Chapter 19 #2
Then Roxy had spent a winter coaxing her out from behind those doors one careful inch at a time.
Being known isn't the same as being used, Roxy had promised her, not in those words but in every dawn and every real name and every song hidden in a folder, I will never be the one who does that to you.
And then Roxy's own world, Roxy's own manager, Roxy's own glittering machine, had done the very thing Roxy swore would never reach her.
It had taken Dani's most guarded self and pinned it grainy and long-lens to the front of every tabloid in the country, and proved the lesson Dani had spent seven years living by exactly, brutally right.
Being known was being used. Roxy had been the proof against it and now she was the proof for it.
No wonder Dani had run. Roxy would have run from herself too.
She thought she might be sick. She sat on the cold floor and breathed and didn't let herself dial Tilda back with the wild useless plan already forming, because a plan built on this much guilt would be a plan about Roxy, about absolving Roxy, and Dani didn't need Roxy to feel better.
Dani needed the lie taken apart at the root.
Those weren't the same thing, and Roxy made herself sit there until she could tell them apart.
Her phone rang in her hand and she answered it without looking, hoping past sense, and it wasn't Dani. It was Astoria Shepry.
"Don't talk," Astoria said, not unkindly, in the low even voice of a woman who ran a building full of crises for a living.
"Listen. I've already spoken to Dani this morning.
She came to me before the second story even broke, because that's who she is.
She walked into my office, told me to my face before she'd let me read it somewhere.
And she's handling it as she handles everything, which is quietly, and competently, and by closing every door in the building one at a time.
She played it down. She called herself a friend.
She is doing a very good impression of a woman who is fine.
" A pause. "I have known Dani Petrovic for a long time, and I am telling you she is not fine.
She is breaking. She is just doing it her own way, where nobody gets to watch. "
Roxy pressed the heel of her hand against her eyes. "I never wanted—Astoria, I would never have let this near her, I tried so hard to keep her out of it—"
"I believe you. That isn't the question anymore.
" Astoria's voice sharpened, not cruel, just true.
"Here is the question. By tonight there will be two versions of this story in the world. One is the one your manager wrote, where Dani is a footnote and you are single and stepping out with a nice young man. That story is already running, and it is very well crafted. If you do nothing, it will win.”
She paused for a moment. “The other story is whatever you decide to do next.
That's it. That's the whole choice in front of you.
So I'm not going to tell you what to do, Roxy.
I'm going to tell you that what you do in the next two days is going to decide who you actually are, after a whole decade of letting other people decide it for you.
And then I'm going to hang up, because I have my player to look after. "
The line went quiet.
Roxy sat on the floor for one more minute.
She let herself feel all of it, the guilt and the grief and the unbearable fact of Roxana used as a goodbye, let it go all the way through her, because she'd learned from Dani that you didn't get anywhere pretending a thing didn't hurt.
And then she stood up, and something in her had changed, gone hard and clear and quiet, and she understood that she was, for the first time, completely done being afraid of Vivienne Croft, because the worst thing Vivienne could do she had already done, she'd taken the one good thing, and there was nothing left to hold over a woman with nothing left to lose.
She packed the rental in twenty minutes.
Her own hands, no stylist, the few real things she'd accumulated in the only home she'd had in years, and she left the bad coffee and the burnt-pan smell and the bed that had taught her she was a person.
She left the notebook for last. She stood at the little table where three years of silence had broken open into thirteen songs, all of them about a woman who'd just told her goodbye, and for one cracked second she thought about leaving them too, the whole folder, walking away from the only thing she'd made that was real.
Then she thought about what those songs actually were, and what they could still do, said out loud, in public, on her own terms, and she put the notebook in the bag with the careful hands of a woman picking up the one weapon she had left.
At the door she stopped and looked back once, the lit window nobody was supposed to be able to find, and made herself a promise about it she didn't say out loud.
Tilda met her at the car. Roxy put the rental keys in her hand and held onto her fingers a second.
"I need you to do something, and it's going to take all night, and it might end your career in this business.
" Roxy's voice was steady now. "Get me everything.
Every contract Vivienne ever signed me to.
Every clause. Every appearance log, every email, every statement that went out under my name that I never approved.
All of it, in one place, by tomorrow. I'm going to take my whole life back from her, Til, on paper, where she can't spin it, and then I'm going to do the thing she spent eleven years making sure I'd never be brave enough to do. "
"Which is?"
"Tell the truth in public," Roxy said. "On my terms, for once."
And she got in the car alone, and told the driver the airport, and didn't look back at the window again, because she'd already promised it something, and Roxy Blaze, whatever else the morning had made of her, was finally a woman who intended to keep her promises.