Chapter 5
Roxy woke at seven all at once, the body of a woman who'd been getting up for call times since she was a child, and the first thing she did, before water, before the curtains, before she was properly a person yet, was reach for her phone and check whether Dani had text back.
She hadn't.
The text sat there exactly where Roxy had left it, delivered and unanswered, That coffee was a guess.
Did I get it right? with no gray bubble under it and no dots and nothing at all, and Roxy lay in the enormous hotel bed and looked at her own message and felt, of all the stupid things, embarrassed.
She'd built a career, an empire, an entire human brand on being the one who got reached for.
People wrote songs about wanting her. People got married to her songs.
And a hockey goalie in Phoenix Ridge had read one text, decided it didn't require an answer, and gone to sleep, and meanwhile lying awake at seven a.m. in a thousand-dollar bed refreshing a thread of one was Roxy Blaze, net worth obscene, most eligible woman in pop three years running.
There was a lesson in it somewhere. She suspected the lesson was that she had spent ten years confusing being wanted with being known, and that a stranger had accidentally laid a finger on the exact seam where the two came apart.
It was, she thought, probably very good for her. She didn't think it for long.
"Tilda." Roxy padded out into the suite in a hotel robe, hair everywhere, and found Tilda already at the little desk with a laptop and a coffee and the alert stillness of a person who'd been up two hours. "The London flight. Can we push it a day?"
Tilda didn't look up from the screen. "We pushed it a day on Tuesday. And again Thursday."
"So this'll be easy. You've had the practice."
"Vivienne's assistant has started calling me directly to ask why you're still in a hockey town." Now Tilda looked up, and one eyebrow went up with her. "What do I tell her?"
"Tell her the foundation wants the ambassador at the home opener tonight. It's good optics, the ambassador shows up to the actual games. That part's even true." Roxy dropped onto the couch. "I'm the ambassador. I should go to a game."
"You have never been to a hockey game in your life."
"Then it's about time, isn't it? I want to support women’s sport and that means showing up for games.” Roxy picked a grape off the plate she still wasn't going to eat and didn't meet Tilda's eyes, which answered the question, and Tilda let the silence run on a moment to make sure Roxy heard herself in it, then went back to the laptop and started moving a flight.
"One day," Tilda said. "I can buy you one day. After that Vivienne flies someone out, and it won't be to bring you a smoothie."
"One day's plenty," Roxy said, and almost believed it.
The truth, which she wouldn't be handing to Tilda or to anyone, was that she didn't want to get on the plane.
London was sold-out arenas and a hotel that looked like every other hotel and ten days of being the most wanted woman in a country that had never once seen her actual face.
Phoenix Ridge held the enigma that was Dani Petrovic, completely unfazable, those cool gray eyes that looked straight through her, and Roxy couldn't for the life of her explain why Phoenix Ridge had begun to feel like the only place she could breathe.
Astoria Shepry's box hung over center ice like the prow of a ship, glass on three sides, and from it the whole bowl of the arena opened up below, thousands of seats filling in, the ice a long clean rectangle of white under the lights.
Roxy stood at the glass in something tailored and photographable and let a sequence of donors shake her hand, and gave them the smile, and said how excited she was about the partnership, and meant about four percent of it.
"You'll want to watch our girl in net," Astoria said, appearing at her elbow with two flutes of champagne and her wife a half-step behind her. "Miller thinks she's the best goalie in the league. Miller is usually right about these things."
"Miller is always right about these things," said Miller Scott, who was as dry as a good martini and shook Roxy's hand like she'd already decided whether she liked her and didn't intend to say which.
"Petrovic. Thirty-one. Don't waste your time on the puck.
Watch her. The puck's a distraction. She isn't."
"I'll watch her," Roxy said, and took a too-large sip of champagne, because she'd been planning to watch Dani Petrovic all along, and it unsettled her to admit it.
The game started and Roxy understood almost none of it.
