Page 33 of Under the Spotlight

She was in the corridor when her phone buzzed again, and she looked at it, and the second story was there.

This one was worse than the first, and she hadn't known that was possible. POP'S GOLDEN COUPLE CLOSER THAN EVER. A statement, fluent and warm, under Roxy's name, confirming Roxy at a gallery with Reeve Hollis that weekend, and explaining away the Phoenix Ridge noise in one breezy line about how Ms. Blaze had socialized warmly with several members of the Valkyries organization. Several members. Dani read it twice, standing in the empty corridor under the buzzing lights, and felt herself become, in real time, a line in someone else's press release. Not a person. Not the woman in the song. One of several. A warm socializing. The most private fact of her whole life, reduced to a managed sentence designed to make her disappear so a different story could stand where she'd been.

She turned the phone face-down against her chest. She didn't let herself think about whether Roxy had written it, because she already knew Roxy hadn't, knew it as she knew Roxy's breathing in the dark. And it didn't matter, because it had gone out under Roxy's name, and that was the world Roxy lived in and Dani couldn't live in it. She wasn't built to be a managed sentence and she wouldn't survive being one. She put the phone in her pocket and went and found a wall nobody used, in the old equipment hallway, and stood with her forehead against the cinderblock for a while, breathing, as she breathed in the crease when the shots came too fast, until she could be a goalie again instead of a person.

She went down to the players' garage and got into her car and sat with the engine off and the cold coming up through the floor, and she did the thing she knew how to do, the thing her hands remembered from seven years ago, while she still had the steadiness for it. She wrote the text. There was no version that didn't cut, so she made it short, because short was the only mercy on offer, to herself and maybe to Roxy too. She knew the rules of this. She'd learned them at twenty-four. You didn't negotiate your way out of a thing like this, you didn't leave it half open to see if it might heal, because half open was only a slower way to bleed. You closed the door all the way, in one motion, while you still had the hands to do it cleanly, and then you walked away and didn't look back no matter what you heard through the wood.

She didn't write the long thing, the true thing, the I have never been happier than I was this winter and you didn't do this to me and I know it. That was a door left open, and an open door got you killed slow. She wrote the clean one, four sentences and a closed latch, and she made herself put the real name at the end of it, the secret one, because Roxy had earned the truth even in the goodbye, and she thought about Roxana Halliday in a dark room saying I see you, and she sent it anyway. Then she blocked the number, fast, before she could start watching for the reply, because watching for the reply was how women like her got dragged back under.

She turned the phone all the way off and sat in the cold car with it dead in her hand, and that was the only time all morning her hands shook. When they stopped she sat a while longer anyway, because there was nowhere left she wanted to drive to, and the quiet in the cold car with the dead phone in her lap was the closest thing to the crease she was going to get all day.

The photographers found her apartment by noon.

She didn't go home. Lou was the one who handled it, Lou who'd played beside her longer than anyone, who didn't text, just appeared in the players' garage where Dani was sitting in her parked car not going anywhere, and rapped a knuckle on the window and said, "There's six of them in your lot. Come to my place. Camille will be back later with lots of food, she does that when she's worried." And Dani, who would have refused anyone else, who'd spent seven years refusing everyone, got out of her car and into Lou's truck, because she didn't have it in her, today, to be alone, and Lou hadn't asked her to explain a single thing.

Lou and Camille’s house was warm and smelled of garlic, and Lou put a sandwich in front of her at the kitchen table and didn't make her eat it. She called Frankie from the next room, low, and twenty minutes later Frankie came through the door with a duffel bag over her shoulder like she was moving in, took one look at Dani, and set the bag down by the couch.

"I'm staying," Frankie said. "Don't argue. Helen the psychologist has got space for you tomorrow at eleven, I already texted her. Tonight you don't have to do anything except sit there." She dropped onto the couch and put her battered hockey feet up on Lou's coffee table like she lived there. "And before you say it, because I can see you winding up to say it. I don't care that you didn't tell me. I knew anyway, you idiot, I've known since the diner. I wasn't waiting for the confession. I was waiting for you to be happy, and you were, for a while. I saw it, and I'm not going to let what those vultures did to you turn it into something you're ashamed of."

And Dani, who had lied to her, who had decided that very morning at five o'clock to finally tell her the truth, and who had instead had the truth ripped out of her hands and printed in a tabloid before she could give it away freely, looked at Frankie sitting on Lou's couch having shown up with a packed bag. She felt her throat close, and managed, roughly, "I was going to tell you today. This morning. I'd decided."

"I know," Frankie said. "That's the part that pisses me off the most." And she patted the couch beside her, and Dani went and sat down, and that was all it took.

The team came to her in pieces over the night, as they did when one of their own went down.

Camille arrived late with takeout she insisted Dani try, three different things, just talked easily about nothing, about her own mess of a famous-relationship years ago, that whole circus with her ex, offering it sideways, I know what the lens does to you, I'm not going to pretend I don't. Lex texted Frankie, not Dani, the right call, tell her the gear room's a no-phone zone tomorrow, I'll deck anyone who brings it up. Mara texted Dani directly, two lines. Practice is normal tomorrow. Anyone makes it weird answers to me. And Dani, who had spent years certain that the safest thing a person could be was alone, sat in Lou and Camille’s house surrounded by people who had simply shown up, none of them asking her to perform being okay, none of them needing the story, just there, and she thanked each of them and meant it all the way down. She ate, finally, because Camille kept nudging the containers an inch closer until she did, and the food was good, and that small stupid fact undid her more than any of the kindness had.

