Page 12 of Under the Spotlight

Shutout. Thirty-four saves. The quiet had held the entire time, and she'd needed it to.

Frankie found her at her stall after, when the room had thinned out, half the team already showered and gone, the adrenaline draining into the ordinary ache of a body that had worked. She dropped onto the bench beside Dani and handed her a Gatorade and didn't say anything for a minute, which from Frankie was a whole paragraph.

"That," Frankie said finally, "was a person playing angry."

"I don't play angry. I just play."

"You played like the net owed you money." Frankie cracked her own bottle. "Thirty-four. Against Boston. On a Tuesday." She let it sit. Then, lower, in the voice from the hallway three weeks ago, the real-question voice. “Roxy’s in the box, Dani. She's been texting you, hasn't she? The pop star? Three weeks you've had a face like a closed bank and the whole time you've been getting messages you won't talk about."

Dani drank her Gatorade and looked at the floor.

"You don't have to tell me anything," Frankie said. "You never do. I'm just gonna say one thing and then I'll drop it, same as always." She waited until Dani looked at her. "You're the smartest player I've ever skated with and the dumbest person I know about your own self, and at some point avoiding her is just a slower way of letting her have you. That's it. That's the whole speech. You want to get food?"

"I'm good."

"Course you are." Frankie heaved herself up, knocked her knuckles once against Dani's shoulder pad, and went. "You played great. Quit punishing yourself with it."

Dani sat at her stall a while longer in the emptying room, and didn't examine the word Frankie had used, the obvious one, the one Dani had said yes to without saying anything at all. Avoiding. As if Dani didn't know the word by heart. As if she hadn't built a master class in it, a whole life, all these clean careful years of being essential to a team and a stranger to every woman on it, and gotten so good at the avoiding that somewhere down the line she'd started calling it peace.

Roxy Blaze was leaning against her car. Dani’s car.

How does she even know which one is mine?

Dani came out into the players' lot at near midnight, bag over her shoulder, hair wet, the building behind her ticking and cooling, and there in the half-light between two pillars was Roxy Blaze in a gray hoodie with the hood down, leaning back against the driver's door of Dani's car with her ankles crossed, like she had every right, like she'd been there a while and would have waited longer.

"Don't panic," Roxy said. "I'm not stalking you, your car is extremely findable, it's the only clean one in the lot." She pushed off the door and stood, hands in the hoodie pocket, and up close in the bad light she looked tired and real and so beautiful it made Dani’s chest ache. "I just wanted to say it in person, since I was here. That was the best thing I've ever watched anyone do. Your game. Your saves. You were incredible. The two minutes at the end. I forgot I was supposed to be an ambassador, I think I screamed. Astoria has it on video, it's humiliating." A breath. "You were incredible. And I like you. That's all. I'll go."

Dani stood there with her keys in her hand.

There were things to say. There were a lot of things to say, three weeks of them, and they were all stacked up behind her teeth, and not one of them would come, because if she opened her mouth she didn't trust what would come out of it and she had spent her whole life not trusting her words. So she did the thing she knew how to do. She stepped past Roxy to her own door, and Roxy moved aside to let her, and Dani put the key in and got in and pulled the door shut, and through the window she saw Roxy's face do something small and accepting and tired before Dani looked away from it.

It was the not-chasing that did it, in the end. A different woman would have knocked on the glass, would have said her name, would have made Dani be the bad guy out loud where she'd have to defend it. Roxy just stepped back and let her go, a person who kept offering and kept refusing to make the offer cost Dani a thing. It was so far outside Dani's experience of what wanting looked like that she had no defense built for it. All her defenses had been built for people who took from her. Needed from her. The ones who just kept taking.

She backed out. She drove off. She watched Roxy get smaller in the mirror, standing alone between the pillars in a gray hoodie, not chasing, just watching her go, and Dani made it almost a mile.

Then she pulled the car over to the shoulder of an empty road and put it in park and sat there with her hands on the wheel and her heart doing a thing it didn't do, a hard uneven knock against her ribs she could feel all the way up in her throat. It was the exact feeling she got in a shootout, the whole building gone to noise and the puck on a stranger's stick. Except there was no puck this time, and no save to make, just a dark road and a decision she'd been putting off for three weeks.

She got out her phone. She opened the thread, the long one-sided thread, three weeks of small dry easy messages from a woman who'd promised she'd keep sending them and had, into a silence, with no proof at all that anyone was reading them, and Dani read all of them again, start to finish, every one, Berlin and the crying fans and the dog in the lobby and the heavy gold object and the smug quality of her silence.

And the one about the wall. She read that one twice. I'd rather talk to a wall I picked. Dani had been a wall her whole adult life, on purpose, professionally, the last line of defense, and not one person had ever once made it sound like that was something somebody might choose from the other side, might walk right up to and put a hand on, might want. She sat on the dark shoulder of the road with the heater ticking and understood that she had been answering these texts in her head for three weeks, every single one, full sentences, and that the only person her silence had ever been protecting was herself, and that she was so tired of it she could have put her head down on the wheel.

And then, before the careful machine she'd built her whole life out of could get its hands on her thumbs, before she could do the arithmetic and find the safe answer she always found, Dani typed four words and sent them.

I'm sorry. That was rude.

She watched it deliver. She put the phone face-down on the passenger seat. She sat on the shoulder of the dark road with her hands back on the wheel and didn't drive, and waited, with a feeling in her chest she hadn't let herself have in seven years, to see if anyone was awake.

7

The text came in while Roxy was sitting across a desk from the most powerful woman in women's hockey, pretending to care about a first-quarter activation calendar. Roxy had turned her phone off last night. Sometimes it just felt a lot and sometimes she didn’t want to be contactable. She turned it back on just before this meeting under strict orders that had come through from London.

She felt the phone buzz against her thigh and ignored it, because she was a professional and Astoria Shepry was midway through a sentence about a sponsor breakfast. And then she stopped being a professional, because the screen had lit face-up on her knee under the desk and she'd read the first two words before she meant to.

I'm sorry.

The number was the one she hadn't saved and knew by heart. Three weeks of silence, twelve unanswered texts, a woman who'd looked at the boards instead of at Roxy, who'd gotten into her car and driven out of a midnight parking lot without a single word, and now, at eight in the morning, four of them.

I'm sorry. That was rude.