Chapter 3
She should have been over the Atlantic by now.
That had been the plan in the car after the gala, the plan that lived on Tilda's tablet, the plan that put her in London by morning for three days of appearances she couldn't remember agreeing to.
Instead Roxy had stood in the hotel lobby at one in the morning with her bag already gone up to a suite and told Tilda to hold the flight.
The team wanted to fast-track the ambassador deal.
The ambassador deal was a good reason. It was even, in the parts she let herself examine, partly true.
So here she was two days later, in a corner suite on the eleventh floor of a Phoenix Ridge hotel.
Floor-to-ceiling windows. A view of a parking structure and a slice of mountain going pink behind it.
A fruit plate she hadn't touched, because some things followed you everywhere, and a quiet that pressed against the glass like weather.
The phone sat in the middle of the coffee table on speaker, and Vivienne's voice came out of it flat and efficient and four thousand miles away.
It was always like this now, Vivienne a voice on a table in whatever city, the most constant relationship of Roxy's adult life conducted entirely through speakerphones and time zones.
They hadn't stood in the same room in nine weeks.
Roxy couldn't have named the last real conversation between them that wasn't a schedule.
She had once thought of Vivienne as something near family, back in the years when family was a thing Roxy was short on, and maybe that was the cruelest beam in the whole structure, that the woman who'd built the cage had for a long time also been the warmest thing inside it.
"Clause eight is the morals language, standard, you've signed it a hundred times.
Clause nine is the exclusivity window, they can't run your image against a competing brand for the season.
Clause eleven." A pause, the sound of a page turning.
"Clause eleven is ours. The publicity standards.
It restates the personal-conduct expectations from the master agreement. "
"The single one," Roxy said.
"The personal-conduct expectations," Vivienne said, in the voice she used when she didn't like a word you'd chosen and intended to keep using her own until you gave up. "Yes."
Roxy lay back on the couch with one arm over her eyes. Tilda was somewhere behind her, quiet, doing the thing she did where she made herself part of the furniture so the call would forget she was in the room.
"You'll want to move on this today," Vivienne went on. "They've got the press release drafted, they want to announce before the home opener. I've had legal red-line it. It's clean."
"Fine."
"I'm sending it to Tilda now. Sign where she shows you."
The tablet appeared over Roxy's shoulder, held in Tilda's careful hands, the document already scrolled to the bottom, a soft gray box waiting for her finger.
Roxy looked at it. Forty pages she hadn't read above the line where her name went, as she hadn't read the last one, or the one before that.
There had been a year, at the start, when she read every word.
She'd been seventeen and certain that if she just understood the paper she would understand the trap, and she'd read them all the way through with a highlighter, hunting the one sentence nobody had told her about, until she finally understood the thing the highlighter couldn't fix, which was that understanding a trap and being able to walk out of it aren't the same skill.
After that, reading them only meant you got to watch yourself sign.
She'd been sixteen when her mother signed the first one and seventeen when the second made her a global product, and somewhere past nineteen she had stopped being able to find the seam between Roxana Halliday, who'd wanted this so badly she would have signed anything, and Roxy Blaze, the global superstar.
Roxy had only wanted to be wanted. She'd gotten her wish at a scale that would have frightened her if a single adult in the room had been honest about the exchange rate.
You traded the private version of yourself for the public one, the whole of it, every room, and the trade came with no buyback clause.
She had read enough contracts to know that much.
She signed. Her finger dragged a gray scrawl across the glass that looked nothing like a signature and meant she had agreed to a season.
"Done," Tilda said into the phone, and took the tablet away.
"Good." Paper again. "Now. The Reeve dates. The gallery opening is the twenty-second, the premiere's the Thursday after. He'll route through wherever you are. You'll arrive separately, leave together, the usual. Wear the green if you still have it. It photographs like you're happy."
There it was, the whole machine in one sentence.
Arrive separately, leave together, wear the color that photographed like joy.
Ten years of being the most wanted woman in every room she walked into, and the wanting was a thing other people scheduled and dressed and aimed at a lens, and somewhere underneath all of it there was supposed to be a person whose actual life this was.
Roxy had spent two years now reaching for that person in the dark and coming back with a fistful of nothing.
The clause had a name for what she was allowed to be.
Single. Available. Beloved at a distance and belonging to no one, because a woman who belonged to someone was a woman people stopped imagining they could have, and the whole tower was built on people imagining.
"I'll handle Reeve when I get to him," she said.
"You'll handle Reeve by showing up in the green and smiling—"
"I said I'll handle it, Viv." It came out with more edge than she'd planned, a flat little note with teeth in it, and the edge surprised both of them. Roxy took her arm off her eyes. "We're done for tonight. Thank you. Go to bed, it's the middle of the night where you are."
A silence on the line that cost money. "Get some rest," Vivienne said, which from her was almost tender and almost a warning, and the call ended.
The suite was very quiet after.
Roxy stayed on the couch a while, looking at the ceiling.
"You're not tired," Tilda said.
She'd come around to perch on the arm of the opposite chair, tablet face-down on her knee for once, watching Roxy with the sharp brown eyes that had never once signed on to the act, even when everyone else in the building had.
Tilda had been with her three years. Tilda knew which smile was which, knew the difference between the one Roxy gave a rope line and the one she gave almost no one.
It was the single most relaxing and most dangerous thing about her, that there was one human in the apparatus Roxy couldn't successfully perform for, and that the human had a key to every room she slept in.
"I'm a little tired," Roxy said.
"You held a flight to London to extend a stay in a city whose biggest draw is a hockey team you'd never heard of in August." Tilda tilted her head.
"I booked the room under Halliday, by the way.
Nobody's looking for you. Or if they are, they won’t find you.
So whatever this is, you can tell me or not tell me. Just don't tell me you're tired."
Roxy almost laughed. It was the name that did it, her own real name said out loud and gentle in a hotel suite, Halliday, the thing she'd been before any of this got built on top of her, and it reached somewhere soft she usually kept under armor.
"I requested someone for the first shoot," she said. "For the ambassador campaign. The one-on-one."
"I know. I processed the request." Tilda's expression didn't move. "The goalie."
"The goalie."
"Dani Petrovic." Tilda set the name down on the table between them, careful, like she wanted to see what Roxy would do with it. "The one you chased down after the gig.”
"I didn't chase—" Roxy stopped, because she had, in fact, chased.
She sat up and pushed both hands back through her hair, the elaborate gala set long since brushed out, just her own honey mess now.
"She didn't watch the show, Til. The whole building had its phone up and she was reading a text from her brother about a four-year-old losing a tooth.
And when I went and talked to her she looked at me like I was just a person who'd interrupted her evening.
Not Roxy Blaze. Not a brand. Not a thing she wanted a piece of.
Somebody who'd interrupted her evening, and was maybe going to keep her standing in a cold hallway when she had an early morning the next day. "
It shouldn't have been a thing she was still turning over two days later.
She met thousands of people a year and they blurred, all of them, the reaching and the smiling and the phones held up.
Then she forgot them by the next city because you couldn't carry the faces and survive.
She had carried this one for forty-eight hours, taking it out to look at it on planes and in elevators, and she had no frame for that, because no one in a very long time had cost her the smallest thing, and she didn't know what to call a person who simply wanted nothing back.
"And you found that," Tilda said slowly, "irresistible."
"I found it interesting."
"Mm." Tilda picked the tablet back up, which meant she was about to do something Roxy wanted. "You want me to find a reason to keep you in town past the shoot?”
"Can you?"