Willa heard the stumble and stored it. Audrey had almost said we.
"I've seen the floor," Coach Moretti said. "I've seen worse shoes do honest work and better shoes do none. If they wanted a catalog, they would have asked for one. They asked for her."
Patricia's eyes went to the gray box. Something in her face recalculated, not toward kindness, toward logistics. The pickers were at eleven at the state pavilion across the river. Calder Academy was twenty minutes the other way if the lights were kind. She could not be in both rooms. She had built the year so that she would not have to be.
"You can go," she said to Willa, and the permission came out colder than the refusal had. "Don't make a spectacle. Don't tell them stories about this house. And if you fall, you get up without looking at anyone for applause. I will not come collect you if you cry in a lobby."
"I won't cry in a lobby," Willa said. Her voice was smaller than the sentence.
"See that you don't." Patricia turned to the coach. "If this is a misunderstanding, I expect you to bring her home before noon. Audrey's day is not a backdrop."
"Understood," Coach Moretti said. She did not add a speech. She nodded at Willa's backpack, which wasn't on her shoulders yet. "Coat. Water if you have it. We leave in three minutes so you're not walking into a room already breathing hard."
Willa took the navy windbreaker off the hook. The sleeve righted itself. She put it on over the beige sweater and felt, for a second, like a person who had been allowed to continue. Audrey watched her the way a person watches a drawer that might stick.
"Break a leg," Audrey said. The old theater luck. She made it sound like a suggestion with a method.
"You too," Willa said, because their father had hated unanswered things, and then she wished she had not offered Audrey anything Audrey could refuse.
Audrey did not say thank you. She zipped her puffer the last inch and checked her earrings in the dark of her phone. "Don't scuff the rental if they give you one. We don't need a fee."
There was no rental. There were Willa's shoes. Willa put the backpack on. It held a comb, a bottle of water with the label peeling, an extra pair of socks, and a folded paper where she had written counts in pencil until the pencil went dull. She did not look at the gray box again. If she looked, she would see the white shoes as a kind of proof that her mother had tried, and the trying would confuse her hands.