CHAPTER FOUR
BLAIRE
"Blaire, here's your coffee. The car is here and your bags have been picked up from your apartment. Flight leaves in an hour and a half."
Camille sprints to keep up with my long strides through the Monroe Communications lobby, which tells me she's wearing the wrong shoes for a Monday morning. I take the coffee and the drive she's holding out without breaking pace.
"Thanks, Cammy."
After speaking with the board of Sullivan and Associates, none of them were comfortable with anyone junior level taking this case. Unfortunately, other than leadership, my associates are what would be junior level in their eyes.
I’m the only senior level PR Manager, and considering my life is on fire at the moment, I didn’t need to think too long when they offered to put me up for two months to go to LA and handle Mr. Sullivan’s case personally.
I wouldn’t call it running, necessarily. It does give me the optics I need to get the hell away from my parents and soon to be ex-husband. A win is a win.
"Where do you have us booked?" I ask Cammy. "This is going to be two months of our lives, Cammy. We can’t do a single."
"No, I booked us lofts. Walking distance to the Sullivan building, good neighborhood, private entrance.
" She's slightly breathless but keeping up — I'll give her that.
"I've had the fridge stocked and hired a maid and a cook for the duration.
The cook does a rotating menu, but I flagged your dietary stuff, so she knows. "
I don't have dietary needs. What I have is a decade of Colt deciding what went into my body after a doctor's appointment revealed I'd gained ten pounds.
Couldn't have that. So, carbs and sugars and basically anything worth eating ended up on a heavily monitored list he called my dietary restrictions and I called surviving.
I stop walking.
Camille stops a half-step after me, catching herself.
I turn and look at her. She's twenty-six and has worked for me for six years, and she is, without question, the most quietly competent person I have ever employed. She anticipates. She executes. She does not wait to be told the same thing twice.
She's also a beautiful woman with no children and no boyfriend, and I wonder sometimes, guiltily, if that's partly because of the hours she keeps on my behalf.
"What would I do without you?" I say.
She grins. "Starve in a hotel and lose the Sullivan account."
"Accurate." I start walking again. "What do I need to know before I land?"
She falls back into step. "Sullivan has a reputation for being—" she hesitates.
"Say it."
"Difficult. Uncooperative. The PR firm they hired last year lasted eleven days."
"What happened on day eleven?"
"He told their lead consultant that her strategy was, quote, aggressively mediocre in front of three members of his executive team."
I take a long sip of my coffee. "What was the strategy?"
"Honestly?" Camille glances at her tablet. "Kind of mediocre."
"Then he wasn't wrong. I'm not interested in coddling a client. I'm interested in solving the problem. If he's difficult, he's difficult. I've handled difficult."
Camille nods but says nothing, which means she has a thought she's decided not to share. I let it go. We push through the glass doors into the morning heat, and the car is there, exactly where she said it would be, my bags already loaded.
Mornings in Houston have that particular thick quality that feels like stepping into a mouth. I've lived here my whole life, and I have never once made peace with the humidity.
I slide into the back seat. Camille leans in through the window with my tablet.
"The Sullivan file is loaded. I've flagged the Meridian section and the board's specific concerns. Oh, and your attorney called."
I take the tablet. "Which one?"
A pause. "The divorce one."
I look out the window at the street. A woman is walking a very small dog that is walking her, technically, pulling at the leash with the unearned confidence of something that weighs eight pounds.
"I'll call her from the car."
"She said it's not urgent. Just an update on the filing."
"Okay."
"Blaire." Camille's voice shifts — drops out of assistant mode into one of my closest friends. "Are you okay? Do you need anything?"
I turn back to her and give her the smile that means the conversation is closing. "I'm fine, Cammy. Two months in LA, a loft with a cook, and a client whose worst quality so far is a fountain. I've had harder weeks in Houston."
She doesn't look entirely convinced. She's too smart for that. But she nods. Steps back from the car. "Call me when you land."
"I will."
The window goes up. The car pulls out.
I open the Sullivan file on the tablet, cross my legs, and take another sip of coffee.
I do try, in small doses and when there's no one watching, to be honest with myself.
Camille isn't wrong to ask if I’m okay. I didn't take this case because it's the biggest fee Monroe Communications has seen this quarter, though it is.
I didn't take it because Bennet Sullivan's board requested someone senior, though they did.
I took it because my apartment is too quiet.
Because every room in it has the particular stillness of a space that used to have someone else in it and doesn't anymore, and some mornings I wake up and the quiet is so loud I can't stay inside it.
Because the divorce is moving the way divorces move — slowly, procedurally, with an attorney on each side who bill by the hour and feel nothing — and in the meantime I am still sleeping in the same city as Colt Monroe and breathing the same recycled Houston air and I needed to go somewhere he isn't.
Two months.
Two months in Los Angeles. No Colt, no quiet, no mornings that feel like held breath.
I can do two months.
I turn back to my tablet. Bennet Sullivan looks up at me from the press photo Camille clipped to the front of the file from some charity event six months ago, well before the naked fountain incident.
