents changes what's written inside them.”

“The contents, no. What you do with them, maybe.”

“This is the theatre where I work. You didn't come here to drag me into a forest. Give it to me.”

This time he didn't argue. When he placed the envelope in my hand, he did it carefully, almost excessively so, making sure our fingers didn't touch. I noticed.

And hated the fact that I noticed.

The paper was old, stiffer than modern envelopes, slightly yellowed at the corners. I knew the embossed logo of the Sokołowska Foundation from hundreds of programs, invoices, and sponsor boards. During my first years as a professional dancer, that symbol had been practically everywhere. Above rehearsal-room entrances. On banners. In contract footers. The foundation had financed half the more ambitious projects in the city until it suddenly announced it was closing down and disappeared almost as efficiently as Adrian had.

His name was written on the back.

ADRIAN KOSTECKI - PERSONAL DELIVERY ONLY.

“This was addressed to you.”

“Yes.”

“And for six years it never occurred to you to show it to me?”

“I haven't had it for six years.”

I looked up.

“Then where did you get it?”

“Two months ago a law firm contacted me. They were sorting through the archive after the foundation's liquidator. Some of the documents had been sitting in a storage facility belonging to an accounting company that went bankrupt. The boxes went into storage, then to the bankruptcy trustee, and eventually someone started working out what was actually in them. My name appeared in contracts connected to Pomiędzy, so they asked me to confirm a few things.”

“And they found the letter.”

“They found a lot more than a letter.”

I felt my grip tighten around the envelope.

“What does ‘a lot more’ mean?”

“It means I don't want to start throwing document titles at you when I haven't verified all of them yet.”

“But you've verified enough to come to Warsaw.”

“Yes.”

“And come back to the theatre.”

“Yes.”

“And agree to dance a piece you haven't touched in six years.”

This time, he waited before answering.

“Yes.”

I tore open the envelope.

“Julia.”

“If you're about to tell me not to read this, I swear I'll throw you out through the stage door.”

“I wasn't going to.”

There were three sheets inside. The first was a letter on foundation stationery, dated May seventeenth, six years earlier. The second looked like part of a financial statement. The third was a copy of an appendix to some agreement.

I read the first sentence.

Then the second.

Then went back to the first, because it looked just as bad the second time.

“Dear Sir, in connection with the final agreement regarding the termination of your artistic partnership with Ms. Julia Radecka and her consent to the transfer of rights to future revivals of the production...”

I stopped.

“What is this?”

Adrian said nothing.

“I asked what this is.”

“A letter that was supposed to be sent to me before I signed my contract in Berlin.”

“‘Her consent’?”

“Keep reading.”

“I never gave any consent.”

“I know.”

I looked at him so sharply that if a stare had physical weight, it would have pushed him back several steps.

“Since when?”

“Since two months ago. Since I found out you hadn't signed it.”

“And six years ago?”

“Six years ago, I saw a different version of the documents.”

I turned the page. The words began arranging themselves into sentences my brain refused to accept without resistance. The foundation was informing Adrian that the arrangements with me had been concluded, that I had waived my participation in future revivals of Pomiędzy, and that continued exploitation of the production abroad no longer required my separate involvement. In return, there was supposed to have been a one-time settlement for the rights.

The amount made me read it twice.

One hundred and twenty thousand złoty.

I had not received one hundred and twenty thousand złoty.

I hadn't received twelve thousand.

Or twelve hundred.

I had received my final performance fee, an overdue workshop payment several weeks later, and an extremely polite letter announcing the end of the project's funding.

“Where is the money?”

“I don't know.”

I let out a disbelieving breath.

“Perfect. You come back after six years to tell me someone signed something in my name, a hundred and twenty thousand złoty disappeared, and you don't know where it went.”

“If I knew, I'd tell you.”

“You should have told me six years ago.”

“Six years ago, I believed you'd signed the agreement.”

“Why?”

Adrian took out his phone, but before he could find whatever he was looking for, I shook my head.

“No. Don't show me a picture. Tell me.”

He lowered his hand.

“Because I saw a document with your signature on it.”

The theatre was so quiet that I could hear the ventilation system running somewhere high above us.

“My signature.”

“Yes.”

“On what?”

“An agreement terminating our artistic partnership and transferring the rights to the production.”

