Page 34 of Under the Spotlight

"I'm not jet-lagged, I'm finished. You're fired, Vivienne. Effective the second I'm saying it. No severance, because you put a statement out under my name that I never approved and used my own face to bury a person I—" Roxy stopped, and reset, and wouldn't give the woman even that much of Dani. "No severance, no transition period, no final meeting where you talk me out of it, because I know you, and a meeting is just a room where you win. There's no room. There's this phone call. You're done managing me. You're done managing my career, my image, my statements, my body, my schedule, and my heart, which you have been managing longest of all and which was never, ever yours to touch."

"You ungrateful little—" The warmth was gone now, all of it, and underneath was the thing Roxy had been afraid of since she was sixteen, the cold fury of the woman who'd built her. "I made you. There was a karaoke contestant from a trailer park in Florida, nothing but poor trash. I made that the most valuable woman in pop, and you think you can fire me by telephone? I will tie you up in litigation until you're forty. I own pieces of you that you don't even know are pieces. You will not survive this. I will make absolutely certain you do not survive this."

"Maybe," Roxy said, and found, to her own amazement, that her hand was steady. "But you'll be doing it from outside my life, and that's the only part I came here for. Lawyers can have the rest. Goodbye, Viv."

And she hung up on Vivienne Croft for the second and final time, and turned the phone off so she couldn't hear it ring, and stood in the cold a moment with her eyes shut, her pulse loud in her ears, the dark phone gone heavy in her fist.

She'd expected to feel triumphant. She felt sick. She'd known for weeks what this would cost, had said it once to Tilda and never again, that the woman she'd just fired in a parking lot wasn't a manager but the person who'd raised the second half of her, built someone out of the empty space a receding mother left when Roxy was sixteen. Knowing it in advance hadn't made the doing of it any easier. Roxy stood in the London cold and grieved her, actually grieved her, like you grieve a thing that hurt you, which is the most complicated grief there is, and let it move through her, because Dani had taught her that you didn't get anywhere pretending a thing didn't cost you. Then she wiped her face once with the back of her hand and opened her eyes, because the grief was real and it changed nothing, the woman had still done what she'd done, and there was a podium downstairs with Roxy's name on it.

She got in the car and told the driver the name of the hotel where Tilda was waiting, because the easy part and the frightening part were done, and now there was only the impossible one left.

Tilda had taken an executive suite and turned it into a war room overnight.

Roxy walked in to find every surface covered. Eleven years of contracts in labeled stacks. Appearance logs going back to her teens. A printout of every statement ever issued under her name, the ones she'd written and the hundreds she hadn't, flagged in three colors. A woman she'd never met in a sharp suit at the desk, a media lawyer Tilda had pulled in on an emergency rate, already three hours into reading. And Tilda in the middle of it on no sleep, curly hair wild, running on what looked like four espressos and pure loyalty, who looked up when Roxy came in and just said, "Tell me you did it."

"Both of them. Reeve's out. Vivienne's fired. She's going to sue me into the next decade."

"Let her." Tilda crossed the room and hugged her, fierce and fast, the first time in six years of working together they'd done that, and then got straight back to business because there were three hours on the clock. "Okay. Sit. We have a lot to do and not enough time and you have to be at a podium downstairs at three, so listen."

It went fast after that, as the morning of the leak had gone fast, except this was the inverse of that morning, this was Roxy building instead of being dismantled. She signed the paperwork to register her own management company, her name on the line as the principal, the first business she'd ever owned in a career that had made other people rich. She stopped with the pen on the page and looked at it for a second, the legal name of a company that didn't exist until she signed, with Roxana Halliday listed as its sole owner, and understood that she had been a globally famous multimillionaire for ten years and had never once, until this exact pen stroke, owned a single thing that decided her own life. Everything had been somebody else's, leased back to her in exchange for compliance. She signed it slowly, and her hand didn't shake, and when it was done she had, for the first time, a place to stand that no one could take from her.

She worked the statement with the lawyer line by line, every word hers, and the lawyer kept trying to add denials and Roxy kept striking them out, because the one thing she wouldn't do, the line under everything, was say a single word about Dani. Not a confirmation. Not a denial. Not her name, nothing. The world wanted Roxy to either deny the woman in the photos or claim her, and either one threw Dani to the cameras, and Roxy would do neither. She'd take back her own life in public and leave Dani's untouched in private. It was a needle she had to thread, and it was harder than firing Vivienne had been, because every instinct the machine had trained into her screamed to control the narrative, and the bravest thing she could do was refuse to.

And then, last, she uploaded the songs.

Thirteen of them, every one she'd written that winter, recorded rough in a rental kitchen and a London hotel and the back of a tour bus on a phone, unmastered, unmixed, naked. She loaded them to the label's private server with a release set for seventy-two hours out, no single, no campaign, no rollout, no Vivienne, just thirteen true things going up into the world all at once with her own hand on the button. She titled the album and sat looking at the title for a moment before she confirmed it. Last Line. The last line of defense. The goalie. The thing you said when you finally said the truth. All of it at once. Nobody would know what it meant for seventy-two hours, and then everybody would, and one person in Phoenix Ridge would know exactly, would hear her own self sung back to her in thirteen different costumes and understand that every word had always been for her.

