Page 13 of Under the Spotlight

Roxy read it twice. She read it a third time. Across the desk Astoria was still talking, the activation, the foundation, the optics, and Roxy heard none of it, because the whole surface of her skin had gone warm and she was working, actively, with effort, to keep her face from doing something that would need explaining.

Three weeks she had told herself she was fine. That the texting was a kindness she was doing for a stranger and not a hunger she was feeding in herself, that if Dani never wrote back it would be a small clean disappointment she'd survive as she survived everything, by getting on the next plane. She had been lying. She knew it now, with the phone warm against her knee and her heart going like a kid's on a stairwell, because you didn't feel this, this specific helium lift behind the ribs, about a thing you'd genuinely been fine about. She hadn't been fine. She had been holding her breath for three weeks, and a goalie in Phoenix Ridge had just, without meaning to, let her exhale.

She didn't reply right away. That took a discipline she had to physically hold onto, her thumb wanting to move. You didn't answer a thing like this inside ten seconds. You didn't let a person who'd cracked open the smallest door watch you throw your entire body against it. She pressed the phone dark and slid it under her thigh, out of sight, and made herself sit still and not answer for once in her life, a discipline Dani would have recognized in about a second, and that thought alone nearly undid the careful nothing she was keeping on her face.

"I'm sorry," Roxy said, to Astoria. "Say that last part again? I drifted."

"You drifted." Astoria set down her pen. She was a woman who set down a pen like other people slammed one. "Ms. Blaze, I have run this franchise for some time now. I have sat across this desk from agents and sponsors and television executives who lie to me for a living, and I want you to understand that you, currently, aren't very good at it." She folded her hands. "What's the team's travel schedule?"

Roxy looked up. "What?"

"That's the question you want to ask me. You've wanted to ask it since you walked in. So." Astoria's expression gave away nothing. "Ask."

There was no point pretending. Astoria Shepry hadn't gotten where she was by missing the obvious, and she'd spent a whole hockey game at the home opener watching Roxy with eyes that priced her, and Roxy had felt herself get priced.

It was a strange thing, to be seen through by someone who wasn't paid to manage you. Vivienne saw through her too, but Vivienne's seeing was a tool, a thing she used to steer. Astoria's was just attention, the flat unsentimental attention of a woman weighing an asset and a risk and, maybe, somewhere underneath, a person she didn't entirely dislike. Roxy had so few people left who looked at her and wanted nothing that she'd started to notice the difference, like noticing a clean glass of water after years of drinking only the sweet thing.

"What does the road schedule for the team look like," Roxy said. "The next couple of weeks."

"We're in Montreal a week from Thursday. We charter up the morning of, play that night, fly home after." Astoria let it sit. "The ambassador is, naturally, welcome to travel with the team where it makes sense for coverage. It would be entirely reasonable for you to be on that flight. Promotional value. The brand alongside the players. That sort of thing."

"That sort of thing."

"I'm going to say something, and then we will never discuss it again, because I have a franchise to run and a partnership to protect and I would honestly rather not know the details of whatever this is." Astoria leaned back. "Dani Petrovic is the most private person who has ever played for me. In all this time I have not once seen her let a living soul past her walls. She is also, not coincidentally, the most reliable human being I employ. If you are bored, if this is a season's entertainment, if there is any version of this that ends with you messing her around or treating her with anything other than the utmost respect, I will make the rest of your ambassadorship a misery, and I will enjoy doing it. And I do NOT want to see Dani Petrovic in a tabloid gossip column. Are we clear?"

Roxy held her eyes and didn't flinch, because the threat pointed at a place she already lived in. "I would never mess her around or treat her without respect.”

And she meant it with a violence that startled her, because Roxy of all people knew what a tabloid did to a private person. She had watched it done. She had been the one it was done to, more times than she could count. The thought of that lens turning on the one woman in the country who didn't want it made something go cold and final in her chest. Whatever this was, whatever it became or didn't, she would put a torch to her own brand before she let it cost Dani her quiet. She just didn't say that part. It was too large to set down on a desk in front of Astoria Shepry, and besides, she was only beginning to understand it was true.

"People in your position say that," Astoria said, "right up until the machine they hired does it for them." But she pulled her laptop over, and tapped, and Roxy's phone buzzed with a calendar invite. Team charter to YUL, ambassador travel approved. "Don't make me regret it. And Ms. Blaze." She was already back in her email. "Whatever you write her next, write it like a person and not a press release. She'll smell a press release from the runway."

Roxy waited until she was back in the suite, alone, before she let herself reply, and even then she sat with the thread open ten minutes, composing and deleting, which was absurd. She'd written hooks that sold forty million copies and she couldn't work out how to answer four words from a near silent hockey player.

Everything she typed was too much. I've been hoping you'd text back. Too much. You have no idea what that did to me. God, no. She kept hearing Astoria. Write it like a person. The trouble was that Roxy had spent ten years being written for, smoothed, optimized, every public sentence run past three people, and somewhere in there she'd half-forgotten what her own voice sounded like when it wasn't selling something.

That was the part nobody warned you about when they signed the girl and built the brand. You didn't only lose your privacy. You lost the muscle. The part of you that could just say the truth to someone, unsmoothed, no committee, withered from disuse, until you reached for it in a hotel room at twenty-seven and found it had stiffened up like a bad knee. Roxy flexed it now, clumsy, and it hurt, and it worked.

In the end she kept it short, because short was the only honest length.

You weren't rude. You were honest. There's a difference, and you're allowed both.

She sent it. She watched it sit there. Then, before she could lose her nerve, she sent the second one, the real one, the one with the joke in it, because a joke was a door you could leave standing open.

So the coffee WAS right.

The reply came back nine minutes later. She counted the minutes. Nine.

It was right.

Roxy laughed out loud in an empty hotel suite. Then, because she couldn't help herself, because she'd promised Astoria she would be a person and a person would just say what they meant, she sent one more.

I'm going to be on the team charter to Montreal next week. Ambassador stuff. I can fly commercial instead if that's weird. Genuinely, say the word and I'll get my own plane. I have one. It's obscene. I hate it.

This reply took longer. Roxy made herself set the phone down and pour a glass of water she didn't drink and look at the parking structure. When she picked the phone up again, it was there.

It's fine.

Two words. Roxy held the phone in both hands and read it's fine the way other people read a love letter, because she had learned this woman's whole dialect in the space of a month, and she knew that from Dani Petrovic, it's fine wasn't a closed door. It was a door left unlocked. It was the most a person who had built her entire life out of locks knew how to offer, and she had offered it to Roxy.