Page 3 of Under the Spotlight

"Congratulations on the show," Dani said. "It sounded good from back here." She said it like a stranger thanking someone for holding an elevator, polite, finished, already half through the door. "I have to go. Early skate."

"Okay," Roxy heard herself say. "Yeah. Of course."

And that was four sentences, maybe five, and not one of them had been for her, not the woman on the banner, not the brand, not the most-wanted person in any room she'd walked into since she was a teenager. Dani Petrovic had handed her a kid's lost tooth and a compliment about the acoustics and gone to bed.

"There you are." Tilda came around the corner at speed, tablet clutched to her chest, relief and fury fighting it out on her face. "We have to go. The car's been running ten minutes⁠—"

The exit door had already swung shut. Roxy looked back at it once, at the bar where a hand had been, at the thin line of cold still bleeding in along the threshold.

"Roxy." Tilda touched her shoulder. "Hey. You good?"

"I'm great." Roxy turned and gave her the smile, the real one she kept for the four people on earth who'd earned it. "Let's go home."

In the car the city peeled away in reverse, her own forty-foot face sliding past the window again, mouth open, eyes lit, every flaw sanded off. Somewhere over the Atlantic she'd have to put it all back on and be the brand again, single and available, smiling at Reeve across a glass of wine for a camera that would tell the world the story it had paid for. But the banner was already shrinking in the side mirror now, going dark with the rest of Phoenix Ridge, and for the length of one quiet drive she let herself be the other thing, the one nobody held a contract on.

Tilda was back on the phone. The heater ticked. Roxy thumbed open a new message to the only number she had inside that building, the assistant who'd been emailing her about the ambassador campaign all week.

She typed it out. Loved tonight, thank you for having me. For the first featured shoot, can you send me Dani Petrovic's number? I'd like to coordinate directly. Logistics.

She read it back. Logistics. Sure.

She sent it anyway, and laid the phone face-down on her knee, and kept turning the last few minutes over and over in the dark, not sure why a woman who'd wanted nothing from her was the best thing that had happened to her in a year.

2

Two days after the gala, Dani Petrovic got to the rink at six-fifteen, as she did every morning, and for the first forty minutes the building was hers.

She liked it empty. The big lights came up in banks with a sound like someone clearing their throat, and the ice lay flat and gray-blue and untouched, and the cold off it was the cleanest thing she knew. The crease was four feet by eight, the only square of the world she had ever wanted to own. Out past the blue paint the game was chaos, twelve women and a frozen disc of rubber and a hundred things that could go wrong in a second. In here it was just her and the angles. You cut the net down, you stayed square, you trusted your feet, you let the puck come to you. She had picked the loneliest position on the ice at nine years old and never once been sorry.

She did her laps. She did her crease work, the same drills in the same order, edges and shuffles and the slow drop into the butterfly until her body stopped asking questions. By the time the rest of them started filtering in she'd already sweated through her base layer and the noise had started coming back into the building, sticks and shouting and somebody's speaker, and her own head had gone quiet underneath all of it. That was the trade she made every morning and it was the best trade she knew. Out here nobody wanted anything from her but saves, and that, at least, was something she could give all day.

Coffee after. Oat milk and one sugar, the same as every morning, in the same dented thermos she'd had since her first pro contract. She drank half of it in the gear room with her back to her stall and her eyes on nothing.

"Petrovic." Frankie O'Connell dropped onto the bench two stalls down and started unlacing a skate, loud about it, the way Frankie was loud about everything. "How's the elbow?"

"Fine," Dani said.

"Yeah? No lasting damage?" Frankie's face was doing the thing it did before a joke, the broken nose crinkling. "Because the way I heard it, Roxy Blaze put a hand on you backstage and you've been walking funny ever since."

It had been great having Frankie back. The new young defender had taken a knock in pre season and Frankie, having already retired and spent a year in Europe with Alessia Volkov had been drafted back in by Mara.

Frankie was different now. Calmer, just happy to play in a way that she hadn’t been in recent years. Alessia had brought something to her world, that was for sure. Happiness, Dani suspected. And it looked good on her. Alessia was currently injured with an ACL injury so in a supporting role as girlfriend to Frankie, the two of them back in Phoenix Ridge just for one last season.

Down the row, two of the younger players cackled into their pads.

Dani took another mouthful of coffee. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Course not." Frankie pulled the skate off and thunked it onto the mat. "Quiet little goalie, minding her business, and the most famous woman on the planet chases her down a hallway. Happens to everybody." She raised her voice for the room. "Hey, did everybody hear Petrovic's got a famous girlfriend now?"

"Shut up, Frankie." Dani screwed the cap back on the thermos and stood. She tossed the roll of stick tape off the shelf into Frankie's lap on her way past. "Tape your stick. You looked like a beer-leaguer out there yesterday."

The room laughed at Frankie instead, which was the trade, and Dani walked out into the corridor while it was still working.

She didn't get far. Frankie caught up in three strides, sock feet slapping the rubber floor, and when she spoke again the volume was gone out of her.

"Hey." She fell in beside Dani. "You good?"

There it was. The whole point of the noise had been to get to the quiet version, and Dani knew it, because she'd known Frankie for years and Frankie had been checking on her in exactly this way for most of them. A joke for the room. The real question in the hall. Frankie had decided a long time ago that Dani was a person worth keeping an eye on, and Dani had never once asked her to and never once told her to stop.