For two years the label had been begging her for product and she'd had nothing, the well dry, the smooth managed nothing inside her producing smooth managed nothing on the page. And here were thirteen songs she'd written in a single winter, the best work of her life, and the old Roxy, the trained one, knew exactly what they were worth handled properly, knew a year of careful rollout and a stadium tour and Vivienne's fingerprints on every frame could turn them into the biggest release of her career.

And she was going to throw all of that away and put them out raw and unmastered in seventy-two hours with no campaign at all, because the songs were the truest things she'd ever made and the machine made everything false by touching it. She would rather they reached the world cracked and naked and honest than polished into another product. There was exactly one person she needed to hear them, and that person didn't care about mastering. That person cared about the truth, had built a whole life around being able to tell the true thing from the performed one. So Roxy was going to hand her thirteen pieces of her heart, in public, where the woman who'd told her goodbye could find them the moment she was ready, without Roxy ever once knocking on a door she'd been asked not to knock on.

She hovered over the button as she'd hovered over the unsent text on the runway. This one she pressed.

At three she put on a black suit.

No glitter, no lacquer, no stylist, no stage face. Just a sharp black suit Tilda had found in two hours and Roxy's own hands in her own hair and the reading glasses she'd stopped hiding, and she looked at herself in the hotel mirror and saw, for the first time in eleven years, a woman she actually recognized, tired and frightened and entirely her own. Roxana Halliday in a borrowed suit, about to do what the machine had spent her whole life making sure she'd never be brave enough to do.

She thought, looking at the mirror, about all the women who had stood in all the mirrors before all the other appearances, the lacquered ones, the engineered ones, the girl who'd been told what to wear and what to want and which version of herself to sell that night. Roxy didn't miss any of them. She'd spent a decade afraid that without the costume there'd be nothing underneath, that the brand was the whole of her and the person had been spent paying for it years ago.

And the woman in the glass was proof against that fear, plain and unpainted and unmistakably someone, the woman Dani had found and the one who'd written and written all winter long. The woman who was about to walk out in front of a hundred cameras with nothing to hide behind. Roxy looked at her and, for the first time in years, wasn't ashamed of who she saw.

They'd given her a number. A hundred and ten press credentials issued, Tilda said, in three hours, which was unheard of. That meant the room downstairs was packed to the walls with people who had come to watch Roxy Blaze either deny a scandal or drown in one, and who were about to get a third thing none of them had a template for.

She walked down with Tilda beside her and stopped at the side door of the ballroom. Through the gap she could see it, the lights, the lenses, the hundred faces, the whole apparatus that had owned her since she was a child, turned toward an empty podium, waiting. Her heart was going like a kick drum. Every cell she had wanted to run, to call Vivienne back, to apologize, to take the safe managed road one more time, because the safe road was all she'd ever known and the thing past this door was a cliff.

Then she thought about a goalie who'd flown across an ocean for thirty-six hours with her. She thought about being known isn't the same as being used. She thought about all the things she'd promised Dani in the dark and the one promise left that she could still keep, which was this, to walk out of the cage on her own feet in front of everyone and never once say the name of the person it was for.

Tilda squeezed her shoulder. "Whenever you're ready. There's no version of this where I'm not standing right here."

Roxy took one breath. Then she opened the door and walked toward the podium, into the white roar of the lights, and a hundred cameras came up at once, and the room went electric and silent and hungry, and Roxy Blaze stepped up to the microphone and looked out at all of them and got ready to finally tell the truth.

22

The press conference happened at ten in the morning, Phoenix Ridge time. Dani didn't watch it.

That was a decision she'd made the night before, lying awake on Lou's guest bed, and she held to it as she held to everything once she'd decided, with a discipline that had frightened her own teammates for eleven years. She knew it was happening. You couldn't not know. By the time she got to the rink for morning skate the whole building was vibrating with it, phones out in the hallway, a clip already trending, somebody's screen glimpsed and then turned guiltily face-down when she walked past. Roxy Blaze had called a press conference in London and the entire sports world that had spent two days speculating was now watching something else entirely, and Dani moved through all of it in a bubble of refusal, eyes forward, earbuds in with nothing playing, and didn't look at a single screen.

Because she had a game that night. That’s what she clung to. There was a home game against Detroit at seven, and a game was the one place left in the world where the noise couldn't follow her, the one room with no phones, and she wasn't going to spend it half present, replaying a thing she couldn't change. She would play first. She would watch after, if she watched at all. The ice didn't care who'd held a press conference. The ice only cared whether the puck went in, and Dani knew how to give the ice the only thing it wanted.