Author's Commentary: Finding the Steps

I should say plainly, before anything else: I have never danced a Viennese Waltz under stage lights, and I have never set a bone or read an MRI. I spent forty years behind the wheel of a bus, not behind a barre or a scalpel. So when people ask how a retired Transit Operator came to hundreds of pages about ballroom competition and a shattered knee, the honest answer is that I didn't come to it through expertise. I came to it through fascination, humility, and a great deal of careful research.

The fascination came first, and it came early. I don't remember a specific afternoon when ballroom dancing entered my life the way I remember the afternoon my wife handed me a jigsaw piece and told me to just try it—dance was simply always there, glimpsed on television specials, watched on TV Reality shows, in old films, in the posture of certain people I'd pick up on my route who carried themselves like they were still counting beats under their coats. I was drawn to the contradiction of it: how something so disciplined could look so effortless, how two people could move as a single organism while each carrying their own private weight. I wanted, for most of my adult life, to understand what it cost to make that illusion. Amelia Mercer's story became my way of finally asking that question on paper.

But wanting to write about competitive ballroom and actually writing about it responsibly are two different things. I am not a dancer, and I was determined not to fake my way through the choreography or the injury with confident-sounding nonsense. So I did what I've always done when I don't know something: I paid attention, I read everything I could find written by and about the people who live inside this world, and I stayed humble about the gap between research and lived experience. I studied the vocabulary—frame, connection, promenade, gancho—not to show it off, but so the dancing in these pages would move the way real dancing moves, with its own internal logic. I studied the physical toll competitive dancers describe: the way a body compensates for pain until compensation becomes its own injury, the specific vocabulary of swelling and instability, the grim arithmetic dancers do when deciding whether one more performance is worth what it will cost tomorrow.

The medical material required even more caution. I am not a physician, and I want to say clearly to any reader: nothing in this novel should be mistaken for medical guidance. Amelia's meniscus tear, her cartilage damage, her bracing and rehabilitation protocol—all of it was built from research into how orthopedic injuries are generally evaluated and managed, how physical therapy rebuilds function, how doctors weigh risk against a patient's own sense of purpose. I leaned hard on that research, and harder still on restraint. Whenever I found myself uncertain whether a detail was clinically plausible, I chose the version that served the emotional truth of the scene rather than the version that might impress a reader with technical swagger. Dr. Zeigler exists in this book to hold that line for me as much as for Amelia—he is the character who insists on medical reality even when the story wants to run past it.

That's really what the medical research was for, in the end: not to write a textbook, but to make Amelia's choices mean something. A woman deciding whether to dance through pain is only interesting if the pain is real, if the risk is real, if the people around her disagree about what she owes her body versus what she owes her art. So I built the people around her to hold different pieces of that argument. Jacques carries the guilt of having once pushed her too far and spends the book trying to protect her from his own old mistake. Mandy argues, always, for safety over spectacle. Matthew reads her body in ways words can't, adjusting his frame before she even asks him to. None of them are right all the time. I didn't want them to be. I wanted the disagreement itself to be the story—old money and old silence pressing against a body that remembers everything it was told to forget.

Because underneath the sequins and the brace and the swelling, this book is really about inheritance—the kind that comes wrapped in trust documents and the kind that lives in scar tissue and posture and the things families refuse to say out loud for forty-two years. Dina's stolen career, Clara's erased life, Arthur's quiet decades of not-knowing—these are all injuries too, just ones that don't show up on an X-ray. Writing Amelia's knee taught me something about writing that silence: both required me to trust research and restraint over invention, to let the wound speak without over-explaining it.

I think my years driving a bus prepared me for this more than people expect. Four decades of watching strangers board and disembark taught me to notice timing, pressure, the small dramas people carry without announcing them—the woman who always sat with her knee turned carefully away from the aisle, the man who winced getting up two stops early so no one would see him struggle. You learn to read a body's private history in public movement. That habit of quiet observation became, I think, the closest thing I had to training for this book.

Retirement at sixty-three gave me the room to finally put that habit to use. My wife's love of jigsaw puzzles started all of it, really—her complaints about the lack of good novels centered on her hobby sent me down a three-year road that became the Wicked Games Trilogy. That project taught me how to finish a book. This one taught me how to research a world I'd only ever watched from the outside, with the same respect I try to bring to every passenger who ever sat quietly in seat four, carrying something I couldn't see.

I hope Amelia's story carries that respect through to you.

— Morgan Litlee