Page 4 of The Naughty Ex

I stood on the dock and looked at the Second Take sitting there in all that blue water, and I understood that I was about to blow up the only two years of peace I'd managed since the divorce, and that I was going to do it anyway. Somewhere over the ocean the whole thing would catch up with me and sit down in the seat beside mine.

I turned the opal ring on my finger. Once. For luck I don't believe in.

Then I went to find my phone and ruin everything I had left.

Chapter Two

Blaine

I keep my office at sixty-eight degrees. People assume it's a preference.

It's a tactic.

Sixty-eight is two degrees below the temperature at which a person relaxes. Warm rooms make men expansive — they lean back, tell you about their cars, and take four hours to say no. A cool room keeps everyone slightly braced and eager to be finished. Opposing counsel who wants to be finished is opposing counsel who signs what I want him to sign.

I figured this out the summer the building's AC went haywire and my floor sat at sixty-five for nine days. Before they could fix it I took eight figures off a man who kept his suit jacket buttoned through the entire negotiation because he was too proud to admit he was cold. I had the thermostat professionally calibrated after that. Best money I've ever spent.

At four-fifteen on a Thursday I was reading a term sheet and finding it insulting, and everything on my desk was where I'd put it. Pen parallel to the legal pad. Pad squared to the blotter. One white orchid that my assistant Diane has learned to water only on Tuesdays. All in all, I have built a life in which nothing arrives that I didn't send for.

Then Steven arrived, whom I had not sent for.

He came straight past Diane's desk, which meant Diane had failed to stop him, which meant Diane and I would be having a conversation neither of us would enjoy. Steven enters a room like it's been holding a table for him. He had his phone up at the angle I have come to recognize the way you recognize a strange sound in your house at night.

"Don't move — babe, don't move, this light is insane." He was filming. "Say hi. Say hi to everybody."

"Hello," I said, to the lens, and made my face do the thing Steven liked.

I could picture myself on the little bright rectangle of his screen. A man at a desk. Composed. Saying hello to a phone. He looked convincing. I noted it the way you note a witness who tests well.

"Okay. Putting it away."

My fiancé did not put it away. He set it face-up on my desk, still recording, for another four seconds — and when he set it down, he moved my orchid.

An inch. Maybe less.

He slid it aside to make room and didn't slide it back, and it sat there at an angle to nothing, breaking the line of the desk. I looked at it. I did not touch it. Moving it in front of him would have told him something about me that I decided years ago never to tell anyone.

So I left it. And it sat in the room with us like a third person.

"You are not going to believe my day." He dropped into the client chair — the cold chair — entirely unbothered by the chill, because Steven runs warm in every sense of the phrase. "So Summit's at the Cavallo Point campus this year instead of the city, thank God, because last year downtown was so scarcity—"

"So what?"

"Scarcity. The energy." He said it the way you'd say humid. "Anyway, Brand wants the whole leadership team visible. Like, visible visible. And I said Blaine will come, and they said bring him, and I said he'll come."

"You said it twice?"

"Because you'll come."

He smiled. Steven has a good smile. I want to be fair to him, since almost nothing that went wrong was his fault — the smile is genuine. He is a person who is frictionlessly pleased most of the time, which I have come to understand is not a performance and is possibly a form of grace.

"There's a breath lab," he added.

I should explain about Ascendant, because most people have heard the name and don't know what it is. The ones who do know usually can't say it out loud without their voice changing.

Ascendant is a platform for men who want to be optimized and luminous, or who want other men to believe they already are. Eleven million of them. You post your morning — the cold plunge, the sunrise, the eleven supplements arranged on a slab of raw travertine — and strangers tell you you're dialed in. The main feed is called the Ascent. Paid members are Apex. There's a blue check equivalent, except it's gold, and it's called Verified Optimal.

Steven is Senior Vice President of Community Ascendance. I have asked him twice what that means and received two different answers, neither containing a verb I could act on. The company sells retreats, adaptogenic powders, a ninety-five-dollar water bottle, creatine gummies, and a candle whose price I am not going to tell you.