Page 18 of Under the Spotlight

Frankie caught her in the parking garage.

Dani had her bag over her shoulder and her keys out and was three steps from her car when Frankie peeled off a concrete pillar where she'd very plainly been waiting, in her coat, gear bag already stowed, a woman who had hung around in a cold garage on purpose, which Frankie didn't do for nothing.

"Got a second?"

"I've got a second."

Frankie leaned back on the pillar and looked at her boots and then looked at Dani, and Dani felt what was coming arrive before a word of it did, the same instinct that caught a shot before the stick moved.

"I couldn't sleep in Montreal," Frankie said. "At the airport hotel. After the storm. You know me, I can't sleep anywhere that isn't my own bed and Alessia's feet on my shins." She said it lightly and then stopped saying it lightly. "I came down about two. There's a diner across the lobby. I was going to get a coffee and a piece of pie and feel sorry for myself."

Dani didn't say anything. Her hand had gone still on the keys.

"I didn't come in," Frankie said. "I want you to know that first. I stood in the lobby and I looked through the glass and I saw who was in the booth with you, and I turned around and went back upstairs and ate a granola bar out of my bag like a sad person, and I haven't said one word to anybody and I'm not going to. Not Alessia. Not Lou. Nobody. That's not mine to say." She held Dani's eyes. "I just couldn't let you keep thinking nobody saw. Because you've been walking around for three weeks thinking you've got it locked down airtight, and you're the best I've ever played with at locking things down, Dani, but it isn't airtight. I saw it through a window from forty feet in the dark in about one second. So can the other forty people who get paid to look at famous faces for a living."

Dani's mouth was dry. "Frankie."

"I'm not telling you to stop." Frankie pushed off the pillar. "God knows I'm the last person. I spent too long pretending there was nothing between me and Alessia, and you all knew, and it was humiliating and also the best thing that ever happened to me, so I'm not gonna stand in a parking garage and tell you not to want something for yourself.” Her voice dropped, and the joke went out of it entirely, and what was left was the thing she'd been waiting on the pillar to say. "I'm telling you to know what it is. That world doesn't have edges, Dani. There's no boards. You can't see the hit coming because it doesn't come from the front, it comes from a phone in some stranger's pocket, and it eats private people alive, it has eaten people I've watched it eat, and you are the most private person I have ever met in my life. So go in with your eyes open. That's all." She knocked her knuckles once against Dani's shoulder, the same as always. "You okay?"

"Yeah." Dani's voice came out steadier than she felt. "Thank you. I mean it."

"I know you do, you say everything like you mean it, it's exhausting." Frankie was already walking to her car, the warmth back in her like she'd never set it down. “Now go eat something. You look like a ghost."

Dani stood between the pillars and watched her go and understood that she'd just been handed the second gift of the week, after the address, two people now who'd seen the most exposed thing about her and chosen, instead of taking it, to set it gently back down and step away. She'd built a whole philosophy on the certainty that being seen was being used. She was running out of evidence for it.

She drove home and sat on the couch.

She didn't turn the television on. She didn't eat, though she'd told Frankie she would and would later remember she hadn't. She sat on the couch in her coat with her keys still in her hand and the address still in her pocket, and she let the afternoon go gray and then dark outside the window, and she did what she had spent seven years getting very good at, which was running every possible version of how it ends before it had a chance to begin.

It ends with a long-lens photo. It ends with the team in a meeting room learning the thing Dani had kept from all of them, learning it from a headline instead of from her. It ends as it ended with Marisol, the inside of her on a website with a comments section, except worse, because Roxy Blaze was the most photographed person in the country and the lens was always, already pointed at her, and Dani would just be the shape standing next to her when it went off.

That was the safe answer. That was the arithmetic her whole life had been built to produce, and it produced it cleanly, as it always did, a tidy proof that the only move was no move. Stay home. Don't reply. Let the address go cold in her pocket. Be, for the eight thousandth night in a row, exactly as alone as she had decided at twenty-four she was always going to be, and call it, as she'd learned to, peace.

