Page 32 of Under the Spotlight

The first call went straight to voicemail. The second too. She typed a text with her thumbs shaking so hard she had to fix it twice, it's not what they're saying, none of it is real, please pick up, please, I can explain all of it, and watched it sit there with no delivery. She sent another, and another, and watched them all hang there gray and undelivered, and refreshed, and refreshed, like pressing a bruise to confirm it's real. And then the little word appeared under the last one that told her what had happened. Not Delivered. Not Read. Nothing. The line had gone dead because the number on the other end had blocked it.

And then, a second before the block finished closing, one last message came through from Dani, sent in the seconds before she shut the door, and it was short, and it was clean, and it was the most devastating thing Roxy had ever read.

I saw the photos. And the thing about you and Reeve. I can't be the woman they make me into to protect that story, and I can't watch you stand next to him. I've done this once. I won't do it again. Please don't come to the rink or the apartment. Let it be over. I'm sorry, Roxana.

Roxana. She'd ended it with the name. The real one, the secret one, the one that meant I see the actual you, the one she'd said into the dark like a vow, and she'd used it to say goodbye, and that was the thing that took Roxy's legs out from under her, that Dani had reached past everything the world was screaming about Roxy Blaze and said goodbye to Roxana Halliday, the only person who'd ever gotten to keep her. Roxy read it twice. Then she sat down on the floor of the rental with her back against the bed and couldn't, for a while, do anything at all.

I've done this once. I won't do it again. That was the line that kept going through her, because Roxy knew exactly what it meant, knew the whole shape of the wound it came from. Seven years ago a woman Dani had trusted with the private fact of her had sold it to a blog for a payout, had turned the most undefended thing about her into a headline, and Dani had survived it the only way she knew how, by closing every door and never opening another one for seven years, until Roxy.

Then Roxy had spent a winter coaxing her out from behind those doors one careful inch at a time. Being known isn't the same as being used, Roxy had promised her, not in those words but in every dawn and every real name and every song hidden in a folder, I will never be the one who does that to you. And then Roxy's own world, Roxy's own manager, Roxy's own glittering machine, had done the very thing Roxy swore would never reach her. It had taken Dani's most guarded self and pinned it grainy and long-lens to the front of every tabloid in the country, and proved the lesson Dani had spent seven years living by exactly, brutally right. Being known was being used. Roxy had been the proof against it and now she was the proof for it. No wonder Dani had run. Roxy would have run from herself too.

She thought she might be sick. She sat on the cold floor and breathed and didn't let herself dial Tilda back with the wild useless plan already forming, because a plan built on this much guilt would be a plan about Roxy, about absolving Roxy, and Dani didn't need Roxy to feel better. Dani needed the lie taken apart at the root. Those weren't the same thing, and Roxy made herself sit there until she could tell them apart.

Her phone rang in her hand and she answered it without looking, hoping past sense, and it wasn't Dani. It was Astoria Shepry.

"Don't talk," Astoria said, not unkindly, in the low even voice of a woman who ran a building full of crises for a living. "Listen. I've already spoken to Dani this morning. She came to me before the second story even broke, because that's who she is. She walked into my office, told me to my face before she'd let me read it somewhere. And she's handling it as she handles everything, which is quietly, and competently, and by closing every door in the building one at a time. She played it down. She called herself a friend. She is doing a very good impression of a woman who is fine." A pause. "I have known Dani Petrovic for a long time, and I am telling you she is not fine. She is breaking. She is just doing it her own way, where nobody gets to watch."

Roxy pressed the heel of her hand against her eyes. "I never wanted—Astoria, I would never have let this near her, I tried so hard to keep her out of it⁠—"

"I believe you. That isn't the question anymore." Astoria's voice sharpened, not cruel, just true. "Here is the question. By tonight there will be two versions of this story in the world. One is the one your manager wrote, where Dani is a footnote and you are single and stepping out with a nice young man. That story is already running, and it is very well crafted. If you do nothing, it will win.”

She paused for a moment. “The other story is whatever you decide to do next. That's it. That's the whole choice in front of you. So I'm not going to tell you what to do, Roxy. I'm going to tell you that what you do in the next two days is going to decide who you actually are, after a whole decade of letting other people decide it for you. And then I'm going to hang up, because I have my player to look after."

The line went quiet.

Roxy sat on the floor for one more minute. She let herself feel all of it, the guilt and the grief and the unbearable fact of Roxana used as a goodbye, let it go all the way through her, because she'd learned from Dani that you didn't get anywhere pretending a thing didn't hurt. And then she stood up, and something in her had changed, gone hard and clear and quiet, and she understood that she was, for the first time, completely done being afraid of Vivienne Croft, because the worst thing Vivienne could do she had already done, she'd taken the one good thing, and there was nothing left to hold over a woman with nothing left to lose.

