Page 29 of Under the Spotlight

"You sound happy again," Vivienne said. "I'm choosing not to investigate why." A pause, the sound of her doing three things at once. "The Hollis event is locked. Next Saturday, the new gallery in Mayfair, you and Reeve, separate arrivals, shared car. I've smoothed everything over from the little tantrum about the twentieth. You'll thank me. It photographs like the soft launch of a very long, very lucrative story, and the timing is perfect with the album cycle we still need to discuss."

A week ago this would have started a war. Roxy had hung up on this exact woman over this exact event. And she sat in the gray London morning surrounded by handwritten pages and felt, instead of fury, a kind of cold clear calm, because somewhere over the last two months she had stopped being a person who fought Vivienne and started being a person who simply intended to leave, and the two felt nothing alike.

"Saturday," Roxy said. "Fine. Send me the dress."

The silence on the line was a fraction too long, and Roxy understood, in it, that her own easy fine had cost her something, that Vivienne had been braced for the fight and gotten agreement and that agreement had made her suspicious in a way refusal never could. Roxy had handed her a tell without meaning to. She heard Vivienne file it.

"That's it? No speech about being a person and not a product?"

"I'm tired, Viv. Send the dress." Roxy kept her voice flat and bored, the old register, the one that gave away nothing, and prayed it still worked on the woman who'd built it. "I'll be there."

She wouldn't be there. She had decided it in the space of the phone call, sitting on a hotel floor with ink on her hands, that she would say yes to every single thing Vivienne wanted between now and the moment she was free and mean not one word of any of it, that she was done spending her energy on no when yes bought her quiet and a clean exit. Let Vivienne think she'd won the gallery. Roxy would be six thousand miles away by Saturday, in Phoenix Ridge, and the empty space where she should have been standing next to Reeve would say everything she'd stopped being willing to say out loud to that woman.

She hung up and sat very still and noticed her heart was going hard, and noticed she was, despite all of it, smiling.

The smile faded slowly, though, because under the calm there was a cold thread she couldn't shake, and it was the memory of that fraction-too-long silence on the line. Vivienne didn't miss things. Vivienne had spent twenty-five years reading the gap between what an artist said and what an artist meant, and Roxy had just handed her an easy yes where a fight belonged, and somewhere in another hotel room a woman with cold blue eyes was now turning that over as she turned everything over, looking for the soft place to push. Roxy knew what compliance looked like to Vivienne. It looked like distraction. It looked like a woman whose attention had been captured by something off the board. And the only protection Roxy had ever had against that gaze was being too valuable and too compliant to question, and she'd just stopped being convincingly either. She told herself she had time. She told herself the gallery was Saturday and she'd be long gone and the worst Vivienne could do was be furious about a no-show. She didn't quite believe herself, but she wanted to be home so badly that she let the not-believing sink back down under the wanting, which was, she'd understand later, the most expensive thing she did that whole week.

Tilda let herself in at one with sandwiches and the wary look of a person who had been lying to a very dangerous woman on someone else's behalf for some time and was starting to feel it. She took in the room without comment, the lyric pages fanned across the floor and the bed and the desk, dozens of them, more songs than Roxy had produced in the previous three years combined, and she handed Roxy a sandwich and sat down on the floor across from her and made her eat half of it before she said anything real.

"Can I ask you something, and you don't perform the answer?"

"You can always ask me that," Roxy said. "I might still perform it. Old habit."

"Have you actually thought about what happens when Vivienne finds out?" Tilda wasn't unkind about it. She was the only person in Roxy's life who could ask the brutal thing gently. "Not if. When. She found you suspicious on a phone call just now, I could hear it from the hall. She is going to find out there's someone, and when she does she isn't going to sit Dani down for a nice talk. She is going to do what she does, which is make it a story she controls, and Dani is a private person. So. Have you thought about it? What it does to her?"

And there it was, the only question that actually scared Roxy, the one she'd been outrunning across two continents, said out loud at last by the one person allowed to say it. She set the sandwich down.

"Every hour," Roxy said quietly. "I think about it every hour. And then I think the only way to keep Vivienne from making us a story she controls is to take the story away from her before she gets it. Stop being controllable. Stop having a brand she can threaten me with." She looked at the pages all over the floor. "I used to be so scared of her finding out that I'd have done anything to stop it. Flown anywhere, smiled at anyone, dated whatever man they handed me. And somewhere in the last few weeks I just. Stopped. I stopped caring whether she finds out, Til, because the worst thing she can take from me is a life I already can't stand, and the thing I actually want she can't touch unless I keep handing her the leverage. So I'm going to stop handing it to her."

Tilda held her eyes a few seconds, and something in her face that had been braced for days let down a fraction. "Okay," she said. "Then I need you to know I'm with you. Whatever that ends up costing me. I've been telling myself I'm just covering, just buying you time, and that's a lie, I picked a side weeks ago, I just hadn't said it." She picked at the crust of her own sandwich. "She signs the bigger checks. I want it on the record that I know that and I'm choosing you anyway."

Roxy reached across the lyric pages and took her hand, and didn't make a joke, which was its own kind of confession from her.

