Four years ago, a car accident ended Zedekiah Harrow’s ballet career and sent Philadelphia Ballet principal dancer Alyona Miller spinning toward the breakdown that suspended her own. What they lost on the side of the road that day can never be replaced, and grief is always harshest under a spotlight...
Now twenty-three, Zed teaches music and theatre at a private school in Washington, D.C. and regularly attends AA meetings to keep the pain at bay. Aly has returned to D.C. to live with her mother while trying to recover from the mental and physical breakdown that forced her to take a leave of absence from the ballet world, and her adoring fans.
When Zed and Aly run into each other in a coffee shop, it’s as if no time has passed at all. But without the buffer and escape of dance—and with so much lust, anger and heartbreak hanging between them—their renewed connection will either allow them to build the together they never had... or destroy the fragile recoveries they've only started to make.
I finished this ages ago but could never put my feelings for it into proper words.
Now I am arguing with myself about whether I should rate it 4 or 5 stars because I was not a fan of Ally's therapy sessions. Not because of the content but because of the format. They were dialogue-only and that just doesn't work for me. They were still very powerful but I still felt I was missing something by just learning about what was said and not how it was said. But while the therapy sessions were important, ultimately, there weren't so many of them that it really bothered me.
And the rest was just brilliant. The prose almost made me swoon and I think I must have marked half of the sentences in each chapter because 'LOOK AT THEM! AREN'T THEY AMAZING?'
I loved Aly and Zed and their chemistry was great but at the same time it was fully understandable why they would distance themselves from one another. Their problems were believable and the eventual problem-resolvent was appropriately done and nothing huge just vanished into thin air. (It also means that it is very clearly a Happy for Now ending, so be warned if that's not your thing...if you don't mind: read this book)