Page 5 of Under the Spotlight

The drive home was twenty minutes of wet streetlight and she couldn't have told you a thing about it after. Her mind kept running the same loop, the office and the small turn of the phone and her name in Astoria's mouth. She requested you, Dani. She stopped for gas she didn't need, just to stand in the cold under the canopy a minute and not be anywhere.

By the time she let herself into her apartment that night the city had gone dark and quiet six floors down, and she turned the deadbolt all the way, every night the same, until it seated with a sound she could feel in her teeth. Some people thought a lock was about keeping other people out. For Dani it had always been simpler. The bolt was the sound of the day ending, of the part where she had to be a person other people could look at finally closing down for the night. On this side of it nobody needed her to be calm, or reliable, or fine.

The apartment was clean and spare and hers. No one had ever been inside it but her. She'd lived there four years and the only thing on the walls was a calendar.

She ate standing at the counter, leaning on her forearms over the bowl, as she'd eaten her whole life, because that was how you ate in a house where affection came as a plate set down in front of you without comment. Her mother fed people. Her father fixed their cars. Nobody in Dani's family had ever once said the word love out loud, and she had never doubted it for a second, and somewhere along the way she'd decided that was the right amount of saying and built the rest of her life to that specification. Her brothers still called on birthdays. Her mother still mailed her clippings about Yugoslav kids coming up through the men's leagues, in actual envelopes, with no note. It was a good family. It had taught her that the people who loved you showed up and fixed your transmission and didn't make a production of it. It hadn't, in eighteen years under that roof, taught her one single thing about what to do when somebody did make a production of wanting you. She'd had to learn that part on her own, later, and she'd learned it badly enough that she'd never needed the lesson twice.

And now there was going to be a camera. That was the thing that kept snagging behind her ribs the whole way home, and it wasn't Roxy Blaze, exactly. It was the camera. A lens and a lighting rig and a stranger telling her where to put her hands, all of it pointed at her face for a few hours so the team could sell a season. Most people got their picture taken and thought nothing of it. Dani had had her picture taken once, a long time ago, in a way she had never agreed to, and she'd built an entire adult life out of making sure it never happened that way again. A promo shoot wasn't that. She knew a promo shoot wasn't that. Her body hadn't gotten the memo.

She rinsed the bowl. She should have gone to bed.

Instead she stood at the counter with her phone and typed three words into it before she could talk herself out of them. Roxy Blaze relationship.

The screen filled. Magazine spreads, a red carpet, a long-lensed shot of the singer and some square-jawed man climbing out of a car with his hand at the small of her back. Pop's most eligible. Inside Roxy and Reeve. Is Blaze finally settling down? Dani read two of them all the way through, standing there, and learned that Roxy Blaze was twenty-seven and unattached and photographed once a week on the arm of a different beautiful man, and that the whole engine of her ran on her staying available, on being a thing the world got to keep wanting.

She thought about a beautiful woman in a hallway asking what was on her phone like the answer mattered to her.

She thought about how good people got, in Dani's experience, at wanting the version of you that was useful to them, and how rarely it was the actual you underneath, and how much it cost to learn the difference after the fact instead of before.

None of it fit together. The beautiful woman in the hallway and the international superstar in the car with a stranger's hand at her back couldn't be the same person, and Dani knew better than most how easily one human being could be two, how much practice it took, how good you could get at being whatever the room had paid to see. She just hadn't planned on spending a Tuesday night wondering which of the two had asked for her.

She closed the phone and laid it face-down on the counter and stood in her own quiet kitchen and told herself the only thing there was to tell herself, which was that it was a shoot. A few hours. She would be professional, and polite, and forgettable, and then Roxy Blaze would take her brand and her square-jawed men and her hand at the small of someone's back and go be the loudest woman in the country somewhere Dani wasn't.

She believed it most of the way to the bedroom.

3

She should have been over the Atlantic by now.

That had been the plan in the car after the gala, the plan that lived on Tilda's tablet, the plan that put her in London by morning for three days of appearances she couldn't remember agreeing to. Instead Roxy had stood in the hotel lobby at one in the morning with her bag already gone up to a suite and told Tilda to hold the flight. The team wanted to fast-track the ambassador deal. The ambassador deal was a good reason. It was even, in the parts she let herself examine, partly true.

So here she was two days later, in a corner suite on the eleventh floor of a Phoenix Ridge hotel. Floor-to-ceiling windows. A view of a parking structure and a slice of mountain going pink behind it. A fruit plate she hadn't touched, because some things followed you everywhere, and a quiet that pressed against the glass like weather.

The phone sat in the middle of the coffee table on speaker, and Vivienne's voice came out of it flat and efficient and four thousand miles away. It was always like this now, Vivienne a voice on a table in whatever city, the most constant relationship of Roxy's adult life conducted entirely through speakerphones and time zones. They hadn't stood in the same room in nine weeks. Roxy couldn't have named the last real conversation between them that wasn't a schedule. She had once thought of Vivienne as something near family, back in the years when family was a thing Roxy was short on, and maybe that was the cruelest beam in the whole structure, that the woman who'd built the cage had for a long time also been the warmest thing inside it.

"Clause eight is the morals language, standard, you've signed it a hundred times. Clause nine is the exclusivity window, they can't run your image against a competing brand for the season. Clause eleven." A pause, the sound of a page turning. "Clause eleven is ours. The publicity standards. It restates the personal-conduct expectations from the master agreement."

"The single one," Roxy said.

"The personal-conduct expectations," Vivienne said, in the voice she used when she didn't like a word you'd chosen and intended to keep using her own until you gave up. "Yes."

Roxy lay back on the couch with one arm over her eyes. Tilda was somewhere behind her, quiet, doing the thing she did where she made herself part of the furniture so the call would forget she was in the room.

"You'll want to move on this today," Vivienne went on. "They've got the press release drafted, they want to announce before the home opener. I've had legal red-line it. It's clean."

"Fine."

"I'm sending it to Tilda now. Sign where she shows you."

The tablet appeared over Roxy's shoulder, held in Tilda's careful hands, the document already scrolled to the bottom, a soft gray box waiting for her finger. Roxy looked at it. Forty pages she hadn't read above the line where her name went, as she hadn't read the last one, or the one before that. There had been a year, at the start, when she read every word. She'd been seventeen and certain that if she just understood the paper she would understand the trap, and she'd read them all the way through with a highlighter, hunting the one sentence nobody had told her about, until she finally understood the thing the highlighter couldn't fix, which was that understanding a trap and being able to walk out of it aren't the same skill. After that, reading them only meant you got to watch yourself sign.

She'd been sixteen when her mother signed the first one and seventeen when the second made her a global product, and somewhere past nineteen she had stopped being able to find the seam between Roxana Halliday, who'd wanted this so badly she would have signed anything, and Roxy Blaze, the global superstar. Roxy had only wanted to be wanted. She'd gotten her wish at a scale that would have frightened her if a single adult in the room had been honest about the exchange rate. You traded the private version of yourself for the public one, the whole of it, every room, and the trade came with no buyback clause. She had read enough contracts to know that much.

She signed. Her finger dragged a gray scrawl across the glass that looked nothing like a signature and meant she had agreed to a season.

"Done," Tilda said into the phone, and took the tablet away.

"Good." Paper again. "Now. The Reeve dates. The gallery opening is the twenty-second, the premiere's the Thursday after. He'll route through wherever you are. You'll arrive separately, leave together, the usual. Wear the green if you still have it. It photographs like you're happy."