Jack:You have a problematic neighbor?
Blair:Yep. She’s always lurking. But she seems also to hate me. It’s a weird combo. She got disproportionately mad when she got my magazine by accident. I’m not sure why she didn’t just throw it away. I wouldn’t have missed it—as you know, I’m perpetually behind onThe New Yorker.
Blair:Have you learned anything about the leak?
Jack:I have not. My publisher hired a forensic IT person who came up with nothing except he told me to change all my passwords to unique strings of nonsense letters and characters.
Blair:And did you?
Jack:I did not. I’m too busy not writing my book.
Blair:I thought it was going better.
Jack:It was going better before the leak. Now…
He hated being so simple. If A, then B. Can’t write book, back hurts. Was he a man or a child?
Blair:Does your back hurt?
How did shedothat?
Jack:Yes. My back hurts, and my book is due in five months and I have nothing.
Several minutes passed with no indication that she was going to reply. She did that sometimes, disappeared mid-conversation. It irritated him, but he thought back to that fuckingNew Yorkerarticle and had to admit that perhaps he was not the ultimate authority on texting etiquette. He was also aware that Blair Kellermoon owed him nothing. That she had turned into his de facto shrink/writing coach was more than he deserved.
Jack had been getting ready to go downstairs to the condo gym for a stretching session. His back pain had, of late, precluded lifting—so it was just as well that he’d gone ahead and quit his expensive gym—which meant he was a person whostretchednow, for fuck’s sake. He had just resolved to stop staring at his phone and actually go when she reappeared.
Blair:I have a proposition for you.
He sat down on the bench in his entryway, one shoe on, one shoe off.
Jack:I’m all ears.
Hell, if she asked again forIn Timefor Books with Blair, he would probably say yes, even as he understood that to do so purely for the money would make him the worst sort of hypocrite.
Blair:Move into my pool house and finish the book.
What the hell?
He wasn’t sure how to respond. The last place he could see himself finishing his book was next to a pool in Los Angeles. Next toBlair Kellermoon’spool in Los Angeles.
Blair:It’s a studio apartment, but it’s big—sleeping area, sitting area, kitchen. There’s a dining table where you could work.
Blair:I will leave you alone. You won’t even see me.
He had no idea what to say. She had struck him dumb.
Blair:You’d be doing me a favor.
That was unexpected. And it piqued his curiosity, as so much about her did.
Jack:How so?
Blair:I’m a new empty nester. I’m lonely.
That was also unexpected. Yet it wasn’t. She was always home and available to text at dinnertime. She’d told him she was recently divorced and that her younger kid was newly off to college.
Jack:So shouldn’t you let yourself be lonely?
