Chapter 29 A Good Day
A Good Day
Two months later
It was a good day.
Blair wrapped up her last meeting of the day and repeated her refrain. It was a good day.
She had taken to reminding herself this at the ends of days, when they had, in fact, been good.
And most of them were. If she’d been the kind of person who kept a gratitude journal, she would have made more extensive lists.
Today I had a productive meeting. Read a great book.
Went shopping with Esme. Attended Double Gin Night next door.
Today the hurricane shutters worked.
If you looked at Blair’s life from the outside, you saw progress.
An upward trend line. She was seeing her friends, both at home and out in the world.
Esme had just gone back to school for her sophomore year, but she’d spent a lot of time over the summer at Blair’s house.
Moonpics was in preproduction for Green Light.
With a script she had written.
She had finally done it. It hadn’t even been that hard.
She had “writing” built up in her mind as a mysterious, rarefied gift that she didn’t have.
She would have liked to say she wrote the script triumphantly, with great fanfare, but it had been a big anticlimax.
She just… wrote it. It was like the story was inside her, and all she had to do was sit down and let it come out through her fingers.
She’d removed herself from Allie’s cabin in a daze of heartbreak tempered with the need to move. She’d called a taxi and paid the driver handsomely to take her back to the Twin Cities. She’d had most of her stuff. Whatever was left at Jack’s condo was part of the price she had to pay for…
For what?
For having made a mistake?
For having given the wrong person her… what? Regard? Friendship. Trust. Yes, all those things.
She’d started the script on the plane ride home and finished it the next day, by the pool. It had been a marathon session in which she’d gotten up only to feed herself and the crows.
Those damn crows were still coming.
The question was, Why was she still feeding them? Why was she still collecting the trinkets they were leaving for their long-lost love?
Everybody loved the script. Loved it. Tiffany. Bjorn, who was turning out to be a thoughtful dude in addition to a money tree. Ava Gustafson, whom they’d gotten to direct.
So if writing was a gift, apparently Blair had it after all. But she didn’t think it was. It was a skill a couple of men had once told her she didn’t possess, or couldn’t develop, and she had believed that lie for far too long.
But no more. Blair had written something that Angela would have been proud of. Even if Green Light was a one-off, Blair was done saying she wasn’t a writer.
So everything was on the upswing.
On the surface.
But at the same time, she was heartbroken.
Because she hadn’t just given Jack her regard, friendship, and trust, she’d given him her heart.
He’d wormed his way in the back door, as he’d said, getting to know her with a speed and depth that had no precedent.
She understood where those crows were coming from.
She sat with a thud at her desk and told herself to stop thinking about it. There was no use fixating on something she couldn’t change. What would Mimi have said? That dog won’t hunt.
She took solace in the fact that she was heartbroken, but not broken-broken. The hurricane shutters were holding.
And if she didn’t have this heartbreak, if she hadn’t had her time with Jack, she wouldn’t have written Green Light.
So it was a good day.
She was closing down her computer when Tiffany stuck her head in. “This came for you.” She was holding a thick manila envelope.
“Leave it on Skye’s desk. She’ll deal with it tomorrow.” Skye was Blair’s assistant, and one of her many talents was diverting mail addressed to Blair and making it other people’s problem.
“Skye’s the one who gave it to me. She asked me what she should do with it.”
“OK.” Blair held out her hand. If Tiffany thought she needed to see whatever that was, she probably did.
“Bye!” Tiff called, departing with a vehemence that made it seem an awful lot like fleeing. “Call me if you need me!”
Blair threw the envelope on the corner of her desk. She’d open it tomorrow, when she—
Wait.
Snatching it back up, she blinked a few times before confirming that the return address was in fact what she’d thought it was.
Jack.
She stared at it as her heart started thudding. She didn’t even pretend like she wasn’t going to tear it open—she just needed a moment to get her fingers to cooperate.
It was a manuscript.
The title page read “American Crow: A Novel by Jack Branksome.”
She flipped the page.
“For Blair, who got above her raising. Some of us take longer than others, but we get there eventually.”