Page 16 of Under the Spotlight

"Goodnight, Roxy," she said.

"Goodnight, Dani." Roxy stepped into the elevator. The doors started to close on her tired, unguarded, almost-smiling face. Her startlingly beautiful green eyes had a lightness to them behind the tiredness. "For the record," she said, just before they shut, "that's the most real anyone has been with me in about ten years."

The doors closed. Dani stood alone in the gray lobby a moment. Then she took the stairs back up to her own floor, let herself into her own room, and lay down on top of the covers in her hoodie, and she didn't sleep. For the first time in seven years, the not-sleeping didn't feel like something being kept out. It felt like something that had finally been let in.

9

The storm blew itself out by ten in the morning, as the worst ones did, all that violence overnight and then a sky scrubbed thin and innocent, like nothing at all had happened in the night. Roxy stood at the hotel window with a coffee she hadn't ordered and watched the plows scrape the last of it off the regional runway. Three floors down, a hockey team in matching travel coats funneled onto a bus. And somewhere in that dark stream of women was the one who'd sat across a diner booth from her at two in the morning and handed Roxy the inside of herself like it was nothing, like it was just a thing you did, while the snow came down.

She hadn't slept. She wasn't tired. That was the strange part, the part she kept turning over while Tilda repacked her one carry-on, fast and sure, having done it in forty cities. Roxy had spent two years tired past what sleep could touch, a bone-level depletion that no amount of hotel blackout curtain ever fixed, and she'd come off a sleepless night in a beige airport hotel feeling, of all the impossible things, awake. Lit from somewhere she'd forgotten she had a switch for.

"You're humming," Tilda said, not looking up from the carry-on.

"I'm not."

"You were humming. It's what you do when you've written something. I haven't heard it in about two years and I've decided not to ask." She zipped the bag. "Wheels up in forty. The team's chartering back too, same window. Astoria's people offered to let you ride with them again. I told them you'd take the jet."

Roxy turned from the window. "No."

Tilda's hands went still on the bag. "No?"

"Put me on the charter. Ambassador coverage. The brand alongside the players." Roxy heard herself say it and heard exactly how thin it had worn, the same cover she'd run twice now, a sentence with the meaning sanded off it. "It's good optics. I rough it with the team after a road win. People like that."

"People." Tilda held the look a moment past comfortable, the flat assessing one she did so rarely that it always meant something, the look of a woman weighing a risk she wasn't being paid enough to manage. Then she pulled out her tablet and started moving the day around, because that was the whole arrangement between them, that Tilda would carry whatever Roxy handed her and ask the bare minimum about its contents, and the minimum, this morning, was nothing. "Charter it is. You'll be three rows up from where you were yesterday. Try to contain yourself."

She didn't turn around once.

That was the discipline of the whole grim hour, sitting in a window seat three rows ahead of a woman she could feel behind her like a held match, with her reading glasses on and an unread script of lyrics open on her phone and her spine very straight, not turning around. Because turning around would be something the whole plane could see. Because Astoria had said the word tabloid across a desk and meant it, and because Roxy had said back, with a violence that still surprised her, that she would never, and a vow like that wasn't worth the breath it took if she couldn't sit through one flight without giving them both away to a cabin full of hockey players.

The cabin smelled like cold coffee and hockey gear and the dry recycled air of a chartered plane. Behind her the team was loud in the easy way of women who'd won on the road, somebody narrating a card game, Frankie's laugh carrying over the engines, a whole warm ordinary world Roxy was three rows and one impossible secret removed from. She'd headlined arenas on six continents and she couldn't remember the last time she'd been near a roomful of people who were happy and not performing it for her benefit. She kept her eyes forward and let the sound of it wash up against the back of her neck.

So she looked at the clouds, which had nothing to teach her, and she thought about the diner. About the way Dani's voice had caught, just once, on one word, on comments, a small hard hitch in an otherwise flat recitation, and how Roxy's whole body had moved toward it before she'd decided anything, her hand starting across six inches of laminate, an instinct, reaching, and how Dani had looked at the hand and Roxy had drawn it back. The not-touching had been the loudest thing in the room. She'd lived a decade inside the most touched, most photographed, most reached-for body in pop music, hands on her at every airport and every rope line, and not one of those millions of contacts had cost her or given her a fraction of what it had cost to not touch one tired goalie across a table in the dark.

She wrote four lines about it in her head somewhere over Lake Huron and didn't let herself reach for the phone to save them, because saving them was a thing she could do later, alone, behind two more layers of a hidden folder, and right now she had a posture to maintain. When the plane landed she let Tilda steer her off first, down the jet bridge and into the private car before the team had even stood, and she didn't look back at the cabin. And she got exactly one thing for her trouble, a single text, twenty minutes into the drive, from the number she still hadn't saved and knew by heart.

Glad you made it back. — D

Four words. A weather report. Anyone could have read it over her shoulder and found nothing in it. Roxy read it as she read everything from this woman now, like a coded transmission from a country whose language she was learning by immersion, and what it said, under the weather, was I watched you not turn around. I know what it cost you. I noticed.

She didn't write back from the car. You didn't, she was learning, answer this woman fast. Speed was a tell, and they were both, in their separate ways, professionals at not telling.

The suite that evening was too big and too clean and too quiet, as they all were, a thousand square feet of beige no one would ever live in, and Roxy paced it. She'd ordered food she wasn't eating. She'd turned on the television and turned it off. She'd stood on the balcony in the cold looking at the lit grid of a parking structure she had, against all reason, come to find more beautiful than any skyline the job had ever flown her to, and somewhere in the second hour of all this circling she stopped in the middle of the room and understood what she was doing, which was working up the nerve.

"Tilda." She said it to the room, and Tilda appeared in the connecting doorway in sock feet with a highlighter behind her ear. "I need you to find me somewhere to stay that isn't a hotel."

Tilda waited.

"Small. A rental. A house, an apartment, I don't care. Off the books, not under my name, not anything anyone would think to look at. Somewhere I can come and go without a lobby and a valet and four cameras clocking every time the door opens." Roxy kept her voice level, made it a logistics request, the kind she made a hundred times a year, hair people and car people and a private room at a restaurant. "Somewhere quiet."

"Somewhere quiet," Tilda repeated. She didn't write it down. She looked at Roxy across the beige expanse of the suite, twenty-six years old and already fluent in every dialect of trouble her job had to offer, and Roxy watched her arrive, in real time, at the only conclusion the request supported, and watched her decide not to say it. "How long do you need it?"

"I don't know."

"Right." Tilda took the highlighter from behind her ear and turned it over in her fingers. "You understand that the second I rent a place in Phoenix Ridge that isn't a hotel, I'm not your assistant anymore, I'm the person who knew about what is going on. That's a different job. It has different exposure. If this goes the way these things go, I'm the name in the deposition."

"I know."

"I'm not saying no." Tilda put the highlighter down on the console table, which was, from her, a kind of signing. "I'm saying I want it on the record between us that I knew what I was renting. So that later, whatever later is, you can't tell me you protected me by keeping me out of it. I hate being protected. It's condescending and it's usually a lie." She already had the tablet up. "Two bedrooms or one?"