“I was sixteen at the time of the ball. They would have wanted me to wait until I was eighteen to get married—after high school.” No one had ever said anything overtly, but it had been assumed that she and Wyatt were endgame. She couldn’t even remember Wyatt asking her to be his girlfriend. They had just… become a couple.
“A child bride. Charming. And then what?”
“That’s it. Until it was time to start popping out proper young ladies and gentlemen, which probably would have been a couple years later.”
“No career?”
“No. I mean, if I’d insisted, I could have had a vanity career. Interior design, that sort of thing. In fact, one of the girls from my class went on to be a party planner. Another acceptably cute career for a Southern belle. She’s been wildly successful. She’s built a big company, and to hear it told, she brings home twice what her cardiologist husband does, but she still plays the role of the demure, supportive wife. Their life is organized around him and his job. She introduces herself socially as Mrs. Dr. Asshole.”
“Dr. Asshole. And he’s a cardiologist? I’d say not opting for proctology was a missed opportunity.”
She laughed. It shouldn’t have been surprising that Jack was funny. Though not a comedic novel,In Timehad been truly witty in places. In person, Jack was prone to wry observations and had a deadpan delivery that tickled her funny bone.
“So you ran away to Los Angeles because of something your grandmother told you,” he said, picking up the life story he seemed intent on pulling from her.
“Yes.” He was looking at her pointedly. He probably wanted her to tell him what Mimi had said, but she was not going to do that. For some reason, those words felt private. She’d kept them close to her heart all these years. “To everyone’s surprise, including mine, I met with success here. Ialsomet Reggie. We got pregnant accidentally and…”
“The rest was history,” Jack said.
“That’s all she wrote,” Blair parried.
“You were done like dinner.”
“Time to pull the plug.” Blair smiled. That had been fun—the second time she and Jack had entered into a spontaneous word game, a battle of synonyms. Last time it had beenThe Last of Usadjectives starting withH.This time it was idioms for being finished with something.
“Except,” she added, “I think our problem was the plugwasn’tpulled. It turns out that if you don’t use birth control and you don’t ‘pull the plug’”—she made a silly face—“you’re rewarded for your youthful stupidity with pregnancy. The result was, ironically, that I did get knocked up essentially on my parents’ schedule.”
“Were they scandalized by the out-of-wedlock pregnancy?”
“They were scandalized by the whole thing.” She nodded, remembering. “Mostly by the fact that I was an actress. ‘A TV actress,’ my mom always used to say, as though the ‘TV’ part was the problem.They thought it was tawdry. That was my mother’s word, andtawdrywas probably the worst thing a person could be in her eyes. I might as well have run away and joined the circus. And Reggie was a personal injury lawyer when we met. He only became a producer after he defended a movie star and that opened a pathway to entertainment law, and from there he rose quickly as a studio exec. But when we met, he was an ambulance chaser. Not that my parents had anything against the law, or even personal injury law, probably. One of the girls in my deb class was the daughter of a lawyer who was a partner in a small but exclusive firm. I’m pretty sure he did personal injury cases, and he was a multimillionaire. But Reggie was the type of personal injury lawyer who had his face on the sides of buses.”
Jack guffawed, and she was stupidly proud to have made him laugh. “So that pregnancy was your son.”
“Yes. And of course I don’t regret it. Cal was born when I was twenty. Then Esme a year later. So I did the young mom thing I’d have been doing back home, but it was different. I had a couple big career wins before Cal. I had my own money.”
“You got away,” he said, which struck Blair as an unusual but not incorrect way of summarizing things.
“I did. And then I got away from Reggie, and now it’s just me.”
She wasn’t sure why she’d said it like that. She and Reggie had divorced, but it wasn’t as if he were a malevolent force she’d needed to “get away from.”
“Esme sounds like she’s worried about you.”
“I think she is. She’s a good kid. But she doesn’t need to worry.”
Was that true, though? As lonely as Blair was, she was glad Esme wasn’t here.
Why? Because she would be embarrassed if Esme saw the cyclone?
Honestly, she couldn’t say that Esmehadn’t. During COVID, the last time Blair’s panic attacks had made an appearance, Blair hadmanaged to hide them by “working remotely” in her home office. But Esme was more perceptive than her brother or her father.
And now they’d started up again, after several years of “remission.” So there was no one here to witness this round.
Still, it was as if Esme could sense something was going on. She seemed more worried about Blair than Blair would like.
What would Blair say if the tables were turned and Esme were the one having panic attacks? She would say they were nothing to be ashamed of. She would say it was time to do some therapy.
So why was Blair hunkering down and trying to muscle through?
