The Dirty Truth

Indie presses her lips flat as she listens.

“We’re all so consumed with avoiding anything remotely uncomfortable that we lose all touch with reality,” I say. “We’ve been so coddled by articles and ads and relationships that make us feel good. We hunger for pictures that make us think maybe we have a chance at being beautiful with the right lighting, and we hold on to the belief that if we can find someone to occupy our weekends, it means we’re worthy . . . but none of it is real.”

She glances at the vintage alarm clock on my nightstand. “That was all . . . incredibly deep for three thirty in the morning, babe.”

Sinking back against my pillows, I fold my arm over my eyes and gather a long, hard breath.

“But you’re not wrong,” she adds. “About any of it.”

“I wish I were. It’d make all of this easier.” I imagine most of us are on autopilot—and two months ago, I was too. I’d climbed a mountain and rested on my laurels, content to sit back and appreciate a job that ticked all my boxes and a man who wasn’t perfect but was seemingly perfect for me. Parts of me were settling, of course. But I still had my entire life ahead of me—or so I thought. In my mind, I had plenty of time to continue crafting the life I’d always wanted to live.

Only now that I’ve seen the proverbial light (without seeing any literal light), there’s no going back.

“So what now?” Indie sits up, gathering her wild blonde mane into a high bun and securing it with a purple hair tie from her wrist.

Pitching forward, I crack my laptop open and double-click my empty Word doc. “I finish this article.”

“And then?”

“And then I have a decision to make.”

Indie slides off my bed, fixes the covers on that side, and makes her way to the door, then stops to read the message on the Dove she stole from me a few minutes ago.

“Huh.” Her mouth tugs up at the sides. “‘Don’t settle for a spark . . . light a fire’ again. What are the odds of getting that one twice in one night? Anyway . . . good luck, babe. You’ve got this.”

I wait until Indie shuts the door before scraping my motivation off the floor and running a quick Google image search on West to jump-start my faithless endeavor. With a hair over four hours to go and not one Dove-chocolate-size ounce of inspiration, I’m left with little choice but to be inventive in chasing my muse. Yawning, I flick through page after page of West Maxwell images, lamenting the fact that the man doesn’t take a single bad picture. Or maybe he does and the bad ones have been scrubbed from the internet. Either way, his beauty is distracting, which is why I force myself to replay our exchange again and again—until I’m reminded of his awfulness.

I’m fifty-seven pictures in when it hits me—a tiny spark of madness.

If I didn’t know what I was going to write about before, it’s crystal clear now.

Two hours later, my article is done.

And my fate? Has officially been set on fire.

CHAPTER THREE

WEST

“Please tell me they make nannies for teenagers.” I sink back in my desk chair and soak in the gray cityscape outside.

Miranda glances up from her tablet. “They make anything for anyone if the price is right. Scarlett giving you grief again?”

Dragging my palm along my tensed jaw, I say, “Something like that.”

In the past four months, not only have I gained sole custody of my fourteen-year-old niece—I’ve also amassed an entire set of forehead lines I didn’t have before I opened the doors of my Upper West Side bachelor paradise to the spawn of Satan.

Sitting up, I check the tracking app I installed on Scarlett’s phone and shoot her yet another text reminding her she’s to be at school on time today. When I left this morning, her door was closed and her lights were out. I knocked before attempting to barge in like a human alarm clock, but it was locked—as usual. A minute later, I heard her groan some kind of response before some tinny pop song began to play. I took solace in knowing it at least meant she was home and not gallivanting around the city sans permission for the twentieth time.

In a roundabout way, we both have my dead father to thank for our current situation.

He always used to say, “No good deed goes unpunished.” He’d also occasionally drop a classic “Once a Maxwell, always a Maxwell.” There was nothing original about that man. Every word that left his beer-slicked lips was a tired cliché. Everything about the way he lived his life was too. Bud “Big Boy” Maxwell was a Natty Ice–drinking, Harley-Davidson-riding, womanizing, wife-beating deadbeat with a narcissistic mud vein a mile wide.