Page 23 of Under the Spotlight

Dani left at dawn. That was how it worked now, the routine they'd built without ever discussing it. Dani came after games and after practice, up the alley and up the stair, and she stayed until five, and then she dressed in the gray dark and sat on the edge of the bed and put a hand to the side of Roxy's face, and Roxy turned into the palm of it half asleep, and Dani kissed her once and went to be early for skate. Four days. And every morning Roxy surfaced into the warm hollow Dani had left in the bad rental mattress, and breathed in the trace of her still on the pillow, and lay there for one stolen minute being nobody, being Roxana, being a woman in a bed that the entire world had lost track of. And then she got up and she wrote.

God, did she write.

It came back all at once, like the second verse had come back in the hotel after Montreal, except now it wouldn't stop. She'd sit down at the little rental table with the bad coffee and the notebook and her phone propped against the sugar jar to catch the melodies, and three hours would vanish like ten minutes, and she'd look up and there'd be a finished song where there'd been nothing. A fourth one this morning, and then, before lunch, a fifth, both of them whole, both of them better than anything she'd put on a record since she was twenty-five. She'd thought the well had run dry for good. She'd told three different interviewers, in the flat managed voice she used for the hard questions, that she was "in an exploratory phase," which was the language her label used for an artist who hadn't delivered a usable song in two years, and she'd half believed she'd sold the thing that made her able to do this along with everything else, traded it to the machine and never gotten it back.

She hadn't lost it. She understood that now, with ink on the side of her hand and a fifth finished song sitting in the folder. She had only lost the thing worth writing about. For two years she'd had nothing inside her but the brand, the schedule, the smooth managed nothing, and you couldn't write a song about nothing, no matter how much they paid you to try. And now there was a goalie who left at dawn and a name nobody used and a rented door the world couldn't find, and the songs weren't a thing she was making. They were a thing that was happening to her, and she was lucky enough to be holding the pen.

Every one of them was about Dani. She didn't even pretend otherwise to herself anymore. The hands. The quiet. How she said Roxana into the dark. The crease that was the only safe place until it wasn't. The fifth one, the one that had come this morning before lunch, was just about a woman who left at dawn and a bed that stayed warm in the shape of her for an hour after, and Roxy had sung the hook into her phone with her voice going to pieces on the last line and played it back and known, like you know a key fits before you've turned it, that it was a number-one. She hadn't let herself care whether a song was a hit in two years. She found she cared now, fiercely, for the worst possible reason, which was that she wanted the whole world to sing a song that was secretly about Dani Petrovic and never know they were doing it. Roxy wrote it all and changed the details just enough that no one would ever know, a goalie became a lighthouse keeper, a rink became a harbor, and underneath the costumes it was Dani, all of it, every line.

She didn't let herself think about what it would mean to record them.

Vivienne called at noon, which Roxy should have expected, because Vivienne always called at the exact moment Roxy was happiest, with the unerring instinct of a woman who had spent eleven years making sure her asset never got too comfortable being a person.

Roxy looked at the screen. VIVIENNE CROFT. She let it ring twice while she decided who she was going to be, and then she answered it as the old version, the smooth one, because some habits had claws. "Viv."

"You sound rested." Vivienne made it an accusation. Her voice came down the line clipped and cool and very far away, London and money and a corner office. "That's novel. Where are you? Tilda's being cute about your location, which she only does when you've told her to, which means you've gone somewhere you don't want me knowing about, which means we should talk about your judgment."

"I'm doing ambassador work. It's in the contract you wrote." Roxy walked to the window with the bad coffee. "What do you need, Viv?"

"I need you in London on the twentieth. The Hollis appearance has been locked for weeks. Gallery opening, the two of you, you arrive separately and leave in the same car, the usual, it photographs like the start of something and we let the internet do the rest through the album cycle." Paper shuffled. "Reeve's people already confirmed. Wardrobe's pulled. It's done, I'm just telling you so you turn up in the right dress."