I laughed, but the sound that came out of my throat had nothing to do with amusement.

“So you got a document where I had supposedly informed you in my own handwriting that I was ending our partnership, giving up the rights to Pomiędzy, taking the money, and what did you do?”

Adrian's jaw tightened.

“I signed my contract.”

“You didn't call.”

“No.”

“You didn't come to see me.”

“No.”

“You didn't ask whether it was true.”

“No.”

Every one of his noes hit with more precision than an excuse would have.

“Why?”

This time he didn't look away.

“Because I was furious. Because I believed you'd made the decision without me. Because two days earlier we'd fought about Berlin and you'd told me you weren't going to wait around while I decided what I wanted. Then the next day Sokołowski gave me a document with your signature and told me you'd accepted the settlement. It fit too well with what I'd just heard from you. Far too well.”

I remembered that fight. Not sentence for sentence, but the heat in the rehearsal room, his backpack thrown beneath the mirror, and the offer of a one-year contract in Berlin that I'd heard about from someone else. I had told him I had no intention of becoming the woman standing by the door while a man decided whether he was coming back. He had replied that he'd never asked me to.

The next day, he hadn't come to rehearsal.

On the third day, his phone was switched off.

On the fourth, I learned that he'd left.

“Convenient,” I said.

“Yes.”

His answer surprised me.

“You're not going to defend yourself?”

“Against what? The fact that I should have come to you and asked? I should have. I didn't.”

“And now you're suddenly so mature?”

“Now I know how much that choice cost me.”

“You?”

It took me a second to realize I'd raised my voice.

Adrian nodded slowly.

“You're right. I said that badly.”

“Very badly.”

I placed the first sheet on the stage floor and picked up the second. The financial statement listed dates and amounts. One line had my name beside it. The next had the name of Teatr Ruchu Przejście.

The amounts were almost identical.

One hundred and twenty thousand for me.

One hundred and eighteen thousand seven hundred and fifty for the theatre.

The dates were two days apart.

“What is this supposed to mean?”

Adrian stepped closer, then stopped when I raised my hand.

“Stay there.”

He stopped immediately.

It should have been an ordinary thing, but I noticed that he didn't protest, didn't try to narrow the distance on the pretext of showing me the document.

He waited.

“The law firm thinks the second entry may be a transfer from the foundation's account to the theatre,” he said. “They don't have the full transaction description yet.”

“And the first?”

“It's recorded as settlement of your rights.”

“I never received it.”

“I know.”

“Stop saying you know.”

“Okay.”

I reached for the third page.

It was worse than the first two, because there was a signature line at the bottom.

JULIA RADECKA.

And above it, a signature.

Mine.

Except it wasn't.

Someone had reproduced it well enough that from a distance it would have looked real. The characteristic tall J. The quick R. The long final stroke. But I knew that for years I'd joined the l and i in a single movement.

On the copy, they were separate.

I sat down on the floor.

Not because I felt faint. I wasn't going to give Adrian, or myself, that satisfaction.

I simply didn't want to stand anymore.

“Who signed this?”

“I don't know.”

“Who had access to my contracts?”

“The foundation. The theatre. Accounting. Probably several people involved in production.”

“Anna?”

Adrian said nothing.

I looked up.

“I asked about Anna Zarębska.”

“She had access to the documents.”

“That's not an answer.”

“I don't have evidence that it was her.”

The way he said it was enough.

“But you suspect her.”

“I suspect anyone who could have had access and a motive.”

“Anna had no reason to steal from me.”

“I didn't say she stole from you.”

“You're showing me a hundred and twenty thousand assigned to my name and an almost identical transfer to the theatre.”

“That's exactly why I didn't want you opening that envelope alone at eleven o'clock at night.”

I stood.

“You don't get to decide when I'm ready for my own history.”

“I know.”

“There it is again.”

“Fine. I won't use that word.”

I began collecting the sheets. My fingers were cold.

“I'm taking these.”

“They're copies. The originals are secured.”

“Where?”

“At the law firm.”

“Which one?”

He gave me the name. I knew it. A large Warsaw firm specializing in copyright and corporate matters.

“I'm calling them tomorrow.”

“I already arranged a meeting for eleven.”

I stared at him.

“Of course you did.”

