Page 24 of Under the Spotlight

Tilda went still with a carton of eggs in her hand. "You didn't."

"I did. Then I hung up on her. Then I turned the phone off so I couldn't un-hang-up on her, which I would have, because I'm me." Roxy leaned on the counter. "I think I'm having a very good day, Til. I can't tell if it's a good day or the beginning of a catastrophe. Genuinely can't tell. Both. It's both."

Tilda put the eggs down slowly. She looked at Roxy for a second, and then her eyes went past Roxy to the little table, to the notebook covered in ink, to the phone propped against the sugar jar, and she walked over before Roxy could intervene and picked up the phone and pressed play on the top voice memo.

Roxy's own voice came out of the tinny speaker, rough and unguarded, the version of her singing she never let anyone hear, the one with no production and no mask and a cracked note she hadn't bothered to fix. Thirty seconds of it. The harbor and the lighthouse and the keeper who left at dawn. Tilda stood in the rental kitchen and listened with her whole face going blank, the blank she did when she was feeling something she didn't want on display, and at thirty seconds she reached out and stopped it.

"That's the best thing you've ever made," Tilda said quietly.

"I know." Roxy kept her eyes on the dark window.

"There are five of them in this folder."

"I know."

Tilda set the phone down, gentle, like it was made of something thinner than glass. She didn't ask the obvious. She was too smart for the obvious. She asked the real one, the one underneath, in a voice with nothing managed in it at all.

"Who's it for, Roxy?"

And Roxy, who had told this exact woman nobody in a hotel suite two weeks ago and watched her decide not to push, who had spent ten years answering that question with a brand and a smile and a strategically chosen mystery, looked at the only friend she had who wasn't on Vivienne's payroll in her heart, and told her the truth.

"It's for her," Roxy said. "It's all for her. Every one."

Tilda took it in. She didn't gasp and she didn't lecture and she didn't reach for her tablet to calculate the exposure. She just stood there in the small kitchen and let the answer be true in the room for a moment, gave it the weight Roxy had needed someone to give it, and then she nodded, once, like she was filing it somewhere permanent, and went back to putting the eggs in the refrigerator. It was everything.

"You know she's going to come," Tilda said, later, with the groceries away and two cups of the bad coffee between them. "Vivienne. You turned your phone off after telling her no for the first time in your adult life. That's not a phone call she lets sit. She'll be on a plane inside a week, and she won't be coming to bring you a smoothie."

"Let her come."

"Roxy."

"I mean it. Let her come." Roxy wrapped both hands around the cup. "I've spent eleven years arranging my entire life so Vivienne never has a reason to get on a plane. Tiptoeing. Being reachable. Being smooth. And I have been more myself in four days in this ugly rental than I was in the whole eleven years of keeping her happy, so let her come, and let her see, and let her do her worst, because the worst she can do is take back a life I'd already stopped wanting to live." She heard herself and softened, because none of it was Tilda's to carry. "I'm not asking you to pick a side. I'd never. You've got a job and a life and I won't make you choose between me and the woman who signs the bigger checks."

"When it comes to it," Tilda said, and stopped, and didn't finish, and the not-finishing was the answer, and they both let it stay unfinished because some loyalties you don't make a person say out loud before they have to.

Tilda left at four with a list of things to lie about and a phone she promised to keep on for both of them. And Roxy stood alone in the rental as the early dark came down over the brick and the alley and the lit window nobody could find, and she turned her own phone back on, just long enough, just for one thing. She didn't call Vivienne back. She pulled up the thread with no name on it and typed the only message she wanted in the world to send.

Come over tonight. I wrote something I want you to hear.

The reply came in under a minute, which from Dani was practically a shout.

I'll be there at six. Eat something first. You forget when you write.

Roxy read it twice, that small dry impossible knowing, you forget when you write, four days and the woman already had her read. She turned the phone off again and put it face-down and went to find something to eat, because Dani had told her to. And she couldn't stop smiling.

14

Dani came straight from the practice rink in her training kit, hair still damp at the temples under her hood, and let herself in with the key Roxy had pressed into her palm two nights ago like it was contraband, which, given both their lives, it more or less was.

Roxy was cooking. That was a thing Dani hadn't expected to find lovable and found, immediately, unbearably so, the most famous woman in the country standing barefoot at a rental stove in gray sweats with her hair shoved up in a clip and her reading glasses on, frowning at a pan of something that smelled of garlic and was probably going to be mediocre, because Roxy couldn't actually cook, Dani had learned, she just liked to, which was different and better. Music played low off her phone. She hadn't heard the door.

Dani crossed the kitchen, and Roxy turned, and her whole face did the thing it did now when she saw Dani, the unguarded thing, no banner, no audience, just glad, and Dani didn't say hello. She put her hands on Roxy's waist and lifted her clean up onto the counter, easy, like lifting anything when your whole job was a body that did what you told it, and stepped between her knees and kissed her hard.

Roxy made a sound into it, surprised and delighted, and her arms came around Dani's neck and her heels hooked behind Dani's thighs, and the spatula clattered somewhere onto the floor and neither of them went for it. Three weeks ago Dani wouldn't have done this. Three weeks ago Dani would have stood in the doorway and said something dry and waited to be invited. She didn't feel like waiting tonight. That was the strange new fact of her, that somewhere in the last days the want had stopped being a thing she managed and started being a thing she just had, like a pulse, and she kissed Roxy on the kitchen counter with garlic burning gently behind them and felt her grin against Dani's mouth.

"Hi," Roxy said, breathless, when Dani let her up for air. "The chicken's going to be inedible."

"It was always going to be inedible."