Page 39 of Under the Spotlight

Roxy was at the kitchen counter when Dani got home, in one of Dani's t-shirts, barefoot, bare legs beautiful, a hotel notepad in front of her and a pen in her hand and her reading glasses on, and she was so absorbed she didn't hear the door, and Dani stood there a second just looking at her, this person in her kitchen, in her shirt, writing, like she lived there, because for now she did.

Dani set down her bag and crossed the room and kissed the back of Roxy's neck, soft, where the loose hair fell away from it, and felt Roxy go warm and lean back into her without looking up from the page.

"You're home," Roxy said. "How was the world?"

"Still turning." Dani looked over her shoulder at the notepad, at the lines crossed out and rewritten, the messy honest scrawl of it. "What's this?"

Roxy set the pen down and tipped her head back against Dani's shoulder and smiled up at her.

"The next album," she said.

25

Last Line went platinum in nine days, and Roxy wasn't in a single room where it happened.

She'd turned down eleven appearances to mark it, the press her old self would have killed for, the magazine covers and the late-night couches and the breathless features about the most honest album of her career. She'd said no to all of them through her own company now, a tiny operation run out of a Phoenix Ridge sublet with Tilda as the entire staff. Instead, she'd stayed exactly where she wanted to be, which was here, in seat number whatever of Astoria Shepry's owner's box, watching a hockey game with her heart in her throat. The record could go platinum without her in the room. The thing she couldn't miss, the only thing on the whole calendar she would have walked through fire to be present for, was Game Seven.

She wasn't hiding. That still felt a little like stepping off a ledge every single time. She sat in the front row of the box in full view of a sold-out arena and a national broadcast, no disguise, no hood, Roxy Blaze plainly and openly attending a Valkyries playoff game for reasons everyone in the building could now do the math on, and she'd decided somewhere over the last two weeks that the math being done was fine. Let them.

If the cameras wanted to find her in this box on this night, they could. Dani had made it clear she was ok with it. And if she was ok with it, Roxy was ok with it.

It was a strange seat to be in, and she kept noticing the strangeness of it. For her whole life she'd been the one down on the bright floor and everyone else had been up here, watching her, twenty thousand faces turned toward whatever version of herself she'd been sent out to sell. She had never once been a spectator. She had never sat in the dark and given her whole attention to someone else and wanted nothing back but their happiness, and it turned out to be the best feeling she'd had in a decade, better than any stage, to love someone enough that you'd rather watch them shine than be watched yourself. Tilda was beside her on the other side, in her enormous blazer with her tablet abandoned in her lap for once, and at some point in the first period she'd found Roxy's hand without a word and held it, and the two of them sat there in the box hanging on every shot like a couple of people who had nothing to do with the music industry at all.

Beside her, Astoria sat composed and unreadable in a tailored charcoal suit, Miller on her other side, and she'd said almost nothing all night except, once, low, without turning her head, "She's the best I've ever had. I've had some great ones. She's the best." And Roxy had nodded, unable to speak, because she'd already known it, and hearing the woman who signed the checks say it out loud undid something in her chest she didn't have the room to deal with, not with the puck about to drop.

Toronto came out like they'd been insulted.

Roxy didn't understand most of hockey's geometry even now, after a whole season of it, but she understood a siege when she watched one, and from the first shift Toronto laid siege. They came in waves, blue and white, dumping the puck deep and chasing it. The Valkyries spent the first period pinned in their own end as the shots piled up, and every single one of them ended at the same place, which was Dani.

Roxy had stopped pretending months ago that she watched these games for the team. She watched them for the woman in the net, and tonight, with everything riding on it, she couldn't have looked anywhere else if the box had caught fire. Dani in the crease was a different creature from Dani anywhere else, bigger, taking up angles, sliding post to post on her knees and getting up again before the puck had finished telling her where to be. She was utterly silent inside the roar, an island of total stillness in a building losing its mind, and Roxy understood that this was the truest version of the woman she loved, the one who'd spent her whole life learning to be unreachable, and that the unreachability that had nearly cost them both everything was, here, on this ice, the most beautiful thing Roxy had ever watched a person do.

