Chapter 1

"Lise, sit this one out. Your knee won't take a whole song."

My husband said it with the band already tuning and our daughter standing there in her dress, and Vivienne two steps behind him with her coat still on.

Twenty-one years I have taught every couple in this town their first dance. I taught Colette hers on the kitchen floor when she was nine.

"He's probably right, Mum," Colette said.

I did not answer. That is what I do instead of arguing, and everyone in my family knows it, and not one of them has ever once taken it for agreement.

Gerard held out the chair as if offering me a kindness. Behind him, the drummer lowered both sticks. Three musicians watched us.

I put one hand on the chair back. My right knee trembled once beneath the blue silk of my dress, small enough that Gerard might have missed it. Colette did not.

"I need you standing for the photographs," she said. "And for the farewell. Please, Mum."

She had planned this day for fourteen months, down to the six white roses above the band. She wanted me at the end, upright and smiling.

I had bandaged her scraped feet after her first lesson. I had counted eight slow beats while she stepped on my toes, then counted them again until she stopped looking down. Tonight she looked directly at my knee.

The first notes waited in the violinist's raised bow. Gerard glanced at the floor, where two small brass markers showed the starting places I had chosen during rehearsal.

"We can shorten it," I said.

Gerard's mouth tightened with concern. That was almost worse than impatience would have been.

"It's the full arrangement," he said. "You know what that does to you."

I knew the length: three minutes and forty-two seconds. I knew every turn Colette would make, every pause her new husband would mistake, and the beat when she would laugh and recover.

My shoes waited beneath my chair, their satin dulled at the toes. I always changed into them left foot first. I sat, slipped off the silver shoe Colette had chosen for me, and reached for the old left one.

Gerard crouched before I could fasten it. His hand covered the buckle, warm and careful.

"Don't make tonight harder."

The room had gone quiet enough for the clasp to click when I pulled it from his fingers. I fastened the old shoe, then removed it again. Left first. Right second. I had never reversed the order before a demonstration, and I would not begin because my family had made room for someone else.

Colette gathered her skirt and knelt beside me. Her perfume was the same orange blossom she had worn at sixteen, when I had taught her to turn without clinging to her partner.

"I want you here when we leave," she said.

I looked at her hand resting over mine. Then I loosened the buckle and set both old shoes together beneath the chair. My stockinged feet touched the cold floor.

Gerard rose. Relief crossed his face before he could hide it, and that was the thing I would remember after the flowers browned and the photographs arrived.

The violinist lifted her bow again. Gerard stepped toward the first brass marker, the one where I always stood while teaching the lead.

Vivienne moved past me. Her coat was still buttoned, rain darkening one shoulder, but her feet found the second marker without searching.

She held out her hand to my husband. "Gerard, shall we?"