Chapter 1 #2
The photo line was a smiling firing squad.
Roxy stepped into it and did what she did, gave them an arm here, a tilt of the chin there, two hundred watts of warmth she could pour out of herself and feel nothing draining.
A man in a tuxedo told her his daughter loved her.
A woman gripped her hand in both of hers and said something about hope.
Roxy thanked them and meant a version of it.
This was the other thing she was good at, maybe even best at; being wanted without it costing the wanter and giving her nothing back.
She'd been a mirror so long she sometimes wondered if there was any silver left behind the glass.
The wanting in these rooms ran one direction and always had.
People reached for her and came away holding a photograph, and not one of them had ever cost her a thing, which was, she was only now starting to understand, the whole problem.
Halfway down the line she stopped.
"Tilda." She kept the smile on for the room. "I need five minutes."
Tilda's eyes came up off the tablet, sharp. "We don't have five minutes. We have a flight."
"Then I'm taking five of the flight's minutes." Roxy was already turning, already peeling off down the first dark corridor she saw, the one with the EXIT sign and the smell of cold concrete and somebody's burnt coffee. "Tell them I'm changing. Tell them anything."
"Roxy—"
She didn't stop.
She found her near the exit door.
The hockey player from the wings stood at the end of the corridor with one hand on the push-bar, halfway to gone, and Roxy knew, with the same instinct that found every camera in every room, that in about four seconds that door would shut and that would be that.
So she did something she hadn't done on purpose in years.
She crossed the space fast and put her hand on the woman's elbow.
The woman turned. Up close her eyes were gray, calm, and they moved over Roxy's face once and registered exactly who she was and didn't change at all.
She was taller than Roxy by a couple of inches, and she held a stillness Roxy only ever saw in people who were very good at something physical, a banked and unhurried quality, like motion she was choosing not to spend.
Roxy was abruptly, stupidly aware of her own heartbeat.
"Sorry." She let go of the elbow. "Sorry. Hi. I'm Roxy."
"I know who you are." Not unkind. Just true.
"You weren't watching me.” It came out before she could dress it up, and God, it sounded like something a child would say. "During the show. You were the only person back there who wasn't watching."
The woman considered her. The push-bar creaked under her hand. "Did you need everyone to be watching?"
"No," Roxy said, and then, honestly, "yes. Apparently." She laughed at herself, short. "What's your name?"
"Dani."
"Dani what?"
"Petrovic." She let it sit a second. "I play for the team. Goalie."
"Dani Petrovic." Roxy turned the name over once. "What was on your phone, Dani Petrovic? Because I've been doing this for ten years, and I've never once watched someone not watch me, and I'd genuinely like to know what beat me."
Something moved at the corner of Dani's mouth, there and gone, not quite a smile. "My brother sent a picture of his kid. He lost a tooth."
"That's it?"
"He's four. It's a big deal." Dani pushed the bar an inch, and the cold leaked in around the edge of the door.
Roxy couldn't remember the last time she'd stood in a hallway and simply talked to someone who wanted nothing off her, no photo, no favor, no piece to carry home and sell.
It was such a small thing. It felt like finding a door in a wall she'd been leaning against for years without knowing it was there.
"Congratulations on the show," Dani said. "It sounded good from back here." She said it like a stranger thanking someone for holding an elevator, polite, finished, already half through the door. "I have to go. Early skate."
"Okay," Roxy heard herself say. "Yeah. Of course."
And that was four sentences, maybe five, and not one of them had been for her, not the woman on the banner, not the brand, not the most-wanted person in any room she'd walked into since she was a teenager.
Dani Petrovic had handed her a kid's lost tooth and a compliment about the acoustics and gone to bed.
"There you are." Tilda came around the corner at speed, tablet clutched to her chest, relief and fury fighting it out on her face. "We have to go. The car's been running ten minutes—"
The exit door had already swung shut. Roxy looked back at it once, at the bar where a hand had been, at the thin line of cold still bleeding in along the threshold.
"Roxy." Tilda touched her shoulder. "Hey. You good?"
"I'm great." Roxy turned and gave her the smile, the real one she kept for the four people on earth who'd earned it. "Let's go home."
In the car the city peeled away in reverse, her own forty-foot face sliding past the window again, mouth open, eyes lit, every flaw sanded off.
Somewhere over the Atlantic she'd have to put it all back on and be the brand again, single and available, smiling at Reeve across a glass of wine for a camera that would tell the world the story it had paid for.
But the banner was already shrinking in the side mirror now, going dark with the rest of Phoenix Ridge, and for the length of one quiet drive she let herself be the other thing, the one nobody held a contract on.
Tilda was back on the phone. The heater ticked. Roxy thumbed open a new message to the only number she had inside that building, the assistant who'd been emailing her about the ambassador campaign all week.
She typed it out. Loved tonight, thank you for having me. For the first featured shoot, can you send me Dani Petrovic's number? I'd like to coordinate directly. Logistics.
She read it back. Logistics. Sure.
She sent it anyway, and laid the phone face-down on her knee, and kept turning the last few minutes over and over in the dark, not sure why a woman who'd wanted nothing from her was the best thing that had happened to her in a year.