“You can cancel it.”

“That's not the point. The point is that you show up after six years, and in one evening you've managed to walk into my theatre, schedule a meeting with a lawyer, and announce that I'm supposed to dance with you again.”

“I didn't say you had to.”

“Zarębska wants it.”

“Yes.”

“The sponsor wants it.”

“Yes.”

“You agreed.”

“I agreed to come here and talk.”

“An evasion.”

“No. A condition.”

I frowned.

“What condition?”

“I told Zarębska that if Pomiędzy comes back, the decision belongs to you too. No announcements, no selling our names to the sponsor, no statements without your approval.”

I hadn't expected that.

The worst thing about Adrian had always been his ability to say something sensible at precisely the moment I most needed to think he was an idiot.

“And she agreed?”

“She said she had no choice.”

“Anna always has a choice.”

“This time she has fewer than usual.”

I put the documents back into the envelope.

“What's happening with the theatre?”

Adrian hesitated.

“She should tell you herself tomorrow.”

“So you know something.”

“Only part of it.”

“And again you're deciding which part I get.”

“No. This time I'm trying not to speak for the person who should do it herself.”

I wanted to argue with him, but if I was being fair, that actually made sense.

I simply disliked the fact that reason was reaching me in his voice.

I went down the stage steps, picked up my bag from the front row, and slid the envelope inside.

Adrian remained onstage.

“Julia.”

I turned.

“What?”

“I didn't come back only because of the documents.”

My fingers tightened on the strap of my bag.

“We're not touching that today.”

“Okay.”

“And don't interpret the fact that I said today.”

The corner of his mouth moved.

“I'll try.”

“Excellent. First assignment completed.”

I started toward the exit.

“I'll walk you home.”

“No.”

“It's late.”

“Warsaw didn't turn into a war zone while you were living in Berlin.”

“I know you can get home by yourself.”

I stopped by the door.

“Then why are you offering?”

Adrian came down from the stage. He stopped several meters away from me.

“Because I want ten more minutes with you.”

The simplicity of the answer disarmed me more than anything he'd said before.

“You shouldn't say things like that.”

“Why?”

“Because they sound as if nothing happened six years ago.”

His expression hardened.

“That's exactly why I'm saying them. Because too much happened.”

I left before I could come up with an answer.

Outside, a fine October rain was falling. The air smelled of wet asphalt and leaves. I wrapped my scarf more tightly around my neck and headed toward the bus stop. After a dozen meters, I heard footsteps behind me.

I turned around.

Adrian was walking the other way.

Not after me.

I should have felt relieved.

Instead, I stood beneath the shelter at the bus stop, took out the envelope, and looked once more at the signature that looked like mine.

The bus arrived six minutes later. During the entire ride home, I didn't think about the money, or Zarębska, or even the production.

I thought about the one thing I had been certain of for six years.

Adrian had chosen leaving over me.

Now, for the first time, I saw a far more dangerous possibility.

That someone had helped us make that choice.

-

I didn't fall asleep before three.

I lived in Mokotów, in a two-room apartment I'd bought three years earlier after an exceptionally successful season of commercial choreography. It wasn't large, but it was mine. I had chosen the wooden floor myself. I'd mounted the shelves in the hallway myself, though one of them still hung slightly crooked. I paid the mortgage myself.

I liked things I didn't have to consult anyone about.

That night, for the first time, the apartment felt full of other people's decisions.

I spread the documents across the kitchen table.

At twelve thirty, I took photographs.

At one fifteen, I compared the signature with an agreement I kept in a drawer.

At one forty, I found old emails from the foundation.

At two seventeen, I came across a message from Anna sent the day after the final performance of Pomiędzy.

“Julka, take a few days to rest. I'll handle the administrative matters. Don't contact the foundation for now. I'll close everything out after the weekend.”

Back then, it had sounded like concern.

Now I read the sentence four times.

At two thirty-three, I found another email.

Sender: Sokołowska Foundation Office.

Subject: PROJECT SETTLEMENT.

The message was short.

“Dear Ms. Radecka, as agreed, all further correspondence concerning the project will be conducted through the theatre management.”

I didn't remember that email.

What I did remember was replying with nothing more than, “Understood, thank you.”

I closed the laptop.

The time on my phone was 2:51.

