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have him here by tomorrow.”
    “Anybody I know?”
    For all Lily registered the information, the replacement
conductor could have been the Abominable Snowman. She pushed her steak around
for the rest of the meal, forcing her lips into a bone-dry smile and making
faint noises of interest whenever David or Aidan looked her way.
    When they returned to the rehearsal hall, Lily lost herself
in the performances and took brutally honest notes. For the most part, however,
the new rapport between conductor and orchestra made all the difference. The
show looked like a ballet again, and David was tentatively optimistic by the
end of the rehearsal.
    “We’re two days away from opening. Tomorrow we’ll do tech
all day in the performance venue, and day after tomorrow the orchestra will
work out their thing with the new conductor before the dress rehearsal.
Everybody’s done a fantastic job!”
    Lily gave notes, dismissed the dancers and had gathered her
things to leave when Aidan strode up the aisle.
    “Dinner?”
    When she shook her head, he narrowed his eyes.
    “ Dinner . Lily, you need to eat, you barely touched
your lunch. We don’t have to talk about anything you don’t want to. Come out
with me, please?”
    “We shouldn’t. It’s not that I don’t want to.” She also
didn’t want to cry in front of people, but she felt in imminent danger of doing
exactly that.
    Aidan frowned. “It can be just dinner, Lily. I don’t want to
leave things like this.” He stepped in closer, one hand grazing her upper arm
in a tender gesture.
    She swallowed down the hard, painful lump in her throat.
“Whether we have dinner or not, this is how we’ll be leaving things. Whether we
have sex again or not, this is how things are. So can we please not—”
    Her voice broke and she pressed her fingers to her lips,
grabbed her bag and fled before Aidan could say another word.
    * * * * *
    The ice cream’s container was an unfamiliar size, and Lily
couldn’t pronounce the brand name, but it was delicious. Even in her current
state, she could appreciate that much. She had stopped at a corner store on the
way to the hotel, knowing that ice cream from room service would be all wrong.
Too expensive and served in a bowl, not what she needed at all. The situation
called for a carton, a spoon and a series of cheesy movies.
    After realizing the tiny television in her hotel room would
be no help—her French was good only for ordering things in restaurants and
getting herself around town, not for following plot lines—Lily popped for the
hotel’s exorbitant nightly wireless fee and started a movie night on her
laptop.
    Five minutes into her first selection, Gigi , she
thought how ridiculous it was to sit in a hotel room in Paris, eating
ice cream from a carton and watching movies about Paris.
    Dmitri never even got to see Orly Airport .
    The pain in her throat swelled and finally burst, all the
bottled-up grief pushing to the surface in a pitiful flood of gasping sobs.
Tears streamed down Lily’s face, threatening to drip into her ice cream, and
she put the carton on the nightstand while she reached blindly for the box of
tissues she remembered seeing there.
    If she hadn’t been so distraught, she would have ignored the
knock on the door. In her sudden, stabbing misery, however, she didn’t think
about who it might be. One of the dancers, probably, looking for a needle and
thread or a spare cold pack.
    Scrubbing her face dry with a tissue, she scrambled for the
latch as she called out, “Who is it?”
    “Lily, it’s me. Aidan.”
    Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck…
    He already knew she was in there. She couldn’t pretend to be
out and keep silent until he went away. It was too late.
    Just like Dmitri. All too late .
    A spate of fresh sobs claimed her, and she clutched the
now-sodden wad of tissues to her nose as she opened the door and let him in.
    “Lily, what—oh my god, I’m so sorry. I had no idea—”
    “No, no, it’s not you,” she