Chapter 1

My third and final ballet scholarship audition was a spectacular failure. Not because I fell, or forgot the choreography, or got sick. No, this time, it was because I was in a police interrogation room, accused of stealing from a sick girl.

My mother, Debra Fuller, sat beside me, dabbing at her dry eyes with a tissue. She squeezed my hand, her grip like cold iron.

"Jocelyn, honey, just tell them what happened," she whispered, her voice full of fake sympathy for the benefit of the two detectives across the table. "They'll understand. It was a moment of weakness."

I stared at her. The architect of my ruin, playing the part of the concerned mother.

The lead detective, a man with a tired face named Miller, slid a photo across the metal table. It was a still from a security camera. A girl who looked exactly like me was stuffing cash from a donation box into her bag. The box had a picture on it-a pale, sad-looking girl named Maria Chavez, supposedly suffering from a mystery illness.

"This was taken last night at the fundraiser," Miller said, his tone flat. "The one for Maria. You were there. Multiple witnesses saw you. Then the cash box, containing over five thousand dollars, went missing. We found it empty in a dumpster behind the community hall. And this video..." He tapped the photo. "This is you."

"It's not me," I said, my voice hoarse. I had been at home, stretching, practicing, mentally preparing for the audition that was supposed to happen today.

Debra sighed dramatically. "Detective, my daughter... she's been under so much pressure. These auditions... they do things to a person. She wasn't thinking straight."

She was building the narrative. My desperate, failed-ballerina daughter, cracking under the strain and stealing from a dying girl. It was perfect. It was sickening.

"We also have a sworn statement from Wendy Chavez, Maria's mother," the other detective added, reading from a notepad. "She says she spoke to you right before the money disappeared. You seemed agitated, asking a lot of questions about how much had been raised."

Of course she did. Wendy and my mother were old friends from their showgirl days in Vegas. A matched set of piranhas.

This was the end. My scholarship was gone. My reputation was destroyed. My life as a ballerina, the only life I'd ever known, was over.

The weight of it all pressed down on me. The years of starvation diets, of bleeding toes, of smiling through the pain. And for what? To be sabotaged at every turn by the one person who was supposed to support me.

A strange calm washed over me. The kind of calm that comes when you have absolutely nothing left to lose.

I looked from the photo to my mother's perfectly performed grief. I saw the whole game.

I leaned forward, my eyes locking with Detective Miller's.

"You're right," I said, my voice suddenly clear and steady. "I did it."

Debra's eyes widened in genuine shock for a split second before she composed herself.

Miller leaned back. "You're confessing?"

"Yes," I said. "I confess. I'm a terrible person. A thief. I'm mentally unstable from the pressure. I probably need to be locked up somewhere."

Debra started to protest, a flicker of panic in her eyes. This wasn't going according to her script. She wanted me disgraced, not institutionalized. Not yet.

I stood up, holding my hands out. "So, arrest me. Take me away."

The world of classical ballet, with its impossible standards and silent cruelties, could burn. My mother, with her twisted plans, could watch it burn.

Because in that moment, I wasn't Jocelyn the failed ballerina anymore.

I was someone else entirely. And I was finally free.