Page 11 of Under the Spotlight

6

The texts came every few days for three weeks, and Dani read every one of them and answered none, which she told herself was a position and not a problem.

Three weeks. Twelve texts, maybe thirteen. She could have told you the count, and that was its own piece of evidence, because Dani Petrovic didn't keep a running count of things that didn't matter to her. She had deleted exactly none of them. She'd thought about blocking the number like a door she had no intention of walking through, just to know the lock still worked, and hadn't done it, and the not-blocking went in the same drawer as the not-answering, two halves of a thing she wasn't ready to address.

They were never what she braced for. She braced for pushy. She braced for famous, for messages that assumed they'd be answered, and instead they came in small and dry and easy to live with, from a beautiful woman who intrigued her.

The coffee was right and you know it. Your silence has a smug quality.

Sang to forty thousand people in Berlin tonight. Some of them cried. You'd have read your phone.

There's a dog in the lobby of this hotel with cool gray eyes that doesn't care who I am and I respect him enormously. Reminds me of someone.

Won a thing last night. Held a heavy gold object. Thought about the angle of a top-corner shot the whole time I was meant to be grateful. This is your fault.

And then, three days ago, the one that got past her guard, the one she'd read more times than she would ever admit to a living soul.

It's fine if you never write back. I told you that and I meant it. I like you and I'd just rather talk to a wall I picked than a room full of people who picked me.

Dani read them in the dark at the end of long days and still didn’t answer even though sometimes she thought about what she might text back, if she had been going to text back, which she wasn’t.

This morning, game day, she ran her routine. Same skates, same tape, same playlist, the ice empty and gray-blue and hers for forty minutes, except the quiet she went out there to find had developed a leak somewhere. A leak that looked a lot like Roxy’s intense green eyes and earnest look.

She was lacing up in the gear room when a roll of tape bounced off the side of her head.

"She lives," Lex Landry said, from across the room, tattooed arms crossed, grinning the grin she used right before she made your day worse. "I was starting to think we'd have to check you for a pulse. You've been weird for three weeks, Petrovic. Weirder. Weird-for-you, which is a category most people can't even comprehend."

"I haven't been weird."

"You reorganized the medical-kit shelf on Tuesday. You don't even use the medical kit, you've never been hurt in your life, you're not a real person." Lex pointed at her. "Something's going on in there and I want it on the record that I noticed first."

"Nothing's going on." Dani threw the tape back. It hit Lex in the chest. "Go bother Camille."

"Camille's no fun, she's happy." Lex unfolded and went, because that was the thing about Lex, she pushed exactly to the edge of something and then let you keep it, which was a kind of decency dressed up as not caring. "Shut Boston out tonight and I'll forget I saw anything."

"I always shut Boston out. I shut everyone out.”

"God, you're insufferable," Lex said, admiringly, and left her to it.

The thing about Lex was that she was right, and the thing about a team was that they saw you, all of them, all the time. Year after year of the same faces in the same room. You could keep a secret from the whole watching world for an entire career and still not keep one from the women who watched you tape your stick every morning. They'd clocked it weeks ago, whatever it was. They were just waiting, with the rough patience of people who loved you and would sooner take a slapshot to the mask than say so, for Dani to catch up and clock it too.

Her phone lit on the bench while she was taping her stick. Not a text this time. The pre-game note from the front office, the same one that went to all of them, the suite manifest and the night's logistics, and three lines down in it, in the cold gray font of an internal email, the thing that made her stomach do the drop it had been refusing to do all day.

Owner's box, it read. A. Shepry, M. Scott, four foundation guests. And last on the line, plain as anything, R. Blaze.

R. Blaze. Back. After three weeks of texting from Berlin and London and wherever the heavy gold objects lived, Roxy Blaze had flown back to Phoenix Ridge to sit in a glass box and watch Dani play a regular-season game against Boston, and the note said it plainly, like it was nothing, just another name on a list of people who'd be in the building.

Dani read it twice. She locked the phone and set it face-down on the bench, screen to the wood, and she finished taping her stick, and her hands were steady, because her hands were always steady, that was the entire job. Then she put her gear on, piece by piece in the order she always put it on, and went out to play hockey, which was the one thing in her life that had never once asked her how she was feeling about it.

She was a wall.

She'd been good for three weeks, perfectly reliable, the same Dani Petrovic who always showed up, but tonight something in her went past good and out the other side, and she felt it happen in the first period and rode it the whole way. Boston was a heavy team, a forechecking team, the kind that crashed your net and made it ugly, and Dani let them come. She let all of it come. The traffic and the screens and the tips and the rebounds, the whole loud chaos of it, and out there in the blue paint it went quiet, really quiet, the quiet it almost never managed anymore, because for sixty minutes she had a thing to do with her body that left no room for the rest of it.

There was something she had never tried to explain to anyone, because there were no words for it that didn't sound deranged, which was that the crease was the only place she had ever felt completely safe. Not calm. Safe. Out there with rubber coming at her face all night, with grown women crashing the paint and trying to put her through the back of her own net, Dani had never once been afraid, because out there the danger was honest. It came from the front. You could see it coming and you could set yourself and meet it. It was every other room in her life that scared her, the ones where the danger came dressed as a kindness, as a coffee order, as a woman in a glass box who'd flown across an ocean to watch her play. She'd have stayed in the crease all night if they would have let her.

She didn't look at the box. Not once. She knew exactly where it was but she didn’t look. She kept her eyes on the puck and the points and the next shot and she didn't look, and the not-looking for Roxy was its own kind of looking, and she knew that too.

Boston threw thirty-four pucks at her. None went in. In the third period they pulled their goalie and came at her six skaters to five for two solid minutes, and Dani stood on her head, post to post, a glove save and a pad stack and one off the goal line she had no business reaching and reached, the post ringing under her shoulder, the crowd a wall of sound she registered only as pressure on her back. Her whole body was a held breath for two minutes. She read the pucks off sticks before the sticks moved, as she'd been able to since she was a kid, the one thing she'd been born with and then spent twenty years sharpening, and Boston couldn't solve her, and across the ice a glass box was very probably coming apart and Dani gave it nothing, not one glance, she gave all of it to the puck. And then the horn went, and the building came apart, and she let her teammates pile into her and pound her mask and yell into her ear, and through all of it she didn't lift her eyes to the glass box where she could feel, like a sunburn, exactly one person watching her.