I had two unread messages.

The first was from Anna.

“Please come tomorrow at 9:30. We need to talk before rehearsal.”

The second was from Adrian.

There was no apology in it. No explanation.

“Don't sign anything tomorrow until you've read the documents from the law firm.”

I stared at the message longer than I should have.

Then I replied.

“I'm not a girl who needs to be told what not to sign anymore.”

His answer came a minute later.

“I know. That's why I'm warning you, not trying to decide for you.”

This time, I didn't reply.

But I didn't delete his number either.

Chapter 2 - The Price of Coming Back

At nine twenty-seven the next morning, I sat outside Anna Zarębska's office wondering whether arriving three minutes late would make more of a statement than being on time. At twenty-seven, I would have deliberately shown up late.

At thirty-three, my own time mattered too much to waste it on theatrical gestures offstage.

I knocked at nine thirty.

“Come in.”

Anna sat behind her desk by the window, surrounded by papers that looked like a physical manifestation of her management style. She had never used one binder when she could use five stacks instead. Two coffee mugs sat on the windowsill, yellow roses were dying in a vase, and a navy scarf I remembered from my first season at the theatre hung over the back of a chair.

Adrian wasn't there.

I registered that with relief, then became annoyed with myself for having checked at all.

Anna took off her glasses.

“You look like you haven't slept.”

“You look like you know why.”

Her face changed instantly.

There was no need to ask whether Adrian had spoken to her.

I placed the envelope on the desk.

“Do you recognize this?”

Anna didn't touch it.

“Yes.”

That single word pushed aside every reasonable question I had prepared on my way to the theatre and replaced them all with one.

“Since when?”

“Yesterday.”

“You're lying.”

I said it calmly. Without raising my voice.

Anna leaned back in her chair.

“Julia.”

“Last night Adrian showed me a six-year-old document with a signature someone forged in my name. There's a settlement for one hundred and twenty thousand złoty I never received, and two days later almost the same amount was transferred to the theatre. So either you tell me now what you know about it, or at ten o'clock we stop talking as choreographer and director and start talking as two people with a lawyer present.”

For a long moment, Anna stared at the envelope.

I had known her for eleven years. She was the one who had taken me into the company when I was a dancer with solid technique, terrible patience, and the conviction that anyone with authority would sooner or later abuse it. She had given me my first chance to choreograph. She had sat beside my hospital bed when I tore a ligament. Three years ago, when I was offered a job at a commercial theatre for twice the money, she hadn't tried to keep me with guilt.

She had said, “If you leave, I'll understand. If you stay, we'll build a program of your own.”

I stayed.

Now, for the first time, I wondered how much of our shared history had truly been what I thought it was at the time.

“I didn't forge your signature,” she said.

“That wasn't what I asked.”

“I knew about the transfer to the theatre.”

I sat down.

“For six years?”

“Yes.”

Something inside me went very quiet.

“Go on.”

Anna clasped her hands together.

“After the final season of Pomiędzy, the theatre's financial situation was worse than the company knew. We were behind on payments to the technical crew, social security contributions, two subcontractors. The city was late with a funding tranche. The Sokołowska Foundation was supposed to cover the gap as part of the next program, but after an audit they withdrew from most of their commitments.”

“And you received a hundred and eighteen thousand.”

“We received one hundred and eighteen thousand seven hundred and fifty.”

“I know. I saw it.”

“It saved payroll that month.”

“With my money?”

Anna pressed her lips together.

“I didn't know it had previously been booked as yours.”

“But you knew it came from the foundation two days after my supposed settlement.”

“Not then.”

“When did you find out?”

“A few months later.”

I stood because sitting across from her had become impossible.

“And you didn't tell me.”

“I didn't have the complete documentation.”

“You had enough to realize something was wrong.”

“Yes.”

I turned toward the window. In the courtyard, a stage technician was smoking under an awning. Two young dancers walked past carrying coffee.

A normal day.

Rehearsal at ten.

Warm-up.

Studio schedules.

Everything kept functioning as though the foundation beneath several years of my life hadn't just shifted.

“Why did you keep quiet?”

Anna stood.

“Because by then the foundation practically no longer existed. Roman Sokołowski had gone abroad. The accountant I spoke to insisted all the settlements had been approved. The theatre didn't have the money for a lawsuit, and I...”

