Lissy’s dance performance is both a triumph onstage and a reversal of the panic that nearly takes her out of it. Emma Corrigan arrives backstage to find her friend close to abandoning the show; later, she watches Lissy command the auditorium, shares the audience’s applause with Jack Harper, and hears Lissy describe the performance as a life-changing high. The sequence reveals a part of Lissy that Emma, despite knowing her for more than twenty years, had never seen.

Backstage Crisis

Before the performance, Emma makes her way through the dressing area, where dancers are warming up; asked what one movement is, she can only hazard that it is a pirouette. She nearly trips over a girl doing the splits before finding Lissy seated in a dressing room. Lissy is heavily made up, her eyes made huge and glittering, with blue feathers in her hair. The elaborate appearance of a performer contrasts with what she tells Emma: she cannot do it, cannot remember anything, and her mind has gone blank.

Lissy’s fear becomes concrete when she reappears at the door pale and trembling. She decides she is going home and asks Emma to tell the others that an emergency has made her suddenly ill. The request makes the stakes immediate: the performance is not simply difficult for Lissy; she is ready to leave before it begins. Emma tries to stop her from reaching for her clothes and argues that Lissy has already faced the pressure of speaking at length in court, where a mistake could send an innocent man to jail. The comparison is Emma’s attempt to remind her friend of a competence she can draw on, rather than a claim that stage fright has already passed.

The Performance

The auditorium darkens, and an insistent drumbeat grows louder while the audience waits in silence. For a moment, nothing appears onstage. Then a dazzling light and thumping music break the darkness, revealing a single dancer in a black, glittering costume, twirling and leaping. Emma is initially too dazzled to identify the figure. When she recognizes Lissy, her attention fixes on her: the shock of seeing her friend perform sweeps away every other distraction.

Lissy dances first in a slow, sinuous sequence with a masked man whom Emma supposes is Jean-Paul, then leaps and spins with a ribbon. The audience watches, agog. To Emma, the contrast with her earlier glimpse of Lissy’s panic is striking: onstage, Lissy looks radiant and happier than Emma has seen her for months. Emma feels proud of her friend, and the intensity of that response brings tears to her eyes. The performance therefore changes the meaning of the backstage scene without erasing it: the person who feared she could not continue is now holding the audience’s attention through movement Emma did not know she could perform.

Shared Witness and Aftermath

Emma’s tears embarrass her, but Jack offers her a handkerchief. As she takes it, his fingers briefly curl around hers. The gesture is small and quiet beside the spectacle onstage, yet it makes Jack part of Emma’s response to Lissy’s achievement. When the performance ends, Lissy takes a star bow; Emma and Jack applaud wildly and grin at each other. Emma asks Jack to keep her crying private, and he promises he will. Their exchange gives the moment a confidential note amid the public applause.

Afterward, Lissy admits that she had thought her performance was poor. Emma emphatically refuses that judgment and urges her to call herself fantastic. Lissy eventually accepts the praise, smiles, and says she has never felt so good in her life. She adds that plans are already underway for a tour the following year. This is a decisive reversal from her earlier intention to go home: the experience that had seemed impossible becomes something she wants to continue.

Lissy also explains that her earlier declaration that she never wanted to do this again—and her instruction that Emma should stop her if she brought it up—was only stage fright. She then reveals that she saw Jack and asks Emma what is happening between them. The performance thus closes on two changes at once: Lissy has moved from fearful withdrawal to enthusiasm for touring, while her awareness of Jack redirects the conversation toward Emma’s private life. For Emma, the evening is a discovery of her friend’s ability, but also a shared occasion in which admiration, trust, and the question of her relationship with Jack come into view.