Page 36 of Under the Spotlight

Tilda was still in London holding the war together, three lawyers and a server full of contracts and a manager across the city promising litigation into the next decade, and Roxy had left all of it the second the press conference ended, because the press conference had never been the point. It was the cost. This was the point. She'd thrown the whole machine onto a fire on live television to buy one thing, the right to fly to Phoenix Ridge under her own name and find one person, and here she was with that right in her hands and no guarantee it was worth anything, because the woman she'd burned it all for had blocked her two days ago and ended it.

She tried the rental first. She didn't even decide to; the cab was already rolling and the address came out before she'd thought it, some animal instinct toward the one place that had ever been theirs. It was dark when she got there. Of course it was. She'd packed it herself two days ago, stripped it to bad coffee smell and an empty bed, and standing on the curb looking up at the black window she felt stupid for hoping that Dani might have come back to be near the ghost of it. Dani hadn't. Dani didn't haunt the places that hurt her. She sealed them and walked away and never looked at the door again. Roxy had just needed to see the dark window to believe it.

So she gave the cab the second address, the one Tilda had sent her, because Dani had never once let her come here, and it took her across town to a plain three-story walk-up with a half-lit lot, and Roxy climbed an outdoor stair she'd never climbed to a door she'd never been allowed near, and knocked.

Nothing.

She knocked again. She said Dani's name through the door, not loud, because there were neighbors and there were always, now, possibly cameras, and pressed her forehead to the cold metal and said it again. A thin warm line of light lay under the door. She knocked twice more, gently, and got back nothing but that line and her own breath clouding, and understood that Dani was either not in there or choosing not to open, and that both meant the same thing, a knock in the dark wasn't going to be enough. Of course it wasn't.

She went back down the stairs. She didn't know where she was going until she was already walking.

Dani had told her about Lavender's exactly once, in the dark at the rental, half asleep, when Roxy had asked whether there was anywhere in this town she actually liked. There's a cafe-bar, Dani had said, eyes shut. Lavender's. A lesbian place, the owner's been there forty years, we all like to hang out there. It's the one spot in Phoenix Ridge I can sit and enjoy a coffee. She'd said it like a small confession, sideways and brief, and Roxy had filed it away with every other scrap Dani ever let slip.

She walked there now on her phone's map, twenty minutes through a downtown gone quiet, and found the windows dark, the chairs up on the tables, a hand-lettered sign saying the place had closed at eleven. Roxy stood on the sidewalk and felt the last of the plan run out of her. She'd had one all the way from London, fire the manager, build her company, put out the songs, get on the plane, find Dani, and it had carried her through the most terrifying day of her life and then delivered her to a locked door and an empty bar in a town still hunting her face. She sat on the bench because there was nowhere else to be, pulled her knees up, and let herself, for the first time since the alerts started two days ago, simply not know what to do.

She didn't cry. She'd been so sure she would, fall apart in some cinematic way, and instead she just sat on a cold bench in the dark feeling scraped down to the actual person, which turned out to be a tired woman of twenty-seven who'd given away everything she owned for a maybe and was now finding out whether the maybe was a no.

The door opened behind her.

"We're closed, honey," a voice said, not unkindly, and then stopped. Roxy turned. An older woman stood in the doorway with a dish towel over her shoulder and silver-streaked hair and reading glasses pushed up into it, and she looked at Roxy on the bench, and Roxy watched her arrive at exactly who she was and braced for the phone to rise. It didn't. The woman looked at Roxy's face, the whole wrecked unglamorous truth of it, and something in her own went soft and certain.

"Oh," Lavender said. "You're her, then." She held the door wider. "Come in out of the cold before you catch your death on my bench. I've got tea on, and I wasn't going to bed anyway, my books don't do themselves."

Inside, Lavender turned up one set of lights and left the rest dark, and put a mug of something herbal in front of Roxy in a back booth, and didn't ask her a single question, which undid Roxy more than questions would have. She'd spent eleven years being asked questions. She'd forgotten there were people who just put tea in front of you and let you be a person having a bad night. Lavender wiped down the bar and stacked glasses and let Roxy sit with her hands around the warm mug and breathe and slowly come back into her body.

It was Lavender who said it, eventually, from behind the bar, not looking up from the glass she was drying. "I've known that girl six years. She comes in here with her hockey friends of course, but also when she wants to disappear, sits right where you're sitting, nurses one beer for three hours and talks to nobody, and I let her, because that's what this place is for." She set the glass down. "I saw the photos same as everybody. I didn't think much of it past hoping she was all right, because that one's a self contained outsider and I always thought it was a shame." She finally looked at Roxy. "And now here you are on my bench at one in the morning looking like the floor fell out. So I'm going to suggest something, and you can tell me not to, and I'll respect it. But I think I'm going to call her."

Roxy's throat closed. "She blocked my number," she said. "She doesn't want⁠—"

"She blocked your number," Lavender said. "She didn't block mine." And she took her phone into the back, and Roxy heard the low murmur of it through the kitchen door, two sentences, three, the words not clear, just the steady rhythm of a woman who'd probably talked a lot of people down off a lot of ledges over forty years. Then quiet.

Then Lavender came back out, picked up her dish towel, and said, "She's coming. Drink your tea." And went back to her books like she hadn't just changed Roxy's whole life with a phone call, and Roxy sat in the booth and shook, very slightly, all over, hope and terror gone indistinguishable in her.

Dani came through the door forty minutes later in sweats and an unzipped coat with her dark hair loose, no braid, which Roxy had only ever seen in the dark, and she stopped just inside the door and found Roxy in the booth and the two of them looked at each other across the empty bar and neither of them said anything at all. Dani’s gray eyes were complex and hard to read and Roxy wanted nothing more than to fall into her arms.

Lavender said, "Back booth's yours. I'll be in the office. Lock turns from inside if you leave, just pull it behind you." And she took her tea and her reading glasses and disappeared through the kitchen door, and the lights stayed low, and they were alone in a closed bar with a whole ocean of unsaid things on the table between them.

Dani slid into the booth across from her and didn't take her coat off, and that told Roxy everything about how this could still go, one foot still pointed at the door. Dani's face had the stillness it wore in the crease, and under it she looked exhausted.

"You shouldn't have come," Dani said. Quiet. Not cruel. "I ended it for a reason. That hasn’t changed."

"I know." Roxy made herself not reach across the table, though every cell wanted to. "I'm not here to argue you out of it." She swallowed. "I just need you to hear one song I wrote for you, and then if you want me to go, I'll go. Will you let me play it?"

Dani looked at her. The coat stayed on. But she didn't say no.

So Roxy took out her phone, and she didn't make a speech, because she'd run out of speeches, songwriting was more her thing, and she pulled up the first track of Last Line and set the phone on the table between them and pressed play and watched Dani's face.

It was the first one she'd written. Rough, cut on a phone in the rental kitchen, her voice cracking on the bridge because she'd been crying when she recorded it.

It was about the exact moment they had first met and how Roxy had felt seen and understood all at once. It was about seeing Dani for who she really was under the armor.

It was about falling in love with Dani.

Dani closed her eyes when it started and kept them closed. Roxy watched her listen to her own self come out of the speaker in the words, watched her recognize the gala, the stage, the night they met. Dani's jaw worked once. Her hands went very still on the table. And somewhere in the second verse, without opening her eyes, Dani reached across the table and found Roxy's hand and held it, hard, like a woman grabbing a rope.

The song ended.

Dani opened her eyes. They were wet and she let them be, which Roxy had never once seen her do.