Twenty-six saves through two periods. The number went up on the board and the crowd groaned and cheered it at once, and Toronto kept coming, and Dani kept saying no, glove and pad and chest and the heel of her stick, no and no and no, and the game stayed scoreless because one woman wouldn't allow it to be anything else. Roxy's hands were freezing. She'd been gripping the rail without knowing it for an hour.

It wasn't lost on her, what was happening in the building. The first night she ever saw Dani, on a stage in front of twenty thousand people, Dani had been the one person in the whole arena who wouldn't look at her, head down over a phone by an exit door, and Roxy had missed her cue because of it and chased the feeling ever since. Now an entire sold-out barn was on its feet for the woman who refused to be looked at, chanting the name of the most private person Roxy had ever met. Dani didn't acknowledge a single second of it, just played, eyes forward, alone inside the noise.

The whole world had finally turned to watch Dani Petrovic, and Dani still wasn't watching it back. Roxy loved her for that more than she could have said. But she wasn't walling herself off tonight, wasn’t hiding. It was just who she was, on full display, and the building adored her for exactly the thing she'd spent years afraid would destroy her.

At four minutes left in the third, Roxy couldn’t take her eyes off the ice. Years later, she’d still see this moment behind her eyes.

A Valkyries stick caught a Toronto skate and the whistle blared. The ref’s arm went up, and then a second one, two penalties stacked. Roxy heard the whole building inhale at once but didn't understand why until Astoria said quietly, "Five on three. Two minutes. God help her." Then Roxy watched five Toronto players set up against three defenders and a goalie with the series in her hands, and understood that the next two minutes were going to decide everything.

She stopped breathing. She couldn't have started again if she'd tried.

Toronto moved the puck like it was on a string, side to side, dragging Dani and her three exhausted skaters back and forth, hunting the opening, and they found it again and again and every single time Dani was already there. A one-timer from the slot she took off the chest. A backdoor tap that she robbed with the pad, full stretch, her whole body thrown across the crease. A point shot through traffic she somehow tracked and gloved out of the air, and the glove went up and the official waved it dead and the building came apart. Six shots in two minutes. Six. The last one was a scramble, the puck loose and trickling toward a line Roxy didn't even know was sacred until eighteen thousand people screamed at the sight of it crossing. Dani lunged back and got a shoulder, a pad, some part of herself onto it and smothered it half an inch from the goal line. The whistle blew. The penalty was killed. And Dani Petrovic climbed back up to her skates like she'd done nothing at all while a sold-out arena chanted her name. Roxy realized she was crying and had been for a while.

That was the woman. That was the one. The one who'd flown across an ocean for thirty-six hours and never told a soul, who took her coffee just so but let no one learn it, who'd looked at Roxy and seen her in a way that nobody else ever had. She was down there throwing her body in front of everything the world could fire at her and refusing, with total calm, to be beaten, and Roxy loved her so much that it was difficult to remain in a chair.

Overtime lasted four minutes.

Roxy didn't see most of how the goal happened, only the end of it, the puck springing loose at center and Lou Calder threading a pass through a gap that shouldn't have existed, and Camille Laurent-Dubois behind the defense suddenly with only the Toronto goalie to beat. The whole building rose before the shot was even away. And then the puck was in the top corner, glove side, perfect, and the horn was going and the lights were going and the Valkyries bench was emptying over the boards in a flood.

And Roxy was on her feet screaming with eighteen thousand strangers, screaming with no thought for her face or her image or who might be filming, jumping and gripping the rail and yelling herself hoarse for a sport she'd barely understood a year ago, because it wasn't about the sport.

Astoria had both fists in the air. Tilda was crying. The whole box was a mess of grown adults coming apart at once, and Roxy was the loudest of all of them, because down on the ice the woman she loved had just won the biggest game of her life. There was no version of Roxy left that could have watched it quietly.

One to nothing. Forty-three saves. A shutout in Game Seven, the series clinched, and at the far end of the ice the architect of all of it skated out of her crease with both arms going up for the first time all night as she was swallowed by her team.

Roxy was full-on crying now, the ugly grateful kind, and she didn't care who in the box or on the broadcast saw it. Astoria stood and put a hand briefly on Roxy's shoulder, and leaned down, and said into her ear over the noise, "Go down. Now, while the tunnel's still chaos and nobody's organized. Go on. She'll want to see you before she wants to see anyone." A small push. "Go."