When Love Learns to Let Go

From the back cover

Joanna has loved Ethan for five years, ever since he crouched beside her in a hospital corridor after her mother's death and offered her a warm bottle of coffee. Now she is a principal dancer, and he is a doctor whose world is ordered by surgeries, night shifts and the colleague Grace, who brings him his favorite mocha and stands too close. Joanna waits through missed birthdays, unanswered messages and a sprained ankle she dances on anyway, smiling through three curtain calls while her body trembles.

In the emergency room, Ethan finally sees her swollen ankle, but Grace arrives with coffee and an easy intimacy he never questions. Joanna says nothing, takes a car home alone, and opens an email from the French Arts Dance Company inviting her to be principal dancer for a three-year term. She thinks of Grace's shoulder brushing Ethan's arm, of the reply he never sent, of every "another day" that never came.

She types her acceptance. Seven days to hand over her life here, and then she will go. Whether Ethan notices before she leaves is the question she no longer asks.