And then, sitting in the dark in her coat, Dani did a thing she hadn't done in seven years, which was run the other arithmetic. The one where she didn't go, and was safe, and was also still sitting on this exact couch in five years, in ten, having kept everything she'd kept and protected everything she'd protected and never once found out what Roxy Blaze was like when there were no cameras. The one where the cost wasn't a photograph. The one where the cost was the rest of her life, paid quietly, in installments, as she'd been paying it already without ever putting a number on it.

She thought, as she rarely let herself, about her parents' kitchen outside Detroit. Her father came over from the old country with a duffel and a trade and built a life one quiet shift at a time, and her mother ran a hospital floor and came home and cooked for five and never once in Dani's childhood said the word love out loud, not because it wasn't there but because in that house you didn't announce a thing you could simply do. You fixed the other person's car. You filled the other person's plate before your own. You drove four hours to a tournament and stood in a freezing rink and said, after, only that the second goal was soft and she should have had it, which meant I watched every second and I am proud of you and I will never embarrass us both by saying so. Dani had learned the whole language before she could skate. Keep it inside. Show it with your hands. Never give anybody the words, because words could be repeated and hands could not. She'd thought it made her safe. She was beginning to suspect it had only made her quiet, and that there was a difference, and that she'd spent years pretending there wasn't.

She'd told Roxy, in the diner, the difference between the things you couldn't have and the things you were protecting. She'd been so sure she knew which this was.

She got up off the couch.

She parked a block away.

She didn't decide to, exactly, except that she did, because some part of her that had been a professional at not being seen was still running, still doing its job even now, and it parked the car a full block from the address on a darker stretch of street where there was nothing to photograph and walked her the rest of the way on foot with her hood up and her hands in her pockets and her head down, an ordinary tired woman walking home from somewhere, nobody at all. The cold was clean and hard, the good kind, the kind that lived at the bottom of every memory she had of being happy, cold air and a rink somewhere and a thing to do with her body. Her breath went out white ahead of her. The street was empty in the honest way of a Tuesday in January, salt crust on the asphalt, one dog barking somewhere two yards over, a television glowing blue behind somebody's curtains, the small machinery of ordinary lives that Dani had spent hers on the edge of and never quite inside. She passed a parked car with frost furring the windshield and her own reflection went by dark in the glass, hood up, head down, nobody. The brick block sat low and unremarkable at the end of the street, a side door off the alley and a single window on the second floor was lit warm and gold behind a thin curtain, and Dani stood at the bottom of the alley and looked up at it, and her chest did something that had nothing to do with the cold.

She could still not go. That stayed true the whole way down the alley, a door she could turn around and walk back out of, the choice still hers, if you want to, all the way to the step. She climbed the step. She stood at the door. And she stood there a full minute, a real minute, counted in the cold as she counted everything.

She knocked.

It opened almost at once, like Roxy had been standing on the other side of it the whole time Dani stood on hers, two people on either side of one door in the dark, and there she was. No makeup. Her beautiful wavy honey hair loose around her face, her green eyes glittering as her smile broke out. An oversized t-shirt and sweatpants and bare feet on the cold floor, and reading glasses pushed up into her hair that she'd plainly forgotten were there, and not one single thing about her that was for sale or for a camera or for anyone but Dani. She looked at Dani smiling. She didn't say a word. She didn't perform a thing. She just stepped back, out of the doorway, making the room behind her into an offer, the same gesture as the menu across the booth, I went first, you don't have to, and Dani looked at the warm gold space behind her and at the snow starting again fine in the alley light and at Roxy Blaze barefoot and bare-faced holding a door open for her and nobody else on earth.

Dani crossed the threshold.

Behind her, soft, final, the door clicked shut.

11

The door clicked shut and then there was just the two of them and the small bright kitchen and the snow coming down past the window over the sink, and Roxy, who had stood in front of stadiums and known to the half-second what every move of her body would do to a hundred thousand people, didn't have the faintest idea what to do with her hands.