Page 9 of Under the Spotlight

Dani looked at the cup. She didn't say thank you, because thank you would have meant saying something about how it was exactly right, and saying that would have meant standing in a studio and admitting out loud that it had done something to her, and she wasn't going to do either of those things. She pressed the lid back down. She nodded once, at Roxy's back, where Roxy couldn't see it, and she carried a coffee she hadn't asked for out to her car with her whole hand wrapped around the warmth of it the entire way.

She set the empty cup on her kitchen counter that night and didn't throw it out.

She should have eaten. Instead she opened her laptop at the counter and did the exact thing she'd promised herself in the car she wasn't going to do, which was type Roxy's name into the music app and let it pull up the whole catalog. Ten years of it, album after album, the covers getting glossier and emptier as the dates climbed up toward now. She put on the famous single, the one even she knew, and it was good in the way that a thing gets good when a hundred people have sanded every corner off it, bright and enormous and built for a stadium, and it told her nothing at all about the woman who'd stood half a step in front of her for two hours smelling like clean hair and something else that was affecting her more deeply than she wanted to admit.

Then she scrolled all the way back to the start, to a track from before the machine got its hands on the production, and the voice on it was younger and rougher and alone in a small room, and the song was about wanting a thing so badly you'd let it cost you everything. Dani listened to all of it with her arms crossed over her chest. It was, she thought, the only honest thing she'd heard come out of Roxy Blaze, except it wasn't, because there had been some moments that afternoon that had been honest too, and that was the trouble.

The trouble was that Dani knew how to handle a person who wanted something from her. She had years of practice. You found the angle, you stayed square, you let them come and you didn't bite. She had no idea what to do with a person who looked like she wanted nothing except to find out what was true about her, what was real under all the rest, because that kind didn't come at you from the front where you could see it and set yourself. It came in sideways. In a coffee order. In a question nobody else had ever thought to ask.

She shut the laptop hard, like a lid on a pot, and went to take a shower she didn't need to wash off a day that hadn't dirtied her.

Dani was in bed with the light off when her phone buzzed on the nightstand.

An unknown number. A single line.

That coffee was a guess. Did I get it right? — R.

Dani lay in the dark and read it. She read it again. She read it four times, and somewhere in the middle of that the small careful thing she'd built her whole adult life out of told her, very clearly, that the correct move was nothing. No reply. Because a guess was the tell. A guess was what a person made when they hadn't asked someone at all, when they'd stood at a cart and tried to picture what you'd want and then lied about it to your face so it wouldn't look like they'd been paying that kind of attention. That was worse than getting it wrong. Getting it wrong you could forget. This was somebody deciding to learn her, on purpose, and being decided about Dani Petrovic had cost her everything she had once, and she had built a whole quiet life on the back of swearing it would never get the chance again.

And still her thumb itched toward the phone where it lay face-down. Five words back would have done it. It's right. Or Yes. Or anything at all that wasn't silence. Roxy had guessed (or more likely had her assistant research) Dani’s coffee order, and admitted she'd guessed, and asked plainly whether she'd gotten it right. Lying there in the quiet, the not-answering didn't feel like safety. It felt like the start of something she was going to regret in a way she couldn't yet afford.

She knew what the safe thing was.

She locked the phone and laid it face-down on the nightstand, screen to the wood, and she didn't reply, and she lay awake a long time in a quiet that for once didn't feel like the point of anything.

5

Roxy woke at seven all at once, the body of a woman who'd been getting up for call times since she was a child, and the first thing she did, before water, before the curtains, before she was properly a person yet, was reach for her phone and check whether Dani had text back.

She hadn't.

The text sat there exactly where Roxy had left it, delivered and unanswered, That coffee was a guess. Did I get it right? with no gray bubble under it and no dots and nothing at all, and Roxy lay in the enormous hotel bed and looked at her own message and felt, of all the stupid things, embarrassed. She'd built a career, an empire, an entire human brand on being the one who got reached for. People wrote songs about wanting her. People got married to her songs. And a hockey goalie in Phoenix Ridge had read one text, decided it didn't require an answer, and gone to sleep, and meanwhile lying awake at seven a.m. in a thousand-dollar bed refreshing a thread of one was Roxy Blaze, net worth obscene, most eligible woman in pop three years running.

There was a lesson in it somewhere. She suspected the lesson was that she had spent ten years confusing being wanted with being known, and that a stranger had accidentally laid a finger on the exact seam where the two came apart.

It was, she thought, probably very good for her. She didn't think it for long.

"Tilda." Roxy padded out into the suite in a hotel robe, hair everywhere, and found Tilda already at the little desk with a laptop and a coffee and the alert stillness of a person who'd been up two hours. "The London flight. Can we push it a day?"

Tilda didn't look up from the screen. "We pushed it a day on Tuesday. And again Thursday."

"So this'll be easy. You've had the practice."

"Vivienne's assistant has started calling me directly to ask why you're still in a hockey town." Now Tilda looked up, and one eyebrow went up with her. "What do I tell her?"

"Tell her the foundation wants the ambassador at the home opener tonight. It's good optics, the ambassador shows up to the actual games. That part's even true." Roxy dropped onto the couch. "I'm the ambassador. I should go to a game."

"You have never been to a hockey game in your life."

"Then it's about time, isn't it? I want to support women’s sport and that means showing up for games.” Roxy picked a grape off the plate she still wasn't going to eat and didn't meet Tilda's eyes, which answered the question, and Tilda let the silence run on a moment to make sure Roxy heard herself in it, then went back to the laptop and started moving a flight.

"One day," Tilda said. "I can buy you one day. After that Vivienne flies someone out, and it won't be to bring you a smoothie."

"One day's plenty," Roxy said, and almost believed it.

The truth, which she wouldn't be handing to Tilda or to anyone, was that she didn't want to get on the plane. London was sold-out arenas and a hotel that looked like every other hotel and ten days of being the most wanted woman in a country that had never once seen her actual face. Phoenix Ridge held the enigma that was Dani Petrovic, completely unfazable, those cool gray eyes that looked straight through her, and Roxy couldn't for the life of her explain why Phoenix Ridge had begun to feel like the only place she could breathe.

Astoria Shepry's box hung over center ice like the prow of a ship, glass on three sides, and from it the whole bowl of the arena opened up below, thousands of seats filling in, the ice a long clean rectangle of white under the lights. Roxy stood at the glass in something tailored and photographable and let a sequence of donors shake her hand, and gave them the smile, and said how excited she was about the partnership, and meant about four percent of it.