Chapter 21
She landed at Heathrow on no sleep, having crossed the same ocean Dani had crossed for her ten days before, and she didn't let herself feel the symmetry of it, because feeling it would have stopped her, and she couldn't afford to be stopped.
She'd slept maybe an hour over the Atlantic.
The rest of it she'd spent with a yellow legal pad and a pen, and Tilda's voice in her ear from the seat beside her, and by the time the wheels touched down she had a plan, and the plan had three parts, and the first part was the one she was least afraid of, which told her everything about how afraid she was of the other two.
She went to the gallery first. Not to the hotel, not to shower, not to sleep.
Straight from the airport to the venue in Mayfair where, in two days, she was scheduled to arrive separately and leave in the same car as Reeve Hollis, where the wardrobe was pulled and the story was written and the internet was waiting to be told a romance it would believe because it had been trained for a decade to believe it.
She found Reeve in a back room doing a sound check for the gala, and he took one look at her face, jet-lagged and stripped of every layer of management, and he sent the technicians out of the room.
"You're not coming Saturday," Reeve said. It wasn't a question. He'd known her a long time.
"I'm not coming Saturday. I'm not coming to any of it ever again, Reeve, and I'm so sorry, because I know what me pulling out does to your weekend and your numbers, and you didn't do anything to deserve being left holding it.
" Roxy's voice wanted to shake and she didn't let it.
"I can't keep doing this. Standing next to you pretending.
You've been the kindest part of a thing I hate, and that's not fair to you either, you should get to be photographed with someone real too.
I just can't be the lie anymore. Not even the comfortable version of it with you. "
And Reeve, who had spent the same decade in the same machine, performing the same fiction from the other side of it, came across the room and hugged her, hard, and said into her hair, "Took you long enough.
Go burn it down. I'll be fine, I'm always fine, I'm extremely marketable.
" He pulled back and held her by the shoulders and looked at her, and something in him went quiet and true under the charm.
"Whoever she is. I hope she's worth all this, and I hope you don't let those animals make you ashamed of her.
Now get out of my green room, you're ruining my eyeliner with the crying I'm about to do. "
Roxy laughed, wet, and kissed his cheek, and left, and that was the easy part done.
She called Vivienne from the gallery parking lot, standing in the cold London afternoon with her breath clouding, because she wanted to be outside and moving when she did it, not trapped in a car.
Vivienne answered on the second ring, and her voice was warm, which was the worst sign of all, the warm she did when she'd already won and was being generous about it.
"There you are. I was beginning to worry.
The Saturday plan is perfect, darling, the statement's tested beautifully, the engagement numbers on the Reeve angle are already up eleven percent, and the Phoenix Ridge noise is dying exactly on schedule.
You see? You panic, and I solve it. We're a very good machine, you and I. Now. Where are you, I'll send a car—"
"You're fired."
A silence. Roxy had never said those two words to anyone in her life. They felt enormous in her mouth and very small in the air, two ordinary words, and the silence on the other end was the silence of a woman recalibrating an entire universe in real time.
"I'm sorry," Vivienne said, in a different voice. "I think the jet lag has—"
"I'm not jet-lagged, I'm finished. You're fired, Vivienne.
Effective the second I'm saying it. No severance, because you put a statement out under my name that I never approved and used my own face to bury a person I—" Roxy stopped, and reset, and wouldn't give the woman even that much of Dani.
"No severance, no transition period, no final meeting where you talk me out of it, because I know you, and a meeting is just a room where you win.
There's no room. There's this phone call.
You're done managing me. You're done managing my career, my image, my statements, my body, my schedule, and my heart, which you have been managing longest of all and which was never, ever yours to touch. "
"You ungrateful little—" The warmth was gone now, all of it, and underneath was the thing Roxy had been afraid of since she was sixteen, the cold fury of the woman who'd built her.
"I made you. There was a karaoke contestant from a trailer park in Florida, nothing but poor trash.
I made that the most valuable woman in pop, and you think you can fire me by telephone?
I will tie you up in litigation until you're forty.
I own pieces of you that you don't even know are pieces.
You will not survive this. I will make absolutely certain you do not survive this. "
"Maybe," Roxy said, and found, to her own amazement, that her hand was steady. "But you'll be doing it from outside my life, and that's the only part I came here for. Lawyers can have the rest. Goodbye, Viv."
And she hung up on Vivienne Croft for the second and final time, and turned the phone off so she couldn't hear it ring, and stood in the cold a moment with her eyes shut, her pulse loud in her ears, the dark phone gone heavy in her fist.
She'd expected to feel triumphant. She felt sick.
She'd known for weeks what this would cost, had said it once to Tilda and never again, that the woman she'd just fired in a parking lot wasn't a manager but the person who'd raised the second half of her, built someone out of the empty space a receding mother left when Roxy was sixteen.
Knowing it in advance hadn't made the doing of it any easier.
Roxy stood in the London cold and grieved her, actually grieved her, like you grieve a thing that hurt you, which is the most complicated grief there is, and let it move through her, because Dani had taught her that you didn't get anywhere pretending a thing didn't cost you.
Then she wiped her face once with the back of her hand and opened her eyes, because the grief was real and it changed nothing, the woman had still done what she'd done, and there was a podium downstairs with Roxy's name on it.
She got in the car and told the driver the name of the hotel where Tilda was waiting, because the easy part and the frightening part were done, and now there was only the impossible one left.
Tilda had taken an executive suite and turned it into a war room overnight.
Roxy walked in to find every surface covered.
Eleven years of contracts in labeled stacks.
Appearance logs going back to her teens.
A printout of every statement ever issued under her name, the ones she'd written and the hundreds she hadn't, flagged in three colors.
A woman she'd never met in a sharp suit at the desk, a media lawyer Tilda had pulled in on an emergency rate, already three hours into reading.
And Tilda in the middle of it on no sleep, curly hair wild, running on what looked like four espressos and pure loyalty, who looked up when Roxy came in and just said, "Tell me you did it. "
"Both of them. Reeve's out. Vivienne's fired. She's going to sue me into the next decade."
"Let her." Tilda crossed the room and hugged her, fierce and fast, the first time in six years of working together they'd done that, and then got straight back to business because there were three hours on the clock.
"Okay. Sit. We have a lot to do and not enough time and you have to be at a podium downstairs at three, so listen. "
It went fast after that, as the morning of the leak had gone fast, except this was the inverse of that morning, this was Roxy building instead of being dismantled.
She signed the paperwork to register her own management company, her name on the line as the principal, the first business she'd ever owned in a career that had made other people rich.
She stopped with the pen on the page and looked at it for a second, the legal name of a company that didn't exist until she signed, with Roxana Halliday listed as its sole owner, and understood that she had been a globally famous multimillionaire for ten years and had never once, until this exact pen stroke, owned a single thing that decided her own life.
Everything had been somebody else's, leased back to her in exchange for compliance.
She signed it slowly, and her hand didn't shake, and when it was done she had, for the first time, a place to stand that no one could take from her.
She worked the statement with the lawyer line by line, every word hers, and the lawyer kept trying to add denials and Roxy kept striking them out, because the one thing she wouldn't do, the line under everything, was say a single word about Dani.
Not a confirmation. Not a denial. Not her name, nothing.
The world wanted Roxy to either deny the woman in the photos or claim her, and either one threw Dani to the cameras, and Roxy would do neither.
She'd take back her own life in public and leave Dani's untouched in private.
It was a needle she had to thread, and it was harder than firing Vivienne had been, because every instinct the machine had trained into her screamed to control the narrative, and the bravest thing she could do was refuse to.
And then, last, she uploaded the songs.