Chapter 3 #2
"I can find you a reason to be anywhere on the planet.
It's the whole job." She was already tapping.
"The team's foundation runs a children's-hospital visit every fall.
I can attach you to it. It reads as goodwill, buys you a week, and gives the cameras something wholesome.
" She glanced up, and the tapping stopped.
"Roxy. Whatever this is, the clause you just put your finger on has teeth.
I'm not telling you not to. I'm telling you I read all forty pages, even on the nights you don't."
"I know you do," Roxy said. "It's why I keep you."
"It's why you keep me." Tilda stood, the next six calls already lining up behind her eyes. "Get some actual sleep. I'll have your week by morning."
She let herself out. The door shut with the heavy, expensive hush of good hotels, and Roxy was alone with the parking-structure view and forty signed pages and the silence she'd been outrunning for two years.
She didn't go to bed.
She paced the suite once, twice, like she did in the wings before a show when the adrenaline had nowhere to spend itself, and then she stopped at the desk because there was a notepad on it.
Hotel stationery, thick and creamy and useless.
A pen with the hotel's name down one side.
Her hands had the pen uncapped before the rest of her had agreed to anything.
For two years there had been nothing. That was the part nobody knew, not Vivienne, not the label, not the millions of people who streamed the back catalog on the assumption that the woman who made it was still in there making more.
Roxy Blaze, who'd written her first single at sixteen in a motel bathroom because it was the only door in her mother's life that locked, hadn't finished a song since she was twenty-five.
The motel song had been about her mother, not that she'd ever said so out loud and not that she ever would.
Eight years old on a folding chair backstage at a pageant, sixteen in a bathroom with a borrowed guitar, and in between a thousand stages and one woman in the wings counting the judges' faces.
She'd built a whole sound out of wanting to be chosen, and the terrible joke of it was that the wanting had sold, the hunger had gone platinum, and once you'd put your own hunger on the market there was one question you could never ask out loud again.
Whether anyone would choose you if there were nothing in it for them.
She had stopped being able to write right around the time she stopped believing the answer was yes.
She'd sat at pianos in five countries and waited and felt nothing arrive.
She had quietly decided it was gone the way everything else had gone, sold off a piece at a time, and that the machine had finally come for the one part of her that had ever truly been hers, and there would be no getting it back.
You didn't tell people that. There was no clause for it.
You just kept lip-syncing your own old joy on stage and hoping the hole didn't show in the light.
She wrote a line.
She looked at it. It was about a hallway and a cold door and a woman who hadn't looked up, and it wasn't good yet, exactly, but it was true, and true was a thing she hadn't been able to get onto a page in so long she'd forgotten the feeling of it, the small clean click of a word falling into the place it belonged.
She wrote the next line. Then the one under that.
Her handwriting got worse as it got faster, like it used to when she was sixteen and chasing a thing before it could get away.
Seven lines came out of her standing at that desk in a hotel robe at midnight.
Seven lines, and the shape of where the chorus wanted to go, an ache of melody she could already hear under the words.
When she stopped it was only because her hand had cramped around the cheap pen and her face hurt, and she realized she'd been smiling at a notepad in an empty room like a lunatic.
She hadn't smiled at her own work in years.
She'd performed a thousand smiles and meant almost none of them, and here was one nobody had asked her for, alone, at a desk, over hotel stationery, with no camera to catch it and no one to sell it to, and that was exactly why it was the most honest thing her face had done since she was a kid.
She read it back twice. It was the best thing she'd written in years.
It had come out of her in the time it took to boil a kettle, after two years of drought, the day after a stranger had politely declined to be impressed by her.
What was it about Dani Petrovic that intrigued her so? Her intense eyes? Her hard to read face?
She knew what it meant for her to start writing again, and she wasn't going to look at it head-on.
She tore the page off the pad, folded it once, and opened the songwriting app she hadn't touched in so long it made her log back in.
She typed the seven lines into a clean file with her thumb, slow, getting the line breaks right, handling it like glass.
Then she went to name the file and her thumb hovered.
If she named it properly, she would have to know she'd done it.
If she named it something safe, she'd lose it in a graveyard folder of dead demos and never open it again, which was probably the entire function of safe.
She typed two letters. DP.
She saved it. She set the phone face-down on the desk, imagining Dani setting one down at home, in a life Roxy hadn't been let into yet, and she stood there in a room booked under her own forgotten name with her heart going hard for no reason a cardiologist could find.
She didn't show it to Tilda. She didn't call her mother, or her producer, or anyone who would want a piece of it.
For a long while she only stood at the window and looked at the dark parking structure, and let herself, privately, for the first time in longer than she could stand to count, be glad about something that was hers.