She packed the rental in twenty minutes. Her own hands, no stylist, the few real things she'd accumulated in the only home she'd had in years, and she left the bad coffee and the burnt-pan smell and the bed that had taught her she was a person. She left the notebook for last. She stood at the little table where three years of silence had broken open into thirteen songs, all of them about a woman who'd just told her goodbye, and for one cracked second she thought about leaving them too, the whole folder, walking away from the only thing she'd made that was real. Then she thought about what those songs actually were, and what they could still do, said out loud, in public, on her own terms, and she put the notebook in the bag with the careful hands of a woman picking up the one weapon she had left. At the door she stopped and looked back once, the lit window nobody was supposed to be able to find, and made herself a promise about it she didn't say out loud.

Tilda met her at the car. Roxy put the rental keys in her hand and held onto her fingers a second.

"I need you to do something, and it's going to take all night, and it might end your career in this business." Roxy's voice was steady now. "Get me everything. Every contract Vivienne ever signed me to. Every clause. Every appearance log, every email, every statement that went out under my name that I never approved. All of it, in one place, by tomorrow. I'm going to take my whole life back from her, Til, on paper, where she can't spin it, and then I'm going to do the thing she spent eleven years making sure I'd never be brave enough to do."

"Which is?"

"Tell the truth in public," Roxy said. "On my terms, for once."

And she got in the car alone, and told the driver the airport, and didn't look back at the window again, because she'd already promised it something, and Roxy Blaze, whatever else the morning had made of her, was finally a woman who intended to keep her promises.

20

She found out at a red light, which she'd think about later, that the worst morning of seven years had started with her stopped at a perfectly ordinary intersection three blocks from the rental, happy, planning how she'd tell Frankie.

The phone lit up in the cupholder. She glanced at it like you glance at a phone, expecting nothing, expecting Roxy maybe, a sleepy good-morning. And instead her own face was on the screen, or not her face, a tall dark-coated shape in falling snow, and the word over it was TRYSTS. Dani sat at the red light and couldn't understand for one full second what she was looking at, like a word you've stared at too long. Then she understood. The light turned green. Someone behind her tapped a horn. She pulled through the intersection on muscle memory and turned into the first lot she saw and put the car in park with hands that had gone strange and far away, and she read it.

The photos were of the rental. The back stair. The alley. Weeks of them. Every dawn she'd walked out of that door with her collar up thinking she'd gotten away clean, someone had been in a cold car down the block, watching, and Dani sat in a strip-mall parking lot at seven in the morning and felt the bottom drop out of the one safe thing she'd built in seven years, and the feeling wasn't new. That was the part that took the air out of her. The feeling was an old one. She knew it exactly. She'd felt it at twenty-four standing in a training room with her phone in her hand, looking at private things made public for money, learning in real time that the person you let all the way in is the person holding the knife. She'd built a whole life out of never feeling it again. And here it was, identical, worse, on a national scale, and the lesson she'd organized her entire existence around stood up inside her and said, very quietly, I told you so.

What she kept circling, sitting in that parking lot, was how careful she'd been. That was what undid the breath in her. She hadn't been careless. Marisol, at twenty-four, she could almost forgive herself for, a young woman who'd trusted the wrong person and learned the cost. But this winter she'd done everything right. Parked a block away every single time. Worn the dark coat, kept the collar up, treated that rental like a safe house because to her it had been one. She'd been disciplined about it as she was disciplined about everything, and it hadn't mattered one bit, because the world didn't care how careful you were. The world had a long lens and a cold car and all the patience in the world. And the only true way to be safe from it was the one she'd kept for seven years, which was to want nothing and let no one in and stay small. She'd broken that rule exactly once. She'd broken it for a pop star. And the universe had waited until she was happy, genuinely happy, driving to work at dawn rehearsing how she'd tell her best friend she was in love, and then it had taught her the lesson again, in case the years hadn't been enough.

She didn't cry. Dani noted, distantly, that she wasn't crying, as she noted ice conditions, a fact about the surface. She put the car back in drive.

She went straight to the rink. Not home. Home would have meant sitting alone with it, and the one thing Dani knew how to do with a catastrophe was get in front of it. So she drove to the rink, and she walked up to Astoria Shepry's office before the building was even properly awake, and she knocked and went in and told her boss to her face.

"You're going to see something this morning," Dani said, standing, because she couldn't make herself sit. "I wanted you to hear it from me first. There are photos. Of me, at a rental, with Roxy Blaze. I'm in them. It's going to be a thing." She kept her voice flat, the game voice, the one that didn't move when the building was screaming. "She and I are friends. It got blown up into more than it is. I'll keep my head down and it'll pass and it won't touch the team, I'll make sure of that. I just didn't want you reading it before I'd told you."

Astoria looked at her for a moment from behind the desk, and Dani saw that she didn't believe a word of the friends part, saw it cross the older woman's face and saw her decide, kindly, not to push on it, and Dani was grateful for that like you're grateful for someone not touching a burn.

"Okay," Astoria said. "Thank you for coming to me. We'll handle it." And then, as Dani turned to go, "Dani. You don't have to make it smaller than it is in here. Whatever it is. This office has heard everything." But Dani was already at the door, because if she stayed she'd come apart, and coming apart was a thing she did alone, on her own schedule, never in front of the boss, and she said thank you and got out before the kindness could finish the job the photos had started.