It happened during a rehearsal in Pittsburgh. A simple jump. One I’d done a thousand times. I came down wrong. My left knee went one direction, and the rest of me went the other.

I heard it before I felt it. A sound like a wet branch snapping.

Then I felt it.

Two surgeries. A year of physical therapy. A doctor in a white coat sitting on a rolling stool, looking at my X-rays on a lighted board and shaking his head very gently.

“You’ll walk normally,” he said. “You’ll be able to dance at weddings. But Mrs. Burke, I’m sorry. You won’t perform again. Not like you did. The knee won’t take it.”

I went home and lay on the couch for three weeks.

I didn’t play any music. I didn’t open the curtains.

My husband, Daniel, came home from work every evening and sat on the edge of the couch and put his hand on my ankle. The good ankle. He didn’t say much. He’s not a talker. He’s an accountant. He likes numbers because they don’t argue with you.

At the end of the third week, he sat down on the coffee table across from me.

“You could teach,” he said.

“Teach what?” I said. “How to fall gracefully?”

“How to get back up,” he said.

I hated him for saying it.

Then I thought about it for a week.

Then I loved him for saying it.

So I opened a dance studio.

It was a narrow storefront on Main Street, between a shoe repair shop and a bakery that made the best cinnamon rolls in the county. The landlord gave me a deal because nobody else wanted it. It had been a pawn shop. It still smelled a little like old cigarettes and furniture polish.

Daniel and I put in the mirrors ourselves. We laid the wooden floor over a weekend, on our knees, with our friends. We installed the barres along the walls. I painted the sign out front myself. Burke Dance Studio. In blue letters, slightly crooked.

The first month, I had nine students.

By the end of the first year, I had sixty.

By the fifth year, I had over two hundred. Little girls in pink tights. Teenagers who wanted to learn hip-hop. Middle-aged women who’d always wanted to try tap. A seventy-eight-year-old retired mailman named Gus who took ballroom every Tuesday because his late wife had always wanted him to, and he’d never gotten around to it.

For years, I loved every single minute.

But dancing wasn’t my only love.

I’d always adored children. Always. Since I was a little girl myself. I was the one who babysat for every family on our street. I was the one who held the babies at church while their mothers sang in the choir.

I’d dreamed my whole life of having one of my own.

Daniel and I started trying when I was thirty-three. A year after the knee. We thought it would be easy. Everyone in my family got pregnant easily. My sister Carol got pregnant on her honeymoon.

It wasn’t easy.

It was a year. Then two. Then doctors. Then tests. Then shots in my stomach every morning that left little bruises like purple fingerprints. Then a procedure. Then another procedure.

Then a doctor sitting across from us in a small office with a box of tissues on the table.

I won’t tell you everything about those years. Some things belong just to Daniel and me.

But I’ll tell you that by the time I was thirty-nine, we’d stopped talking about it. Not because we’d given up. Because talking about it hurt too much.

We’d walk past the baby aisle at the grocery store without looking. We’d go to baby showers and smile and bring presents and come home and not say anything to each other in the car.

There was a little bedroom upstairs in our house, across the hall from ours. We’d painted it pale yellow when we first moved in. For a nursery, someday.

By the time I was thirty-nine, the door to that room stayed closed.

Then, one evening in October, Daniel took my hand at the kitchen table.

We’d just finished dinner. Pot roast. The dishes were still on the table. There was music playing on the radio, very low, because there was always music playing in our house.

“What if we became foster parents?” he said.

I looked at him.

“After everything we’ve been through?” I said. “Daniel, I can’t. I can’t love a child and then have to give it back. I can’t do that.”

He held my hand a little tighter.

“We still have a home, Maggie,” he said. “And we still have love to give. All that love. It’s just sitting there. In that yellow room. Behind that closed door.”

I didn’t say anything for a long time.

The radio was playing an old Glenn Miller song. Moonlight Serenade. My parents’ song. The one they used to dance to in the kitchen on Saturday nights.

“Okay,” I said finally. “Okay. Let’s find out.”