Ella
The invitation had been sitting on my desk for two months, and still, standing in the entrance hall of the Hart Foundation's ballroom with Kylian's hand steady at the small of my back, I felt the full weight of it land only now, with the doors about to open in front of me.
"You don't have to do this tonight," Kylian said quietly, close enough that only I could hear him over the string quartet warming up somewhere beyond the doors. "We can turn around."
"I've been turning around from this room for eleven months." I smoothed a hand down the front of my gown, dark green silk Camille had chosen specifically because it was nothing Ella Hart would ever have worn. "I'm done."
The doors opened, and the room unfolded in front of us exactly as I remembered it from a hundred childhood galas,
