Page 35 of Under the Spotlight

It cost her, the not-looking. She'd be lying if she said it didn't. All day a low current ran under everything, the knowledge that two thousand miles away the woman who'd told her goodbye had walked into a room full of cameras and done something, and Dani didn't know what, and the not-knowing pulled at her like a hook behind the sternum every quiet minute. Twice her thumb found her phone in her pocket of its own accord and she made herself take her hand back out. She told herself it changed nothing. Whatever Roxy had said in London, the text Dani had sent still stood, the block still held, the reasons she'd ended it were still true, and watching a press conference would only reopen a wound she'd spent two days getting to scab. She was good at this, at deciding a thing was closed and keeping it closed by force. She'd had years of practice. But in all those years, she just hadn’t had to it about someone she could still feel in the room with her even now, even blocked, even gone.

Frankie found her in the gear room before warmups and didn't say anything about London. She just bumped Dani's shoulder with her own, once, and said, "Detroit's got that new kid on the top line, the fast one, she goes glove side on the breakaway every time, I watched tape," and Dani said, "I know, I watched it too," and that was the whole conversation, and it was exactly the right one. Lou caught her eye across the room and nodded once, a small economical nod that meant you're good, go to work, and let her be. They knew her. They knew the crease was where she kept herself, and they knew enough not to crowd the door of it.

She played the best forty minutes of her life.

She would never be able to explain it to anyone who didn't do what she did, how completely a wrecked heart could pour itself into a pair of pads and come out the other side as something close to perfect. Everything else in Dani's life was on fire and she couldn't control one inch of it, and here, between two pipes, was eighteen feet of painted ice where she controlled all of it, every angle, every rebound, every shooter's eyes, and she emptied the whole catastrophe into the work and the work gave it back as save after save after save. Detroit came at her in waves. The fast rookie got on the breakaway in the first and went glove side exactly like the tape said and Dani was already there, glove up, the puck smacking leather before she'd finished the move, and the building came up roaring. She felt nothing but the next shot.

It was Detroit, too, which Dani didn't let herself make anything of and which meant something anyway. Her city. The team her brothers had grown up screaming at in the hot loud kitchen, the sweater her father still wore on Sundays, the franchise a girl from a working-class block outside the city had dreamed at before she'd ever dreamed at anything. She'd stood in goal against them a dozen times in her career and it had always been just a game. Tonight, with her whole life on fire and her family three hundred miles away surely watching, surely worried, surely having seen the photos and not knowing what to say, beating Detroit felt like a thing she was saying to all of them at once without a single phone call. I'm still here. I'm still good. Whatever they print about me, this part is still mine and you can still be proud of it. She stoned them clean.

Thirty-eight shots. Thirty-eight saves. Three breakaways turned away clean. She robbed their captain with the pad in the second on what the replay would call the save of the season, slid post to post faster than a woman her size had any right to, and got a toe on it, and didn't let herself smile.

By the third period the Detroit bench had stopped celebrating their own chances because they could see what the whole building could see, that the woman in the Valkyries net wasn't going to be beaten tonight, that something was driving her that had nothing to do with hockey and everything to do with how completely unreachable she'd made herself. The horn went with the score 3–0 and forty thousand was nothing, this was a sold-out home barn losing its mind. Dani skated to her bench and tapped gloves and kept her face still, and didn't once, all night, look up at the owner's box, which was empty. Astoria Shepry was three thousand miles away in London and nobody on the team would say out loud why.

She'd needed the game and the game had held her, as it always had. But games ended. That was the trouble with them. The horn went, and the save total froze, and the thing she'd been outskating all night was still there waiting in the tunnel.

Frankie came and sat beside her at her stall while she was still in most of her pads, sweat-soaked, her hair plastered down, and she had her phone in her hand.

"You played out of your mind," Frankie said. "Genuinely. I've been doing this nineteen years, I've never seen anything like the third period." She turned the phone over in her hands, and Dani watched her decide something, as Frankie decided things, slow and then certain. "I wasn't going to show you this. I figured you'd want to find it yourself, in your own time. And then I watched it, and I changed my mind, because I think you need to see it tonight, in your pads, while you still feel like the best goalie alive, because you're going to need that armor for about the first ten seconds and then you won't." She held the phone out. "It's the whole thing. Eleven minutes. Watch it. I'll keep everyone off you."

Dani took the phone. The locker room noise went away, or she stopped hearing it, and she put one earbud in and pressed play on a paused video of Roxy standing at a podium in a plain black suit, no glitter, no stage face, the reading glasses on, looking more like the woman she loved than the woman from the banners, and Dani's chest pulled tight before Roxy had said a single word.

She watched Roxy fire Vivienne Croft by name, flat and clear, in front of a hundred cameras. She watched her announce she'd registered her own management company, that every decision about her career and her life from this day forward would be made by her and no one else. She watched a reporter shout a question about Phoenix Ridge, about the photographs, about the mystery woman, and she watched Roxy go very still at the podium, and then lean into the microphone, and say the thing that took the floor out from under Dani in her sweat-soaked pads.