After that it moved fast, as decisions do once she'd stopped negotiating with herself about them. She had Tilda cancel two press appearances, a radio breakfast thing and a magazine sit-down, with a story about her voice that nobody could disprove. And then, while Vivienne was believing Roxy was locked in for the whole leg and the gallery on Saturday, Roxy booked herself a commercial flight to the US and then a transfer to Phoenix Ridge, a real one, economy plus.

"You're going to fly commercial," Tilda said. "You. Coach. With the people."

"I'm going to put on your terrible gray beanie and glasses and a face full of nothing and sit in 24C and nobody is going to look twice at a tired woman in a hoodie, because nobody ever does, because the whole trick of me is the lights and the glamour, and there aren't going to be any lights or glamour.” Roxy was already pulling clothes into a bag, her own hands, no stylist, the first time in years she'd packed for herself. “I’m going to Phoenix Ridge. It feels like home to me now.” She stopped with a sweater half folded and felt the truth of it go all through her. "To her."

"She doesn't know you're coming?"

"No." Roxy thought about it. "Actually. Text her. Don't tell me what you say. Just make sure she's there when I land." She zipped the bag. "I want to walk in and find her. She did it to me in a hotel in London and I haven't stopped feeling it since. Let me give it back."

The flight was the strangest eight hours she'd spent in years, and she loved every dull minute of it. She hadn't flown commercial since she was sixteen. She'd forgotten the whole texture of it, the gate full of ordinary exhausted people, the announcements, the man beside her who slept with his mouth open and his elbow over the armrest and never once glanced at her face, the flight attendant who handed her a cup of bad coffee and a packet of pretzels with the flat boredom of someone working down a line of identical nobodies. Nobody filmed her. Nobody asked for anything. Nobody adjusted their own posture because she'd entered the frame. She sat in 24C in Tilda's beanie eating airline pretzels and felt, with a kind of stunned gratitude, completely unremarkable, a sensation she had been chasing in therapists' offices and panic attacks and two solid years of misery, and it turned out you could just buy it for the price of a coach ticket if you were willing to take off the lights first. She watched a bad movie with no sound. She wrote four more lines on the back of the safety card. She was, for eight hours over the dark Atlantic, nobody's product, and she'd never been happier to be no one.

She eventually landed in Phoenix Ridge at dusk, and the trick worked exactly as she'd promised it would, the whole long humiliating ordinary slog of commercial flights passing without a single person recognizing the most photographed woman in the country slumped in a middle seat in a borrowed beanie hoodie and glasses with her face turned to the window. No car. No Tilda waiting on the curb. She rented something anonymous at the counter with a card in a name that wasn't hers and she drove herself out of the airport into the early dark, and she felt, gripping the unfamiliar wheel, more like Roxana Halliday than she had in years, a girl from Florida driving a cheap rental toward a person who wanted her for nothing.

She parked a block from the rental, as Dani always did. She walked the last of it with her coat collar up and her breath clouding and her heart beating high and quick, up the alley, up the back stair, to the door of the only place in the world the machine couldn't find her, and she found the lit window, and her hands were shaking and not from the cold. She let herself in quietly.

The kitchen light was on. And there, leaning against the counter with a dish towel over one shoulder and the unbearable look of a woman who'd been told to be somewhere and had no idea yet exactly why, gray eyes coming up to the door and going wide, was Dani, home, real, here, six thousand miles from the loading dock where Roxy had watched her drive away. And Roxy stood in the doorway and felt the whole counterfeit decade of her life fall away. And she couldn't, for the second time that week, find a single thing to say.

18

Dani had been running on borrowed fuel for three days and she knew it.

She'd come back from London on no sleep and a body clock turned inside out and gone straight into a game the next night and won it, thirty saves, and the night after that won another, and in between she'd been louder and quicker with the team than she'd been in years, cracking jokes in the gear room that made Lex squint at her like she'd been replaced by a friendlier model. None of them knew she'd been on another continent forty-eight hours earlier. None of them knew she was running on the memory of a hotel suite and the certainty of nothing, because Roxy had had to delay for six more days over there and Dani had six more days of this, of being a goalie and a liar and a woman counting, and she'd decided the only way through six days was to not stop moving. So she didn't stop. She practiced hard and played hard and laughed too easily and lied to everyone she loved, and she told herself it was fine, it was manageable, she'd done harder things than miss somebody.

The lying was the part that wore on her. She'd built a whole life on being sparing with words so she'd never have to spend any of them on falsehoods, and now she was spending them by the handful, a steady low traffic of small untruths to keep the big true thing safe. Where'd you go on the off-day. Detroit. Why're you so cheerful lately? Slept well for once. You seeing anybody? Dani had let that one sit and then said, no, same as ever, to Elise of all people, calm Elise who'd clocked her loneliness for years and had asked it gently over tape in the gear room, and the no had come out smooth and easy and Dani had felt it curdle in her chest the second it was past her teeth. She wasn't built for this. Roxy could carry a public lie for a decade without it touching her sleep, it was practically her trade, but Dani was a person who'd organized her entire existence around not performing, and the performing was starting to cost her in a currency she'd never had to count before. She kept telling herself it was temporary. She kept telling herself there'd come a day when she didn't have to choose between the truth and the woman, and that the day was coming soon, and she was right about that, though not in any of the ways she meant.