“And you?”

“I was afraid that if we started digging into it, the authorities would demand the grant money back and the theatre would collapse.”

I turned around.

“So you knew I might have been defrauded, but decided my money was an acceptable price for saving the theatre.”

“I didn't know it was your money.”

“You knew there was a settlement problem involving me.”

“Yes.”

“You knew I didn't know about it.”

Anna closed her eyes for a second.

“Yes.”

“That's enough.”

“Julia, I know how this sounds.”

“No, Anna. That's exactly the problem. Apparently you've known how this sounds for six years, which is why you never told me.”

Silence fell between us.

The anger I felt was different from the night before. That had been hot, immediate, focused on Adrian and his decision not to ask.

This was heavy.

It belonged to someone I had trusted throughout every year after he left.

“Did Adrian know about the transfer too?” I asked.

“No.”

“Are you sure?”

“Not about that part. He knew about the rights documents and your supposed signature. He didn't know what happened to the money.”

“How do you know what he knew?”

Anna looked at me.

“Because six years ago, he called me from Berlin.”

My shoulders tightened.

“When?”

“About three weeks after he left.”

“Why?”

“He asked whether you'd definitely received the settlement.”

“And what did you tell him?”

She was silent for too long.

“Anna.”

“I told him the financial matters had been closed.”

I gave an incredulous laugh.

“So you lied to him too.”

“I didn't know about the transfer at that point.”

“But you didn't check whether I'd received the money.”

“No.”

“Why?”

“Because I was busy trying to save the theatre.”

“Stop using the theatre as a get-out-of-responsibility card.”

The words came out sharply.

Anna went pale.

“You're right.”

It didn't help.

I wanted her to defend herself. To give me an argument I could tear apart.

Remorse was far more inconvenient.

Someone laughed loudly in the corridor. In a moment, the rehearsal I was directing was supposed to begin. Twelve people were waiting for me to walk into the room and do the job I was paid to do.

“We have another problem,” Anna said.

“An impressively productive morning.”

“The anniversary sponsor confirmed the conditions yesterday.”

“Pomiędzy.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

“Julia, hear me out.”

“I listened to you six years ago when you told me to rest and let you handle the administrative details. The results are sitting on your desk.”

“I'm not asking you to trust me.”

“Good.”

Anna accepted that without comment.

“I'm asking you to look at the numbers.”

She opened her laptop and turned it toward me. The spreadsheet showed the budget for the anniversary gala. I knew the situation wasn't ideal, but I hadn't realized the scale of it.

Almost a third of the planned funding was missing.

The main sponsor would guarantee a significant portion on the condition of a promotional campaign built around the return of the “legendary duo,” as someone in the presentation had very subtly described Adrian and me.

“The theatre won't collapse without me,” I said.

“Not tomorrow. Not a month from now either. But we'll have to cancel two premieres next season, the young choreographers' program, and six permanent positions.”

I closed the laptop.

“Don't use employees as an argument.”

“It's not an argument. It's a consequence.”

“Does the sponsor know about the documents?”

“No.”

“What happens if they find out?”

Anna shook her head.

“I don't know.”

“So you want to revive a production whose rights may be tied to a forged document.”

“The revival can be based on a new agreement between you, Adrian, and the theatre. The law firm is reviewing it.”

“Adrian's law firm.”

“No. The liquidator's law firm. Adrian was only given their contact details.”

It was a small distinction.

But an important one.

“When were you planning to tell me about the finances?”

“Today.”

“Before I signed anything or after?”

Anna looked me straight in the eyes.

“Before.”

I wanted to believe her.

The urge was almost automatic, built over years.

That was exactly why I didn't allow myself to.

“I'm not making a decision today.”

“I understand.”

“And there will be no announcement about our return.”

“There won't.”

“No photographs, leaks, ‘sources close to the theatre,’ attempts to sell our names to the sponsor.”

“Adrian set exactly the same condition.”

I closed my eyes.

“Of course he did.”

“Julia...”

“No. I'm going to rehearsal.”

I had my hand on the door when Anna spoke again.

“There's something else.”

I turned slowly.

“If it's another transfer, you can save it until lunch.”

“The foundation documents mention a recording.”

“What kind of recording?”