That was the thing she couldn't get to sit still in her head. The photos that morning had looked like proof of the one rule she'd lived by, that to be seen was to be cashed in. And then the same day, the same hours, these people had walked into the proof and broken it. Frankie had known the whole truth for weeks and used it to show up with a duffel bag, not to sell it. Lou had read the story and taken her in. Camille had handed over her own old humiliation like a gift, I know what the lens does, I won't pretend. They knew her, all of them, knew the parts she kept hidden and the parts the tabloid had torn open both, and the knowing had come out as food and welcome and family. Dani didn't know yet what to do with that. She only knew the old rule had a hole in it now that it hadn't had at breakfast.

She lay awake on Lou's guest bed the whole night anyway, in a room that smelled of someone else's laundry soap, listening to an unfamiliar furnace tick on and off in a house that wasn't hers. The kindness didn't fix it. The kindness sat alongside the wreckage and neither one canceled the other, and somewhere around three she gave up on sleep and just lay there in the dark doing the only thing she knew how to do with pain, which was decide how she'd carry it. She'd play tomorrow. She'd play like nothing had happened, because the ice was the one place the cameras couldn't follow her in, the one place she was only what she did, and she'd be good there if she could be nothing anywhere else.

She thought about the crease like some people thought about prayer. Eighteen feet of painted ice that belonged to her and no one else, where the only thing that mattered was the next shot and the one after that, where a person could go completely empty and call the emptiness focus. She had hidden inside that emptiness for seven years and it had never once failed her. It wouldn't fail her tomorrow. Whatever the world wanted to make of Dani Petrovic in print, between the pipes she would still be unreachable, and she held onto that through the long gray hours as she'd once held onto nothing at all, and found it was still enough to get her up. She got up at six, as she always did.

She didn't let herself wonder what she'd do when Roxy came back for her. She'd blocked the number and ended it clean and that was supposed to be the end of it. But she knew Roxy Blaze a little now, knew the stubbornness under the gloss, and some traitor part of her, lying awake at three in a borrowed bed, wasn't entirely sure the ending would hold, and wasn't entirely sure, either, whether she wanted it to.

21

She landed at Heathrow on no sleep, having crossed the same ocean Dani had crossed for her ten days before, and she didn't let herself feel the symmetry of it, because feeling it would have stopped her, and she couldn't afford to be stopped. She'd slept maybe an hour over the Atlantic. The rest of it she'd spent with a yellow legal pad and a pen, and Tilda's voice in her ear from the seat beside her, and by the time the wheels touched down she had a plan, and the plan had three parts, and the first part was the one she was least afraid of, which told her everything about how afraid she was of the other two.

She went to the gallery first. Not to the hotel, not to shower, not to sleep. Straight from the airport to the venue in Mayfair where, in two days, she was scheduled to arrive separately and leave in the same car as Reeve Hollis, where the wardrobe was pulled and the story was written and the internet was waiting to be told a romance it would believe because it had been trained for a decade to believe it. She found Reeve in a back room doing a sound check for the gala, and he took one look at her face, jet-lagged and stripped of every layer of management, and he sent the technicians out of the room.

"You're not coming Saturday," Reeve said. It wasn't a question. He'd known her a long time.

"I'm not coming Saturday. I'm not coming to any of it ever again, Reeve, and I'm so sorry, because I know what me pulling out does to your weekend and your numbers, and you didn't do anything to deserve being left holding it." Roxy's voice wanted to shake and she didn't let it. "I can't keep doing this. Standing next to you pretending. You've been the kindest part of a thing I hate, and that's not fair to you either, you should get to be photographed with someone real too. I just can't be the lie anymore. Not even the comfortable version of it with you."

And Reeve, who had spent the same decade in the same machine, performing the same fiction from the other side of it, came across the room and hugged her, hard, and said into her hair, "Took you long enough. Go burn it down. I'll be fine, I'm always fine, I'm extremely marketable." He pulled back and held her by the shoulders and looked at her, and something in him went quiet and true under the charm. "Whoever she is. I hope she's worth all this, and I hope you don't let those animals make you ashamed of her. Now get out of my green room, you're ruining my eyeliner with the crying I'm about to do."

Roxy laughed, wet, and kissed his cheek, and left, and that was the easy part done.

She called Vivienne from the gallery parking lot, standing in the cold London afternoon with her breath clouding, because she wanted to be outside and moving when she did it, not trapped in a car.

Vivienne answered on the second ring, and her voice was warm, which was the worst sign of all, the warm she did when she'd already won and was being generous about it. "There you are. I was beginning to worry. The Saturday plan is perfect, darling, the statement's tested beautifully, the engagement numbers on the Reeve angle are already up eleven percent, and the Phoenix Ridge noise is dying exactly on schedule. You see? You panic, and I solve it. We're a very good machine, you and I. Now. Where are you, I'll send a car⁠—"

"You're fired."

A silence. Roxy had never said those two words to anyone in her life. They felt enormous in her mouth and very small in the air, two ordinary words, and the silence on the other end was the silence of a woman recalibrating an entire universe in real time.

"I'm sorry," Vivienne said, in a different voice. "I think the jet lag has⁠—"