Chapter 19
The phone was screaming when Roxy woke, and she knew before she even looked at it.
Some animal part of her knew. The buzzing was wrong, too much of it, a phone vibrating itself across the nightstand in a way a phone only did when the whole world had decided to want something from you at once, and she lay in the gray morning in the warm hollow where Dani had been a few hours ago and stared at the ceiling and didn't reach for it, because for one last second she got to not know, and some part of her understood that the second was the last good thing she'd get for a while.
Then she reached for it.
The screen was a wall of alerts. Her own name stacked down it over and over, the notifications she'd muted months ago shoved through anyway by sheer volume, and at the top, the thing, the headline with the photo under it, and the photo was the rental.
Her rental. The back stair, the alley, shot long-lens, grainy and unmistakable, and in it a tall woman in a dark coat with her collar up, head down, letting herself in a door.
And the next photo, time-stamped a different night, the same woman leaving at dawn.
And a third, and a fourth, a whole patient catalog of them, weeks of someone sitting in a cold car down the block with a long lens, documenting every dawn Dani had ever walked out of that door thinking she was invisible, thinking the one place in the world the cameras couldn't find them was safe.
POP QUEEN'S SECRET TRYSTS. WHO'S THE MYSTERY WOMAN SLIPPING OUT AT DAWN?
Roxy sat up so fast the room tilted. She couldn't breathe right.
The pictures kept loading as she scrolled, more of them, and her brain did the thing it did in a crisis, went cold and fast and clinical, started doing the damage assessment as Vivienne had trained her to from the time she was seventeen, and she hated herself for it even as she did it, because the assessment kept arriving at the same place, which was Dani.
Dani's face wasn't clear in any of them, the collar and baseball cap and the dark had seen to that, but it would be.
Someone would clear it. Someone would name her by tonight.
The most private person Roxy had ever known, the woman who had built an entire careful life around being impossible to find, was about to be found by everyone, and it had happened in the one place Roxy had promised her no one could.
Roxy had thought of that rental as the one place outside the world. There was no place outside the world. She knew that. She'd known it since she was seventeen. She'd let herself forget it for a few months, and Dani was the one paying for the forgetting.
She fumbled the phone trying to call her. And that was when the second story broke.
It came in over the top of the first, a fresh push notification, and Roxy read it twice before it made sense and then wished it hadn't.
ROXY BLAZE TO HEADLINE HOLLIS GALLERY GALA.
SOURCES CONFIRM POP'S GOLDEN COUPLE 'CLOSER THAN EVER.
' And under it, a quote, attributed to a representative for Ms. Blaze, polished and warm and utterly fluent, confirming Roxy's appearance with Reeve the coming weekend and addressing, with breezy generosity, the unfortunate tabloid speculation about Phoenix Ridge.
It said Ms. Blaze had formed lovely friendships with several members of the Valkyries organization during her ambassadorship, that she socialized warmly with many people, and that fans should look forward to seeing her on Reeve's arm very soon.
Roxy read the words several members of the Valkyries organization and socialized warmly and understood exactly what had been done to her, and to Dani, and exactly who had done it.
Vivienne hadn't been caught flat-footed by the leak.
Vivienne had been ready for it. The statement was too clean, too fast, too perfectly shaped to drop on the same morning, which meant it hadn't been written this morning, which meant Vivienne had known.
Roxy sat on the edge of the bad rental bed with two stories burning a hole in her hand and the whole architecture of it assembled itself in front of her, cold and complete.
The Reeve event held in reserve for weeks.
The too-agreeable phone call. The fraction-too-long silence when Roxy had said fine, send the dress.
Vivienne hadn't been placated. Vivienne had been buying time to load the gun.
The leak, whoever had technically sold the photos, was the starting pistol, and the Reeve statement was the answer Vivienne had written and chambered before the question was even asked.
It was designed to do one thing, to take the true story, Roxy is in love with a woman, and bury it under the brand story, Roxy is single and available and stepping out with Reeve Hollis, and to reduce Dani Petrovic, in the doing, to a friend Roxy briefly socialized with.
To make her nobody. To make their whole secret world a line in a managed paragraph.
She called Tilda with her hands shaking.
Tilda answered on the first ring and didn't bother with hello. "I've been calling you for an hour. Where have you been?"
"Asleep. I just saw it. Both of them. Tilda, the Reeve statement, that's—"
"It's hers. I know. I've already been on with three people.
" Tilda's voice was tight and furious and underneath it something close to tears, which Roxy had never once heard from her.
"She moved without you, Roxy. The statement went out under your name and nobody asked you.
The Reeve event was locked three weeks ago and held, exactly like I was scared of, she kept it in her pocket.
And the photos. I don't know who sold the photos, I genuinely don't, but she had that statement ready to go inside of twenty minutes of the first story, and you don't write that clean that fast, she's been sitting on it.
She knew it was coming. She might as well have called the photographer herself.
" A breath. "I'm done. I want you to hear me say it with my whole chest. I'm done covering for her, I'm done being the buffer, I quit this morning in my heart and I'll quit out loud the second you tell me to.
So tell me. What do you want? Whatever it is. I'm yours."
And Roxy, who had spent eleven years being handled, being moved, being told what she wanted by the woman on the other end of these exact calls, gripped the phone and tried to think past the roar in her ears, because for the first time in her adult life there was no one above her deciding the next move, there was only her, and a friend asking what do you want, and a woman somewhere across town whose life had just been set on fire to protect a lie about Roxy's.
"Give me a second," Roxy said. "I have to reach Dani first. Before anything. I have to—she's going to think—" Her voice cracked. "I have to call her before she does the math on this alone."
She was already too late.
The first call went straight to voicemail.
The second too. She typed a text with her thumbs shaking so hard she had to fix it twice, it's not what they're saying, none of it is real, please pick up, please, I can explain all of it, and watched it sit there with no delivery.
She sent another, and another, and watched them all hang there gray and undelivered, and refreshed, and refreshed, like pressing a bruise to confirm it's real.
And then the little word appeared under the last one that told her what had happened.
Not Delivered. Not Read. Nothing. The line had gone dead because the number on the other end had blocked it.
And then, a second before the block finished closing, one last message came through from Dani, sent in the seconds before she shut the door, and it was short, and it was clean, and it was the most devastating thing Roxy had ever read.
I saw the photos. And the thing about you and Reeve. I can't be the woman they make me into to protect that story, and I can't watch you stand next to him. I've done this once. I won't do it again. Please don't come to the rink or the apartment. Let it be over. I'm sorry, Roxana.
Roxana. She'd ended it with the name. The real one, the secret one, the one that meant I see the actual you, the one she'd said into the dark like a vow, and she'd used it to say goodbye, and that was the thing that took Roxy's legs out from under her, that Dani had reached past everything the world was screaming about Roxy Blaze and said goodbye to Roxana Halliday, the only person who'd ever gotten to keep her.
Roxy read it twice. Then she sat down on the floor of the rental with her back against the bed and couldn't, for a while, do anything at all.
I've done this once. I won't do it again.
That was the line that kept going through her, because Roxy knew exactly what it meant, knew the whole shape of the wound it came from.
Seven years ago a woman Dani had trusted with the private fact of her had sold it to a blog for a payout, had turned the most undefended thing about her into a headline, and Dani had survived it the only way she knew how, by closing every door and never opening another one for seven years, until Roxy.