Chapter 20 #2
"I'm staying," Frankie said. "Don't argue.
Helen the psychologist has got space for you tomorrow at eleven, I already texted her.
Tonight you don't have to do anything except sit there.
" She dropped onto the couch and put her battered hockey feet up on Lou's coffee table like she lived there.
"And before you say it, because I can see you winding up to say it.
I don't care that you didn't tell me. I knew anyway, you idiot, I've known since the diner.
I wasn't waiting for the confession. I was waiting for you to be happy, and you were, for a while.
I saw it, and I'm not going to let what those vultures did to you turn it into something you're ashamed of. "
And Dani, who had lied to her, who had decided that very morning at five o'clock to finally tell her the truth, and who had instead had the truth ripped out of her hands and printed in a tabloid before she could give it away freely, looked at Frankie sitting on Lou's couch having shown up with a packed bag.
She felt her throat close, and managed, roughly, "I was going to tell you today. This morning. I'd decided."
"I know," Frankie said. "That's the part that pisses me off the most." And she patted the couch beside her, and Dani went and sat down, and that was all it took.
The team came to her in pieces over the night, as they did when one of their own went down.
Camille arrived late with takeout she insisted Dani try, three different things, just talked easily about nothing, about her own mess of a famous-relationship years ago, that whole circus with her ex, offering it sideways, I know what the lens does to you, I'm not going to pretend I don't. Lex texted Frankie, not Dani, the right call, tell her the gear room's a no-phone zone tomorrow, I'll deck anyone who brings it up. Mara texted Dani directly, two lines. Practice is normal tomorrow. Anyone makes it weird answers to me. And Dani, who had spent years certain that the safest thing a person could be was alone, sat in Lou and Camille’s house surrounded by people who had simply shown up, none of them asking her to perform being okay, none of them needing the story, just there, and she thanked each of them and meant it all the way down.
She ate, finally, because Camille kept nudging the containers an inch closer until she did, and the food was good, and that small stupid fact undid her more than any of the kindness had.
That was the thing she couldn't get to sit still in her head.
The photos that morning had looked like proof of the one rule she'd lived by, that to be seen was to be cashed in.
And then the same day, the same hours, these people had walked into the proof and broken it.
Frankie had known the whole truth for weeks and used it to show up with a duffel bag, not to sell it.
Lou had read the story and taken her in.
Camille had handed over her own old humiliation like a gift, I know what the lens does, I won't pretend.
They knew her, all of them, knew the parts she kept hidden and the parts the tabloid had torn open both, and the knowing had come out as food and welcome and family.
Dani didn't know yet what to do with that.
She only knew the old rule had a hole in it now that it hadn't had at breakfast.
She lay awake on Lou's guest bed the whole night anyway, in a room that smelled of someone else's laundry soap, listening to an unfamiliar furnace tick on and off in a house that wasn't hers.
The kindness didn't fix it. The kindness sat alongside the wreckage and neither one canceled the other, and somewhere around three she gave up on sleep and just lay there in the dark doing the only thing she knew how to do with pain, which was decide how she'd carry it.
She'd play tomorrow. She'd play like nothing had happened, because the ice was the one place the cameras couldn't follow her in, the one place she was only what she did, and she'd be good there if she could be nothing anywhere else.
She thought about the crease like some people thought about prayer.
Eighteen feet of painted ice that belonged to her and no one else, where the only thing that mattered was the next shot and the one after that, where a person could go completely empty and call the emptiness focus.
She had hidden inside that emptiness for seven years and it had never once failed her.
It wouldn't fail her tomorrow. Whatever the world wanted to make of Dani Petrovic in print, between the pipes she would still be unreachable, and she held onto that through the long gray hours as she'd once held onto nothing at all, and found it was still enough to get her up. She got up at six, as she always did.
She didn't let herself wonder what she'd do when Roxy came back for her.
She'd blocked the number and ended it clean and that was supposed to be the end of it.
But she knew Roxy Blaze a little now, knew the stubbornness under the gloss, and some traitor part of her, lying awake at three in a borrowed bed, wasn't entirely sure the ending would hold, and wasn't entirely sure, either, whether she wanted it to.