The doorbell rang on a Sunday afternoon while I was washing dishes.

I almost didn’t answer it. On Sundays, it’s usually somebody selling something. Solar panels. Gutter cleaning. A young man with a clipboard who wants to talk to me about my eternal soul.

I dried my hands on the dish towel and opened the door.

A young woman was standing on our porch.

She was in her mid-twenties, with dark hair pulled back in a low ponytail and a gray wool coat buttoned all the way up to her chin. She was holding her hands in front of her, one gripping the other, the way people do when they’ve practiced what they’re going to say and can’t remember any of it.

“Can I help you?” I said.

She smiled nervously.

“Hi, Margaret,” she said.

Something about her eyes made my breath catch. Big brown eyes, set a little too wide apart. Eyes that looked like they were waiting to be told to leave.

“Do I know you?” I said.

“I hope so,” she said.

And then she gave me a smile I’d seen ten thousand times. A crooked smile. The left side going up higher than the right. A smile that used to show up over a bowl of vegetables she refused to eat.

The dish towel fell out of my hand.

“Ivy?” I whispered.

To understand why I couldn’t breathe on my own front porch, you have to know who Ivy was to me.

And to understand that, you have to know who I was before her.

I used to believe there wasn’t a single problem in the world that couldn’t be made easier with music.

I grew up in a small town in Ohio, the youngest of four girls. My mother played the piano at our church. My father couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket, but he’d dance with her in the kitchen every Saturday night while the radio played. Big band music. Glenn Miller. Benny Goodman. My sisters and I would sit on the stairs in our nightgowns and watch them through the doorway.

My mother said I was dancing before I was walking. She said I’d hold on to the edge of the coffee table and bounce up and down whenever she played.

I took my first ballet class when I was five. My first jazz class at eight. By fourteen, I was taking the bus forty-five minutes each way, three times a week, to a real studio in Columbus.

At twenty-three, I was winning competitions. Regional, then national. Ballroom and contemporary. My partner was a lanky, sweet boy named Theo who could lift me over his head like I weighed nothing and couldn’t remember a single person’s birthday.

At thirty, I was performing professionally. A touring company. Six months a year on the road. Theaters in Chicago, Atlanta, Denver. Once, for three glorious weeks, a stage in New York.

By thirty-two, it was over.