Hazel’s POV
“You kept my old pointe shoes?” I asked, staring into the box my former ballet mentor had just handed me, my voice catching somewhere between disbelief and grief.
Madame Rousseau, eighty two years old and still standing with the perfect posture of a woman who had once danced for the finest companies in Europe, smiled the small, knowing smile I remembered from every rehearsal she’d ever pushed me through.
“I kept everything from my best students,” she said. “Even the ones the world convinced themselves were finished.”
We were sitting in her old studio, the one where I’d trained as a teenager before the accident took my career and, for a long time, my belief that I had anything left worth training for. She’d read about the foundation in the papers and sent a letter asking to
