"What do you mean you're skipping rehearsal? It's the first day, you'll miss so much!" Meg frowned at Christine.
"I just can't, Meg. I can't sing. Not right now."
There was no way she could explain it to her. Meg has asked, once, about how Christine had managed to improve so much, and she had begun to try to tell her about the angel, but Meg had been skeptical and so she had dropped the subject, instead attributing her success to extra practice. She hadn't wanted her friend to think her crazy at the time, and she had been afraid all the talk of an angel would make it seem that way. But as bad as it would have been to be thought crazy, she felt even worse about being thought gullible. How could she have not realized the Angel was a man?
Christine reached her hands out to grasp Meg's hands.
"Please Meg, just tell the director I'm ill," she begged, her voice breaking.
Meg's brow furrowed and she scooted over to move closer to Christine as they sat on her bed.
"Christine, are you all right? Is something wrong? You can tell me."
Christine sniffled.
"I'll be okay, I just- I just need a little time away for now."
They parted with a hug and Christine soon found herself walking down the sidewalk, the opera house growing smaller and smaller behind her. She had no real destination in mind, she only wanted to flee the presence she knew lurked in the shadows back in the building she had left.
How could she ever go back to her dressing room now? How could she sit in front of her mirror and fix her hair knowing that he could still be back there watching her? She thought with a shudder now how glad she was that her dressing room was set up the way it was, that the partition she always changed behind hid her from the view of the mirror - she had never had reason to change clothes any time around her lessons, but she wasn't sure if he ever took hiding there and spying on her at other times.
Her head spun with the implications of it all.
"Lottie!"
She flinched at the voice calling her name, stopping in her tracks and turning to see who it was.
Of course, there was only one person who ever called her Lottie - not even her Angel knew about that. Her lips quirked at the thought of it.
"Raoul! You surprised me!"
Raoul hurried up to her, the grin on his face slowly fading as he took in her teary eyes that betrayed her attempted smile.
"Christine," he said gently. "What's wrong?"
"Oh, Raoul," she sighed, ducking her head. "It's... it's nothing."
"It's not nothing if it's upset you."
She nodded.
"Let's go down by the river? We can talk about it there," she cast one last anxious glance back the opera house.
He accompanied her down to the benches by the river, talking idly about this and that until they reached their destination. They settled on the bench and looked out at the water, both frowning a little.
"Raoul," she started softly. "Do you remember what I told you about how my singing improved?"
He nodded.
"Your Angel," he replied.
She had told him about the Angel shortly after she had first began lessons with him. Raoul had been a little uncertain about it all at first, but her singing had improved, and her father had promised to send the Angel of Music, and in every other capacity Christine still seemed quite capable and quite herself, so in the end he had supposed that perhaps she really had heard from an angel after all.
Tears formed in her eyes once more.
"Well, he wasn't an angel. He was a man. Just a man," she whispered it as though it was the most shameful secret.
Raoul sat in silence as the revelation sunk in to his mind.
"Has he been improper with you, Christine?" he wrapped a protective arm around her shoulders, already plotting in his head how to track this man down and murder him if he had done something to poor Christine.
"No," she said weakly. "But to think that he lied to me all this time-"
She turned in to Raoul's embrace, crying quietly.
"I'm so stupid. I can't believe it."
"It's not your fault, Lottie," he said soothingly. "It's not your fault that he lied. And it's not your fault that you were so trusting - it's entirely his fault for taking advantage of you. I'm so sorry."
He held her until her tears quieted. Once she had stopped crying, she still stayed in his arms, staring at the river. Raoul was so kind and such a dear friend, she thought to herself. He was the only other person besides her Mamma that she had told about the angel.
"I guess I hoped so much that it was true that I never thought to question it. What a fool I was," she sighed.
"It's not wrong to hope, Christine," he shook his head.
"I don't know what hope there is now, though. I still need so much help on my voice, and rehearsals start tonight but I can't even stand to be there right now."
"There's always hope, I think. Even if you can't see it right now. There's still hope," he asserted. "You don't have to stay at the Opera Populaire, you could go anywhere. I'll find you another vocal tutor if you wish it - a good tutor, a reputable one. You'll never have to see that terrible man again."
