Page 4 of Under the Spotlight

"I'm good," Dani said.

Frankie looked at her a second longer than the answer earned. Whatever she saw, she decided not to push it, which was the other thing about Frankie. She knew where the fence line was.

"All right." She knocked her shoulder into Dani's, light. "For the record, she had decent pipes. The pop star. I'd have watched."

"You were watching. I saw you film the whole thing."

"For Alessia. She's a fan." Frankie was already grinning, already backpedaling toward the gear room. "Don't tell her I said that, she'll never let me hear the end of it."

And that was Frankie handled, which was easier than most things, and Dani had almost gotten her morning back when a runner from the front office leaned into the corridor and said Ms. Shepry wanted her upstairs. Her, and the coach, and the captain. Now, if she had a minute.

Nobody got called upstairs by the owner before practice for good news.

Astoria Shepry's office took up a corner of the top floor with a window onto the bowl of the arena, and the woman herself stood at it with her back to the door when Dani came in, tall and tailored and gray-threaded, a phone face-down on the desk like a thing she'd put away on purpose. Goldie, Mara’s old golden retriever, slept on the rug in a patch of sun and didn't get up for anyone.

Mara Ellison was already there, arms crossed, reading the room. Lou Calder leaned against the bookshelf with her captain's stillness, hands in her pockets. Dani took the empty space by the door and stayed near it.

"Thank you for coming up." Astoria turned. She had a way of making a sentence sound like it had already been decided somewhere else and you were being read the result. "I wanted the three of you to hear this from me before it goes around the room, because it's going to go around the room."

"That sounds like good news," Lou said, dry.

"It's a good opportunity." Astoria let the correction sit. "We've signed Roxy Blaze as the Valkyries' cultural ambassador for the season. Home games, the charter on select road trips, a run of promotional shoots, national press. She'll be around. Quite a lot."

The floor didn't move. Dani knew that. It only felt like it dropped an inch, the way the second stair from the top of her parents' house used to give under your weight, there and then gone. Roxy Blaze, around. Quite a lot. On the charter. In the building Dani came to at six-fifteen because it was the one place nobody wanted anything from her.

She ran the math like a two-on-one, fast and cold and without feeling much about it yet. Roxy Blaze in the room meant cameras in the room. Cameras in the room meant the careful, boring, invisible life she had spent seven years building now had a famous woman walking straight through the middle of it twice a week. None of that was a disaster on its own. It only became one if you happened to be a person who'd learned, the hard way, exactly how fast a careful life could stop being yours.

Lou's eyebrow climbed toward her hairline. "She's a singer."

"She's a brand worth more than this franchise, and she wants to attach it to women's hockey. I would be a fool to say no to that." Astoria's eyes moved over the three of them. "It's a good thing for the team. I need you all to treat it like one."

"Understood," Mara said. She'd said one word and she'd say a few more before this was over and not many. She was watching Dani. Dani felt it, like a draft.

"There's one more piece." Astoria picked the phone up off the desk, turned it over, set it down again, a small tell from a woman who didn't usually have them. "The first featured shoot is a one-on-one. The quiet anchor of the team and the loudest woman in the country, that's the angle. Ms. Blaze requested it specifically." Astoria's eyes came to her. "She requested you, Dani."

The room turned to look at her. She kept her shootout face, which was to say she kept it.

Requested her. By name? Dani turned it over and couldn't make it lie flat. Famous people didn't request the goalie. They requested the captain, the leading scorer, the one with the marketable smile. The only reason Roxy Blaze knew Dani Petrovic was alive was four sentences in a hallway about a kid's lost tooth, and nobody built a national campaign off four sentences. Which meant the request was about something else, and Dani had spent seven years making very sure she was never about something else to anybody.

"No," Dani said.

Astoria didn't blink. "I'm sorry?"

"Find someone who likes cameras. Lex would do it in a heartbeat. Camille's done national spots before, she's good at it." Dani heard her own voice stay flat and even and was grateful for it. "I'm a goalie. I stop pucks. I'm not the angle."

"You're exactly the angle, which is the problem with being good at being invisible." Astoria almost smiled. "It's one shoot. A few hours. You'll be paid for your time, and the team gets a season of coverage it could never buy. I'm not asking you to like it."

"You're not asking me at all."

"No," Astoria agreed, not unkindly. "I'm not."

Mara said her few more words then. "Dani." Just that, low, the verbal equivalent of a hand on the shoulder, which from Mara meant let it go, this one's already decided, don't spend yourself on it.

Dani looked at the three of them, at Goldie asleep in the sun, at the bowl of the arena going about its morning behind the glass. There was a version of this where she argued, and she could see all the way to the end of it, and at the end of it she still did the shoot and had spent something getting there she'd rather keep. That was the part nobody upstairs would ever understand about her. She didn't fold because she didn't care. She folded because she had done the arithmetic on what fighting cost and what it bought, and the answer came out the same every time, and a person who had once paid full price for the wrong fight learned to read that ledger early.

"Fine," she said, and turned, and was through the door before anyone could decide that meant she'd taken it well.

She skated badly the rest of the morning. She let in soft ones, the kind she'd have stopped in her sleep, and she felt the team clock her not-quite-there and quietly agree, all of them, not to mention it. She was allowed one of those a season. She'd never once used hers.