It was fast in a way television flattened completely, bodies hitting bodies along the boards with a bang she felt come up through the glass, the puck a black rumor she kept losing track of.
So she gave up on the puck and watched the people instead, how they threw themselves at each other and bounced back up, the casual violence of it, the whole building breathing in when the play swung toward one net and out when it swung back.
It was, she realized, the most honest room she had been inside in years.
Nobody here was performing. Eighteen thousand people were feeling the identical thing at the identical second and not one of them was doing it for a lens, and Roxy, who got paid an unspeakable amount to manufacture exactly this feeling and sell it back to rooms like this one, stood at the glass and envied them it.
And Miller had been right. You could find the whole game in the goalie.
Down there at the far end, small in all her pads, Dani Petrovic moved the way water moves, no wasted motion anywhere in her, sliding post to post, dropping and rising, and Roxy understood for the first time what the woman in the studio had been trying to tell her.
In the crease it's just angles. You could watch her do it.
You could watch her make the net small, take the shooters' room away from them, dare them to find a gap that wasn't there.
Twice in the first period the building groaned at a shot that should have gone in and didn't, and both times Roxy caught herself already looking to the goalie before she understood why, like looking for the one fixed point in a room that won't stop moving.
Astoria narrated some of it for her, icings and power plays and a penalty Roxy didn't follow, and Roxy nodded and asked a polite question here and there and watched number thirty-one the whole time.
It was the most herself Roxy had seen her.
At the shoot Dani had been braced and polite and giving away nothing, a woman waiting to be allowed to leave.
Out here she'd vanished completely into the work, and the vanishing was the whole point, you could see that it was the point, the same thing Roxy chased on a stage and almost never caught anymore.
Two people who had each found exactly one place on earth where the noise stopped.
In the second period the other team came down three-on-one and Roxy stopped breathing without deciding to.
The shot came hard, top corner, the kind that was already a goal, and Dani's glove was simply there, plucked it out of the air like she'd known the address before the shooter did, and eighteen thousand people came up out of their seats and the noise slammed the glass of the box like weather, and Roxy was on her feet too, champagne forgotten, both palms flat on the cold glass like a kid, close enough to fog it.
"Told you," Miller said, somewhere behind her, deeply satisfied.
Roxy made herself peel her hands off the glass.
She made herself pick the champagne back up and put an ambassador's face on.
But her heart was going like she'd run somewhere, and down on the ice the woman who'd done it was already skating it off, already gone, tapping each post with her stick, head down, back inside the quiet she'd told Roxy she picked at nine years old, like a save that good was just an average day at work, like she hadn't reached into the air and unmade something that was already true.
Roxy had spent her whole life chasing the feeling of doing one thing so well it stopped time.
She was standing here watching someone who lived there.
She made herself sit down. She watched the rest of it like an ambassador.
By the third period she'd stopped performing interest entirely and was just watching, chin in her hand, the donors and the champagne and the glass box gone soft and far away.
Somewhere in there Astoria had stopped narrating and started watching Roxy instead, level and unhurried, no expression on her at all.
She owned the contracts on a great many people and hadn't gotten there by missing things.
Roxy felt it and didn't turn her head. Let her watch.
Let everyone watch. It was, after all, the one thing Roxy Blaze was for.
The Valkyries won. Dani Petrovic saved every puck and Roxy felt like she could remember each one.
"Come down to ice level," Astoria said when the horn went. "We do a few photographs with the players after a win. The ambassador in the family portrait. It plays well."
So Roxy rode the elevator down into the belly of the building and walked out through a tunnel into the cold breath coming off the ice, and the team lined up along the boards in their gear, sweaty and bright-eyed and enormous up close.
Roxy had met presidents and walked away unimpressed, and here she was a little awed by a row of women who smelled of sweat and cold air, who had just left everything they had out on the ice and were still standing, still grinning, still loose and bright with the win.
There was nothing for sale on any of their faces.