When Harry thinks it through, that he is dancing the role of his biological father while his ex-girlfriend plays his mother while pregnant in real life with his half sibling, he becomes disoriented and troubled, and so he prefers not to think but to simply inhabit the role.

“No. The secret is nothing compared to everything else. You can have a secret that stops mattering.”

It is not a sign, but to have asked for one is enough.

The look Arslan and Chloe give each other is full of the kind of solidarity that can only come from love and conspiracy, if those are two things and not one.

His eyes, crimped around their edges by middle age, are sad, not morose like when he used to descend into one of his moods or wildly tragic like when he was mourning Juliet or Giselle onstage, but soft and sad as he stands and drinks.

But she does not expect him to say, immediately, forcefully, champagne flute in one hand, “He is mine, this boy.” “No,” she says, claustrophobic, trying to breathe, “he’s mine.”

The two men look at Joan with their four dark eyes, waiting for her to say something, but she can only look back, riveted by the strangeness. She has imagined this encounter for more than twenty years. The air inside the tent has turned thick and heavy. Their voices plow slowly through it.

Had she set out to create a dancer? If that had been her purpose, she thinks she would feel more elation at the sight of the stunning young performer now alone onstage, flying through his variation. She bore him, raised him, taught him, released him to New York. She masterminded every step of the process that made him what he is, but a part of her

Since her conversation with Harry, she has felt painfully alert, both vulnerable and dangerous, as though she were wrapped in explosives.