“Okay, then. I’ll catch up with you all tomorrow.” Looking over her shoulder one last time, she left with Nadine. “Where are we going?”
“Monsieur Danvers instructed me to pick you up and to bring you to his dressing room.”
“Oh, no, into the lion’s lair. How mysterious,” Stella joked, but Nadine remained quiet.
When they reached David’s private dressing room, Nadine knocked on the door, handed her the cloth bundle and walked away. David stepped out of his room, wearing dark jeans and a white dress shirt together with a half-mask and a long cape.
“Are we going to a masquerade ball? You should’ve told me,” Stella wiggled her eyebrows. “I would’ve brought my sleep mask and fluffy slippers.”
He touched a finger to her mouth, reached for the cloth in her hand, and hung it around her shoulders. It was a cape like his. Taking her hand, he signaled her to follow him.
She couldn’t stop the giggles from escaping. “Not even a hello kiss? And oh, by the way, I noticed the kiss you sent me during your curtain call. Unless you ended each of your performances with one, don’t you think the critics will comment on it tomorrow?”
David shrugged and continued to lead her to the end of the hallway, where he opened a metal door and descended with her into the abyss of the theater. They went deeper and deeper, through spaces cluttered with electrical equipment and generators, storage rooms and stage props, and it turned colder and colder.
“Baby, why aren’t you talking to me? Where are we going?” she wasn’t scared, but they were in a very eerie part of the theater, and she shivered in the underworldly atmosphere. Grateful for the cape, she used her free hand and pulled it closer around her.
He glanced at her but kept walking, a little faster now. Her hands where sweating and she wanted to rub them dry. When her fingers almost slipped out of his grip, he stopped walking, kissed her knuckles, then tightened his hold and pulled her down a set of rickety, creaky stairs, into a short tunnel.
They hadn’t seen a living soul for a while. Where were all the stagehands? “David, can we please go back?”
Instead of an answer, David began to hum a melody and they stepped out of the dim tunnel into a large cave with a vaulted ceiling.
An underground lake was in front of them, with hundreds of floating candles illuminating the dark surface. Not a ripple disturbed the calm water. A white wooden rowboat with two oars laid across the bench waited at the water’s edge.
“The… The lake is real,” she whispered.
Again, he didn’t answer with words, but led her to a table covered with a white tablecloth. Three fat ivory pillar candles in different sizes bathed the table in a warm yellow light. A bottle of champagne rested in a cooler and two glasses stood next to it, with a single white rose lying across the two flutes.
David pulled out a chair and signaled for Stella to sit down. He took off his mask and placed it next to the crystal flutes.
As soon as she sat, he bent one knee in front of her and pulled a teal-colored soft pouch out of his pocket.
She gasped and opened her mouth, but David put his finger on it.
He pointed around the cave and to the lake. “You never liked the ending of The Phantom of the Opera. Why don’t we write our own?”
The glow of the candles reflected in his eyes. They were like two dark pools of water, calm on the surface, but deep and mysterious beneath.
David lifted a ring from its velvety cushion.
“My angel, you’ve listened to your heart and believed in us. For the rest of my life, I want to fall asleep with you in my arms, and I want to wake up with you next to me. I want to be there for you. I want to share our joys with you and ease your sorrows.”
He reached for her hands.
“You gave me your heart not once, but twice. Will you entrust me with it for the rest of our lives? Will you marry me and let me love you until I take my last breath?”
She nodded.
She didn’t know how she found her voice, but she said, “I love you so much. Yes, I will marry you.”
With tears spilling over and trickling down his face, he slid a sparkling ring on her finger. “We belong together.” His arms went around her. “I’ll love you forever.”
Before their lips touched, Stella whispered, “Forever.”
THE END
AUTHOR NOTES
L
ike so many others, I had this dream of writing a novel since my adolescence, but the inspiration to sit down and bring something to paper didn’t come until the summer of 2019, when I found myself with nothing to read—which is rare.
Sitting in the backyard, I thought about my favorite musical and one of my favorite cities, Philadelphia. I wondered if a book, or even one paragraph, can have a life-altering impact on us. I believe the answer is yes.
Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera provided me with the perfect theme and framework for this book. I “saw” a woman mulling over what the book meant to her. And because I love the phantom as much as Stella does, I had no choice but to send her on a journey to pay homage to the fictional character.
I saw the musical The Phantom of the Opera for the first time in 1992 in Hamburg, Germany, and many more times since then in different cities—just never on Broadway (yet).
This book could not have been written and published without the unfaltering support of my husband and son. We called in pizza for dinner more times than I like to admit when I was lost in the world of my characters...just one more page... Axel and Mika, you are my rock!
I owe big thanks to:
Susan Blair and Lynn Rhodes for reading an early draft and providing me with
