“I know this sounds stupid,” you admit, “but not really? I don’t know. It didn’t become real to me until he got hurt. Now I feel like it’s all I can think about.”
“Is it really about Kai?” she presses. “Or are you finding yourself generally more anxious these days? With your career struggling, and the crimes on your property, and your partner’s injury? That’s a lot, Sterling. It’s okay to be affected by it.”
A flock of birds flies past the glass. You wish you could fly beyond this conversation.
“I’ve definitely been more on edge than normal,” you say carefully, after weighing the value of lying about it.
“How are you handling that?”
“Excuse me?”
“The additional tension.”
“Oh.” You crack your knuckles restlessly. “I’ve been, ahh, meditating a lot. I try to keep up with my daily yoga flow. I haven’t been eating as much, and I guess that’s a problem. I do like a glass of wine or three when I’m feeling extra-stressed.”
SHUT THE FUCK UP!your brain screams unhelpfully in bold railroad font.She’s a fucking shrink! Do you realize what that sounds like?
Blair doesn’t make a face or even arch an eyebrow, though. She reaches over for her tablet.
“How would you feel about starting something for your anxiety?” she asks, looking at the screen. “I like Wellbutrin for people like you. It’s off-label for anxiety specifically, but a lot of clients say that it helps. It’s activating, so you don’t deal with any dragginess. Fewer sexual side effects than other meds, too.”
Your teeth are literally on edge. “I don’t think so. Thank you.”
She still doesn’t look up. “Do you take any prescription drugs currently?”
“No.”
“Okay, so I understand why you might be reluctant to start. A lot of people have walls up when it comes to medications. I could give you some literature, and you could look at it and let me know. I don’t like Doctor Google, but you could do your ownresearch. I really think that you could use a little help right now. At the very least, until things settle down in your professional and personal life.”
You want to tell her that there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that any part of your life is settling down any time in the next decade or so. Instead, you swallow your irrational hostility and agree to take the pamphlets she’s handing you. You drop them in the trash on your way out of her building.
***
NEW YORK CITY:Police have arrested Aileen Rosenthal, 49, on suspicion of breaking into Sterling Grayson’s New York City residence and kidnapping his dog. Rosenthal, a former Corporal in the United States Marine Force, surrendered herself to police on Friday. When Rosenthal walked into the station, she was carrying what she termed a “manifesto,” a spiral-bound notebook containing what police would only call “disturbing details” about Grayson. The manifesto included architectural plans for his UWS home and a schematic of the electrical system. Rosenthal, this publication can confirm, received an OTH discharge from service due to erratic behavior. She was trained as a systems technician, which may have given her additional insight into how to disable Grayson’s alarm system.
Rosenthal spent upwards of three hours explaining to police why she took Grayson’s dog, say authorities. Allegedly, she was an animal lover who wanted to “rescue” the dog from what Rosenthal perceived to be Grayson’s tremendous wickedness. Her manifesto contained dozens of Bible verses and stream-of-consciousness narratives regarding Grayson.
“It was obsessive,” says an unnamed source. “It’s like she knew everything about him but his Social Security number.”
Perhaps most disturbingly, we can confirm, authorities are keeping mum about the fact that, when she turned herself in, Rosenthal was carrying two automatic weapons.
“She absolutely wanted to kill him,” says our source. “If Sterling Grayson had been in town, she absolutely would have done it, too.”
Chapter Fifteen
October 24, 2025
2Hot:GABRIELLE ROSE: **3.4**
Genre: Pop
A controversial starlet delivers exactly what it says on the label: a second album that drips sex. Gabrielle Rose has impressive pipes, but her 13-track ode to sensual pleasure leaves us strangely cold and unbothered. Could it be that all the innuendos (and some very explicit lines) are laying it on too thick? Rose clearly wants to ditch the image of the playful pop princess that she cultivated in her debut era, but we think she leaned too hard in the opposite direction. There’s adult, and then there’s just tawdry. By the end of 43 minutes listening to Rose croon about the joys of self-love, broken headboards, and even ménages à trois, we have to question whether the lady is trying too hard. This is all to say nothing about her bizarre decision to give 50% writing credit on each track to her husband, Grenville “GoGo” Heller, solely for the fact that he, per a simpering quote, inspires everything she does. Taking credit for this album is definitely not an honor we’d brag about, sorry to say.
***
On the Saturday night of his weekend off, you and Kai attend a Halloween party thrown by a former member of a boy bandthat was huge in the 2010s. With your industry connections, you know that he’s planning on resurrecting his solo career with a surprise album drop in the very near future, but you aren’t allowed to tell anybody that. It’s not your first choice for the weekend before the holiday, but your normal plans, dinner and horror movies with your friends Merry and Ross, have been preempted by the fact that they just welcomed their third daughter. Babies, it seems, are just falling out of the woodwork these days. Must have something to do with turning 30.
The party is at a dive bar, albeit a dive bar absolutely crawling with private security, since the people inside are all famous. It’s probably not even a real dive bar, but a luxurious private event space that some interior designer stage-dressed immaculately to look like a hole in the wall. Your own black-garbed giants are among the corps on the sidewalk. You almost tried to get Cal to don a pair of cat ears, but decided that his withering disdain wouldn’t be worth it. The lights are low, the music is loud, and there’s a ton of dry ice in fog machines, which crawls under the high-top tables and drifts damply across the dance floor. Somebody spent a lot of money to make the place look this bad, you think.