Never see the angel again. Was that what she wanted?
She merely nodded as she leaned against him. His understanding tone made her feel safer, and she began to tell him of the ill-fated meeting between her and the false angel.
"I thought- oh, it feels so silly, but before this happened I would have said he was like a friend... and I told him I hated him. What he did is still so upsetting to me, but even still, I feel badly that I told him that. Do you think that's silly of me?" she glanced up at him.
"It's not silly, it's just because you're such a kind soul. And you shared so much with him for so long, of course it's surely confusing. But you owe him nothing, Christine. Not a single word, and most certainly not an apology!"
They stayed on the bench a while longer before he had to regretfully leave her.
"You can always stay with my family if you need," he told her. "And I was serious about finding you someone to help your voice - just say the word and I'll arrange it."
She hugged him.
"Thank you, Raoul. It means so much to me."
She wandered until the shadows on the ground started to grow long, and then used the rest of her pocket money to hire a cab. The house it took her to was just outside of Paris, one she had been to before but hadn't visited in quite a while.
Erik sat on the bank of the lake near his underground house. The water moved ever so gently, as though perhaps something was there just under the surface, but Erik knew that he was the only thing that inhabited the cavern, utterly alone.
Slowly the noises of rehearsal from up above began to float down to him, muffled and softened but there all the same.
He had promised to leave Christine be, and he meant to do so. But surely he could still watch rehearsals? He lived in an opera house, for goodness's sake - surely he wasn't expected to never watch any of the shows again simply because she was in them? Besides, she'd never know, never have to speak to him or hear from him again. He decided to go watch, just for a little while, at least.
Once inside Box Five, he crept to the edge to look down at the stage. His eyes swept across the stage, suddenly stopping on the empty place in the line of ballet dancers.
Christine was missing. His heart twisted. Had he truly scared her that badly? Had he ruined singing for her?
He tried to shove down the guilt and frantic thoughts. Perhaps she was simply late. But no, she didn't show up for any of the rehearsal. He stayed and watched long after rehearsal had ended, watched as the performers trailed off the stage and one by one the lights went out, but still Christine did not show up. He stared into the darkness for a little while afterwards before creeping back down to his house.
He told himself half-believed stories of why she was missing, but each one grew less and less likely as the week went on and she still did not appear for rehearsal. She would be cut from the show at this rate.
Soon he stopped going to watch rehearsals at all. It made him too anxious to see the show going on without her. Where could she be? It was a thought he heard echoed from the other ballet girls as well. No one knew where she was. The Giry girl would only say that she was ill and then shrug helplessly.
Christine was ill? Was it his fault somehow? Perhaps his betrayal had crushed her spirit far more than he realized - perhaps she was languishing away in some hospital bed at that very moment, wrapped in the grip of some mysterious illness that the doctors couldn't make heads or tails of, and all because she had simply lost the will to fight it off. He cursed himself even more than he usually did. How could he have done this to her?
He so desperately wanted to find out more, to question Madame Giry, press the matter until he found out exactly what had happened to his former student - but he had promised. For all he knew his continued meddling in Christine's life might be the final shove required to force her from the world of music forever, and he couldn't stand for that to happen.
So he stayed down in his home, trying as hard as he could to put her from his mind. Her leaving, however, had unexpected consequences. He had been writing music for decades, on and off. Quite often he would get stuck on a piece and have to leave off, sometimes for years. But that had changed shortly after Christine was in his life. In the past two years he had consistently written some of the best music of his career as if propelled by clockwork. But now - now his ears still rang with her declaration of hatred, and every note he played sounded discordant and wrong.
Perhaps that was only fair, he mused. He had stolen the music from her life, and now his own music had abandoned him in return.
He turned instead to drawing blueprints for extravagant houses that would never exist, castles fit for royalty, quaint little cottages. At least this skill had not forsaken him. At the end of the week he looked over all the plans for each one, the meticulous details he had added to them, all bursting with possibility and potential - and he threw them into the lit fireplace.
Any possibility or potential seen in those thin papers was merely an illusion, one he couldn't bear to see.