Chapter 2
Two days after the gala, Dani Petrovic got to the rink at six-fifteen, as she did every morning, and for the first forty minutes the building was hers.
She liked it empty. The big lights came up in banks with a sound like someone clearing their throat, and the ice lay flat and gray-blue and untouched, and the cold off it was the cleanest thing she knew.
The crease was four feet by eight, the only square of the world she had ever wanted to own.
Out past the blue paint the game was chaos, twelve women and a frozen disc of rubber and a hundred things that could go wrong in a second.
In here it was just her and the angles. You cut the net down, you stayed square, you trusted your feet, you let the puck come to you.
She had picked the loneliest position on the ice at nine years old and never once been sorry.
She did her laps. She did her crease work, the same drills in the same order, edges and shuffles and the slow drop into the butterfly until her body stopped asking questions.
By the time the rest of them started filtering in she'd already sweated through her base layer and the noise had started coming back into the building, sticks and shouting and somebody's speaker, and her own head had gone quiet underneath all of it.
That was the trade she made every morning and it was the best trade she knew.
Out here nobody wanted anything from her but saves, and that, at least, was something she could give all day.
Coffee after. Oat milk and one sugar, the same as every morning, in the same dented thermos she'd had since her first pro contract. She drank half of it in the gear room with her back to her stall and her eyes on nothing.
"Petrovic." Frankie O'Connell dropped onto the bench two stalls down and started unlacing a skate, loud about it, the way Frankie was loud about everything. "How's the elbow?"
"Fine," Dani said.
"Yeah? No lasting damage?" Frankie's face was doing the thing it did before a joke, the broken nose crinkling. "Because the way I heard it, Roxy Blaze put a hand on you backstage and you've been walking funny ever since."
It had been great having Frankie back. The new young defender had taken a knock in pre season and Frankie, having already retired and spent a year in Europe with Alessia Volkov had been drafted back in by Mara.
Frankie was different now. Calmer, just happy to play in a way that she hadn’t been in recent years.
Alessia had brought something to her world, that was for sure.
Happiness, Dani suspected. And it looked good on her.
Alessia was currently injured with an ACL injury so in a supporting role as girlfriend to Frankie, the two of them back in Phoenix Ridge just for one last season.
Down the row, two of the younger players cackled into their pads.
Dani took another mouthful of coffee. "I have no idea what you're talking about."
"Course not." Frankie pulled the skate off and thunked it onto the mat.
"Quiet little goalie, minding her business, and the most famous woman on the planet chases her down a hallway.
Happens to everybody." She raised her voice for the room.
"Hey, did everybody hear Petrovic's got a famous girlfriend now? "
"Shut up, Frankie." Dani screwed the cap back on the thermos and stood. She tossed the roll of stick tape off the shelf into Frankie's lap on her way past. "Tape your stick. You looked like a beer-leaguer out there yesterday."
The room laughed at Frankie instead, which was the trade, and Dani walked out into the corridor while it was still working.
She didn't get far. Frankie caught up in three strides, sock feet slapping the rubber floor, and when she spoke again the volume was gone out of her.
"Hey." She fell in beside Dani. "You good?"
There it was. The whole point of the noise had been to get to the quiet version, and Dani knew it, because she'd known Frankie for years and Frankie had been checking on her in exactly this way for most of them.
A joke for the room. The real question in the hall.
Frankie had decided a long time ago that Dani was a person worth keeping an eye on, and Dani had never once asked her to and never once told her to stop.
"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.