He has dark, wavy hair that falls just past his shoulders.
A full beard. Broad shoulders filling out a suit that probably cost more than most people's rent, and ink peeking out from his collar and cuffs in a way that shouldn't work with black tie and absolutely does.
He's objectively good looking.
Who am I kidding? He's insanely hot.
I scroll to the next page.
He is also, according to everything in this file, an absolute handful — and not in the fun way.
In the way that has his board of directors stress eating antacids and his entire team updating their résumés.
The fountain is just the most recent entry in a highlight reel that goes back over four years and gets progressively more creative.
I have handled difficult clients before. I can handle one billionaire with a bad boy complex and a thing for public water features.
Probably.
"Mrs. Monroe, good morning." Charles's voice pulls me from the screen as the partition lowers. "We're going to hit a bit of traffic en route to the airport, but I've called ahead to let them know. Sit tight and we'll be there in about an hour."
"Thank you, Charlie."
He gives me a slight nod and raises the partition.
I set the tablet aside, kick off my heels, and pull up my phone. I need a beat of mindlessness, and an hour will do just fine. Something brainless that requires absolutely nothing from me.
I open Instagram.
And because I am apparently still committed to making my own life harder, I navigate directly to Colt Monroe's profile.
It's become a habit. A bad one. The kind you know is bad while you're doing it and do it anyway, like pressing on a bruise to check if it still hurts. It always still hurts. That's not the point. The point is knowing exactly what I'm dealing with so it can't blindside me.
When the divorce went public, Colt moved fast — faster than I expected, which I should have expected, because Colt has always understood optics better than most people understand their own names.
Within seventy-two hours of the filing, he had a narrative.
Scorned husband. Blindsided. Didn't see it coming.
As witnessed in the news spectacle this week.
His latest post is a photo of us on a beach somewhere, the ocean at our backs, him holding the phone toward us with smiles on both our faces. It was a beautiful day. I remember it. I remember what happened that night when we got back to the hotel room, but I remember the day too.
I remember the broken nose that night, too. One I apparently deserved because my bikini bottom rode up when I went for a swim and I didn't fix it before I walked back to shore, and a couple of men cat called me.
Once again, I was the whore, and he was the victim.
His caption reads: I miss the good times. I miss my soul. I'm a broken man without it.
The comments are full of people I have known for years typing broken heart emojis.
People who have sat at my dinner table. People I called when my mother was sick.
People who had to have known — the way everyone in a small orbit knows even when they're pretending not to — and who have chosen, cleanly and without apparent difficulty, the side of the scorned and love lorn husband.
We were high school sweethearts. Married right before college, which everyone called romantic, and I now understand was just the next move in a game I didn't know I was playing. He went on to play nearly five years in the NFL.
I built Monroe Communications from a one-woman operation into one of the most discreet and recognized PR firms in the South. By every external measure, we were a success story. Two kids from Houston who made something of themselves.
What nobody talks about is that Colt always owned my social currency. Has since we were seventeen. The cheerleading captain and the football star — it sounds like a cliché because it is one, and clichés have weight.
His status was the container my life lived inside of. When he shone, I shone. When he didn't, I found out exactly how conditional that light had always been.
A bad field injury ended his career at twenty-six. Torn ACL, complications, a second surgery that didn't take the way it should have. Football had been the architecture of his entire identity, and without it he had no blueprint for who he was supposed to be.
The drinking got worse. The drugs were never not there — professional athletics in that environment, that was almost ambient — but when the career ended, they stopped being recreational and became structural.
He needed them to function, and then he needed more of them.
Then the man I had married became someone I did not recognize and was also afraid of, which is a specific and disorienting combination that nobody prepares you for.
Our friends saw the version he performed for them. The retired athlete navigating a hard transition. Colt at dinner, Colt at charity events, Colt making the table laugh. He was always good at that — filling a room so completely that whatever was happening in private seemed impossible by comparison.
The drop in his voice. That's the thing I'll carry the longest, I think.
A specific register he hit when he'd had enough — lower, quieter, almost gentle — that my nervous system learned to track before my brain ever caught up.
I got very good at knowing. I got so good at it that I can feel it now in other men's voices sometimes, a pitch that has nothing to do with Colt, and my body responds anyway, like it never got the memo that I left.
The last straw was over six months ago. I dared to walk away mid-argument, so he slammed my head so hard into the wall that my brain swelled.
I woke up in the hospital three days later from a medically induced coma to a blithering Colt crying into my neck about how he swears to have the tiles fixed so I'll never take such a tumble again.
Oh god, Blaire. I thought I lost you.
Then he shook the doctor's hand and right before autographing his white jacket.
I filed three weeks later.
That's not in his instagram story.
I close the app.
I look out the window at the highway sliding past, the flat sprawl of Houston giving way to overpasses and toll-road and the particular grey-brown landscape of a city that never decided what it wanted to be.
Two months, I tell myself.