Four days ago Roxy would have said fine. She had said fine to a thousand of these. She heard the word rise up out of pure muscle memory, fine, sure, send the dress, the reflex of a girl who'd been doing what this voice told her since she was sixteen.

She didn't say it.

"Push it," Roxy said. "Two weeks. I'm in the middle of something and I can't be in London on the twentieth."

A silence came down the line, a cold expensive London silence, and Roxy felt the temperature of the whole call change.

"I'm sorry," Vivienne said. "In the middle of what?"

"Writing."

"You're—" A short laugh, not warm. "Darling. You haven't delivered a song in two years. I have been very patient about the exploratory phase, I have protected you in rooms you don't even know exist, and now you want to move a locked appearance with a confirmed partner and a pulled wardrobe because you're writing? Send me what you've got. I'll have the team take a look and tell you if there's anything in it worth rearranging a quarter for."

And there it was, the thing Vivienne did, the thing she'd done for eleven years, the small clean knife of it. I'll have the team take a look. As if the songs that had come up out of Roxy whole and shaking this morning were a pitch deck. As if there were a version of Roxana Halliday's actual heart that needed clearing by a committee before it counted.

"No," Roxy said.

"No?"

"You're not going to take a look. They're not for the team. And I'm not flying to London to leave a gallery in a car with a man I've never touched so the internet can write a love story neither of us is in. Not on the twentieth. The Hollis thing moves, or it doesn't happen, but it isn't happening on the twentieth, and that's not a negotiation, Viv, it's just a fact I'm telling you so you can plan around it." Her heart was slamming. Her voice, somehow, was level. "That's all. I have to go."

"Roxana." Vivienne's voice had gone very quiet, which was worse than loud, which Roxy had learned at seventeen was the sound of real trouble. "Whatever this is. Whoever this is. I have seen this exact thing a dozen times in twenty-five years, and it always ends the same way, with the artist humiliated and the brand in repair and me cleaning up a mess that a single phone call could have prevented. Do not make me come find out what you're⁠—"

Roxy hung up.

She stood there with the dead phone in her hand and her pulse loud in her own ears, and then, before she could second-guess it, before the managed girl could come back online and dial Vivienne to apologize, Roxy pressed the button on the side and watched the screen go black and set the dark phone on the windowsill. Off. All the way off. She hadn't turned her phone all the way off in years, it was practically a clause in the contract, the asset is reachable, and she turned it off and the silence that came in after was enormous and clean and entirely hers.

She'd just refused Vivienne Croft. Out loud. For the first time since she was a child. Her hands were shaking and she was grinning at the snow like a lunatic and she didn't know which feeling was real and decided she didn't have to pick.

The thing nobody understood about Vivienne, the thing Roxy had never been able to explain to the few people who'd tried to ask, was that it wasn't a normal manager relationship she was defying. Vivienne hadn't just managed her. Vivienne had raised the second half of her. Roxy's mother had signed the papers at sixteen and then quietly stepped back into the small Florida life she actually wanted, relieved, Roxy understood now, to hand the enormous strange daughter off to someone who knew what to do with her, and into that empty space Vivienne had walked, and stayed. She had taught Roxy how to eat in front of cameras and how to cry on cue and which of her own opinions were safe to have out loud. She had chosen Roxy's friends and vetoed her loves and built, brick by patient brick, the most successful and most contained woman in pop. Telling her no wasn't like firing a contractor. It was like a daughter, very late, finally locking her bedroom door. It felt like betrayal. It felt like being born. Roxy stood at the window and shook with both at once.

Tilda let herself in an hour later with two bags of groceries and the wound-up energy of a woman who had been trying to reach someone and failing.

"Your phone's off." She set the bags on the counter. "Your phone is never off. I called you four times, I thought you were dead in a ditch, I had a whole plan involving the police and a very embarrassing welfare check at a rental I'm technically not supposed to know exists." She started unpacking. Real food, Roxy noticed, the things Roxy actually ate when nobody was building her a meal for a magazine, and something in her chest pulled at that, at being known in groceries. "Why is your phone off?"

"I turned it off after I told Vivienne to move the Hollis event and stop managing my love life."