Jack:You need any help with the party cleanup?
That probably wasn’t the best way to ask if he could come over. If his goal was to see her, he should have just asked if she wanted to do drinks by the pool. Or, hell, he could have pulled out one of the TV show ideas he’d gotten when he’d googled “What to watch afterThe Bear.”
The thing was, in addition to wanting to see her, he wanted to help her. He wanted to understand what had happened at Thanksgiving. He hoped it wasn’t happening now. But if it was, he could be there while it did.
Her silence told him he had miscalculated. So did her next text.
Blair:I’m good, thanks.
Damn it.
He tried to go to bed. Lay there for what felt like an inordinately long time.
Eventually he got up, ostensibly for a glass of water. But really, he went and peered out the doors again. The kitchen light was now the only one on, and he could see a figure moving around. She was still awake.
He was just going to go over there.
Chapter 19
The Cyclone
Blair was not in a good way when Jack arrived.
“It’s me,” he said as he opened the sliding door.
No. He couldn’t be here now. She tried to get up, but her limbs didn’t want to obey her brain.
What the hell waswrongwith her? The party had been fine, surprisingly so. And more to the point, it wasover. She’d gotten through it without incident.
She should be in bed. Or sitting by the pool with a cup of tea toasting the fact thatGreen Lightmight be back from the dead, if she could solve the script problem. That she’d gotten Jack to sing. That her truce with Mrs. Afonso was sticking.
But no. She was sitting on the floor of her kitchen among a pile of broken glass, freaking out about catering glasses.
She was so mad at herself.
She was sotiredof this.
And she was going to have to face the fact that “this” was more than the cyclone. “The cyclone” was what she’d always called the panic attacks that had accompanied stressful periods of her life. But this—the glasses—was something different.
The glasses. The quilts. The dishwasher loading protocol.
“Hey,” Jack said quietly, looking like a disheveled angel, backlit as he was by the light he’d turned on in the mudroom. He was wearingplaid pajama pants, one of his ratty T-shirts, and a pair of flip-flops from the bin of pool stuff.
Edward and Morticia both got up from their spots on the sofa and went trotting over to greet Jack. Edward liked everyone—in one-on-one settings, anyway. But Morticia hated most people.
Wait. Was she Edward and Jack Morticia?
It made her smile, and smiling was a relief. A tiny relief, but she’d take any amount she could get right now.
“What’s the matter?” he said, and the part of her brain that was still here, still the detached observer, marveled that he knew immediately upon seeing her that something was wrong.
Of course, she was sitting on the floor of the kitchen in her party dress next to a pile of broken glass.
“Nothing,” she said automatically.
She reached out to grab the edge of the counter to haul herself to standing. Her hand was shaking. She glanced at him to see if he noticed.
He noticed.
