Page 88

Shopping?

I don’t really feel like being out.

Her birthday?

Maybe you shouldn’t come.

That one had hurt. Eventually, I understood. Gabby didn’t want the other girls knowing she still fucked with me. She could love me privately, but she just couldn’t be seen doing it. I should’ve known then that she was fake as fuck. But I told myself that maybe Gabby had been caught between loving her best friend and being deeply disappointed in who her best friend was choosing to be. I understood, but that didn’t mean I forgave everything that came after.

When the affair exploded publicly, Gabby disappeared. The same woman who had sat on my couch listening to me talk about Caleb made sure everyone knew she didn’t condone me. She separated herself from me so fucking fast it made my head spin. I understood protecting yourself. What I didn’t understand was pretending you hadn’t held my hand privately just because it became embarrassing to admit publicly.

I backed out of her page. Many people never talked about how actions have consequences. Sometimes the consequence wasn’t losing the man. Sometimes it was looking around years later and realizing how many people had disappeared while you were busy loving him.

Caleb had cost me clients, my reputation, friendships, and my peace. But I couldn’t put all of that on him. Some of those friendships ended because of me. I made a choice they couldn’t stand beside.

Sometimes I wondered what my life would’ve looked like if I’d walked away sooner. Would I still have girls’ trips? Group chats? Would I have been in that picture?

I locked my phone and told myself that I wasn’t doing that to myself. I’d had a good day. A really fucking good one. I wasn’t giving Caleb another afternoon years after he’d already taken enough.

I set my phone against the pillow and closed my eyes.

“Blair?”

I jumped and my eyes flew open.

A sleepy laugh escaped me. “Yeah?”

His voice was deep and rough with sleep. “You finally up?”

I smiled and I pulled the phone closer. “Yeah.”

14

Blair

BEFORE

One year later.

Three hundred and sixty-five days.

Fifty-two weeks.

Twelve months of loving a man I wasn’t supposed to love, and somehow I convinced myself that the calendar made it more legitimate.

I was disgustingly happy. That morning, I woke up smiling before my eyes even opened. Caleb and I had been together for an entire year.

If we were being legal about shit, Caleb was still married. If we were being emotional about it? That was my man. I had stopped fighting myself on that months ago.

He was mine and I was his. The paperwork was simply taking longer to understand what the rest of us already knew.

Klair had met Caleb six months earlier. Against every prediction I’d made, she didn’t hate him. She would never admit that, but I knew my sister. If Klair genuinely disliked someone, she didn’t fake it. Yet somehow she always managed to “stop by” when Caleb was at my house.

The first time they met, she barely spoke to him. The second time, she interrogated him. By the fourth, they had discovered they shared the same fucked-up sense of humor. That was the beginning of the end.

One Sunday, I’d walked into my kitchen and found the two of them laughing so hard neither could explain what was funny.

“What happened?”