"I'm not going to confirm or deny anything about my private life. Not today. Not ever. For a decade I let people I paid decide who I was allowed to love, out loud, for a story, and I'm done telling that story, and I'm especially done telling it with someone else's name in my mouth who never asked to be in the lights. The people in my actual life are people. They're not content. They didn't sign up for any of this, and I will burn the whole thing down before I let it turn one of them into a headline. So you can ask me about that all night and you'll get the same answer, which is that it's mine, and it's the first thing in eleven years that's only mine, and I'm keeping it."

And then, quieter, almost to herself, before she stepped back from the podium, she said one last thing. "I'll only tell you one thing that's true, and then the rest of it's a record that comes out Friday. For the first time in my life, every song on it is true. All thirteen. It's called Last Line."

Dani replayed the last thirty seconds. Then she replayed them again.

She understood exactly what she was looking at, and that was the thing that wrecked her, sitting there in her gear.

Roxy had done the impossible thing. She had walked into a hundred cameras and set fire to the entire machine that owned her, fired the woman who'd built her, ended the lie she'd been living since she was seventeen, and she had done all of it without once saying Dani's name. Vivienne's statement two days ago had taken the truth and used it, had reached into the rental and dragged Dani out and pinned her to a press release as one of several, a footnote, content.

And Roxy had reached into the exact same fire and done the opposite. She'd refused to confirm it. She'd refused to deny it. She'd stood in front of the whole world and said they didn't sign up for the lights and built a wall around Dani with her own body while everything Roxy had burned behind her. She hadn't protected the brand. She had protected Dani. She had taken the single thing Dani had spent seven years believing, that to be known was to be used, and she had stood at a podium and disproved it on national television, by being known herself, completely, on purpose, so that Dani wouldn't have to be.

Being known isn't the same as being used. Roxy had said it to her in the dark months ago and Dani hadn't believed it, not really, not under the scar tissue. And now Roxy had gone and made it true in front of a hundred cameras, at the cost of her whole career, and had asked Dani for nothing in return, hadn't called, hadn't pushed past the block, had simply put thirteen songs into the world where Dani could find them if she ever decided she wanted to, and left the door unlocked, and walked away from it so Dani would never feel chased.

There had only ever been one other person who'd held the private truth of Dani in their hands, and Marisol had sold it. It was the shape her whole adult life had taken, built around that one fact, that the person you trusted with yourself was the person who'd cash you in. For seven years it had been the only data she had. And now there was a second data point, the exact inverse of the first. A woman who'd held the private truth of Dani and, given the chance to spend it for the biggest payday of her life, a tell-all that would have broken the internet, had instead lit her own career on fire to keep it safe.

Two people had ever known the real her. One had sold her. One had burned for her. The lesson she'd carried for seven years had only ever been half the truth, and Dani sat in her gear holding a phone and felt the other half arrive, too late, too loud, exactly when she could no longer pretend it wasn't real.

Dani handed the phone back to Frankie. Her hands were steady, which surprised her. "Thank you," she said, and her voice came out almost normal. "I have to go home."

Frankie looked at her for a moment, and whatever she saw made her nod and stand and clear a path. "Go," she said. "I've got the room. Drive safe, you're not as okay as your face is pretending you are.”

She showered fast and got out before anyone could talk to her and drove home through the dark with the radio off and her jaw set, and she made it. She made it through the parking lot, empty now of cameras, the story moved on to a bigger one. She made it up the stairs and through her own door. She made it all the way to locking the deadbolt behind her and setting her bag down in the dark apartment she'd never let another person into.

And then she didn't make it anymore.

She got as far as the middle of the room and then her legs simply stopped agreeing to hold the rest of it up. She sat down on the floor with her back against the front door, in the dark, still in her coat, her bag toppled beside her, and she finally let it come. There was no one to see. That was the permission. For two days she'd been surrounded, watched over, handled gently by people who loved her, and a watched goalie didn't break, a watched goalie stayed competent, that was the job and the armor both. Here there was no one. Just her, and the dark, and the apartment she'd kept empty her whole adult life so that no one would ever be in it to witness this. She hadn't cried at the red light. She hadn't cried writing the text or blocking the number or lying awake all night at Lou's. She hadn't cried through the best game of her life. She'd held it as she held everything, in a closed competent fist, for two whole days. And now in her own dark apartment with no one to perform stillness for, the fist opened. She cried as she hadn't let herself cry since she was twenty-four, ugly and silent and shaking, the sobs coming up out of her chest in waves she had no say over, with her knees pulled up and her face in her arms.

She cried because it hurt, and because Roxy hadn't done this to her, Roxy had just proven it in front of the whole world. And she'd ended everything with one clean text that she was no longer at all sure she'd wanted to end.

Somewhere out there were thirteen songs from Roxy that she knew were about her that she was too frightened to listen to, and for the first time in seven years the door she'd kept locked her whole adult life had a hand on the other side of it that had refused, gently, to force the handle, and was just waiting, now. Dani didn't know yet whether she was brave enough to be the one who opened it. She cried for a long time, alone, on the floor of her apartment. And when she was done, scoured out and exhausted and clear, she got up. Dani didn't turn the deadbolt back, and she didn't yet know what that small thing meant, only that she'd noticed she hadn't done it.

23

Roxy landed in Phoenix Ridge at midnight on a half-empty red-eye, her seat in last row, hood up, no car waiting and no one who knew she was coming. It was the freest she'd felt in eleven years and also the most afraid.