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 nevernotthere — 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 hadmarried 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'snotin his instagram story.
