Page 2 of Under the Spotlight

Every single one of them except one.

She stood at the edge of the cluster, taller than the women around her, dark hair pulled back so tight it looked drawn on. Team colors, hands quiet, weight settled evenly on both feet like she could stand there until the building came down around her. And she was looking at her phone. Not sneaking a glance. Not torn between the screen and the show. She was reading something, thumb moving, like she'd forgotten there was a room around her at all. Like the stage and the noise and Roxy Blaze in a thousand-watt spotlight were all happening somewhere off to the side of whatever had her attention.

For one absurd second Roxy wanted to walk to the lip of the stage and ask her what was so good on her phone. Ten years of drawing every eye in every building, and here was a hockey player who'd found something better than her on a four-inch screen.

Roxy missed the cue.

It was a small thing. A held breath where a word should have gone, recovered before the band even felt it, and she was a professional and her mouth caught the next line clean. Nobody in twenty thousand people would ever know. But it cracked through her own chest like a dropped glass, the strangest little jolt, and through the rest of the song some back room of her brain stayed in the wings with the woman who hadn't looked up.

She finished on instinct. She took her bows, three of them, arms wide, blowing the kiss that was probably in her contract somewhere if you read the fine print, and let Tilda fold a hand around her elbow and steer her off into the dark.

"That was good," Tilda said, walking fast, eyes on her tablet. "You ran nine seconds long, nobody cares. Photo line's queued. The owner wants a shot, the donors want six, then we go."

The photo line was a smiling firing squad. Roxy stepped into it and did what she did, gave them an arm here, a tilt of the chin there, two hundred watts of warmth she could pour out of herself and feel nothing draining. A man in a tuxedo told her his daughter loved her. A woman gripped her hand in both of hers and said something about hope. Roxy thanked them and meant a version of it. This was the other thing she was good at, maybe even best at; being wanted without it costing the wanter and giving her nothing back. She'd been a mirror so long she sometimes wondered if there was any silver left behind the glass. The wanting in these rooms ran one direction and always had. People reached for her and came away holding a photograph, and not one of them had ever cost her a thing, which was, she was only now starting to understand, the whole problem.

Halfway down the line she stopped.

"Tilda." She kept the smile on for the room. "I need five minutes."

Tilda's eyes came up off the tablet, sharp. "We don't have five minutes. We have a flight."

"Then I'm taking five of the flight's minutes." Roxy was already turning, already peeling off down the first dark corridor she saw, the one with the EXIT sign and the smell of cold concrete and somebody's burnt coffee. "Tell them I'm changing. Tell them anything."

"Roxy—"

She didn't stop.

She found her near the exit door.

The hockey player from the wings stood at the end of the corridor with one hand on the push-bar, halfway to gone, and Roxy knew, with the same instinct that found every camera in every room, that in about four seconds that door would shut and that would be that. So she did something she hadn't done on purpose in years. She crossed the space fast and put her hand on the woman's elbow.

The woman turned. Up close her eyes were gray, calm, and they moved over Roxy's face once and registered exactly who she was and didn't change at all. She was taller than Roxy by a couple of inches, and she held a stillness Roxy only ever saw in people who were very good at something physical, a banked and unhurried quality, like motion she was choosing not to spend. Roxy was abruptly, stupidly aware of her own heartbeat.

"Sorry." She let go of the elbow. "Sorry. Hi. I'm Roxy."

"I know who you are." Not unkind. Just true.

"You weren't watching me.” It came out before she could dress it up, and God, it sounded like something a child would say. "During the show. You were the only person back there who wasn't watching."

The woman considered her. The push-bar creaked under her hand. "Did you need everyone to be watching?"

"No," Roxy said, and then, honestly, "yes. Apparently." She laughed at herself, short. "What's your name?"

"Dani."

"Dani what?"

"Petrovic." She let it sit a second. "I play for the team. Goalie."

"Dani Petrovic." Roxy turned the name over once. "What was on your phone, Dani Petrovic? Because I've been doing this for ten years, and I've never once watched someone not watch me, and I'd genuinely like to know what beat me."

Something moved at the corner of Dani's mouth, there and gone, not quite a smile. "My brother sent a picture of his kid. He lost a tooth."

"That's it?"

"He's four. It's a big deal." Dani pushed the bar an inch, and the cold leaked in around the edge of the door.

Roxy couldn't remember the last time she'd stood in a hallway and simply talked to someone who wanted nothing off her, no photo, no favor, no piece to carry home and sell. It was such a small thing. It felt like finding a door in a wall she'd been leaning against for years without knowing it was there.