Perfect Together by Kristen Ashley

I, however, with Noel and Sabrina, went to the runway shows.

In other words, Noel took care of me and the local operations.

And for the most part, Jana, my current intern, Maria, and I took care of personal clients, of which I had many, and many of those were famous.

I limited the number of our subscription boxes—we mailed twenty thousand of them four times a year—and our waiting list to get one was just under fifty times that.

And every curated collection I created sold out weeks before it was rotated, and I had current designers and up and comers, clamoring to be selected.

I was a small one, but there was no denying I was my own brand of a fashion mogul.

And I might not sit to the side of Anna Wintour next to the runway at Prada.

But I hadn’t been in a nosebleed seat since I dressed Fiona for awards season.

And truthfully, my seats before that far from sucked.

Twenty-two years ago, I had interrupted the pursuit of my own dream while Remy continued on the path to his, for nine years.

I did not regret this or wish that time back. I made precious memories with my babies when they were babies and I gave time to my husband, who I adored, to do the thing his father demanded he not do: follow his own dream to building the structures into realities that had plagued his head since he was a little boy.

But once I began again, I hit the ground running, I’d busted my ass and—I took my office in again—I’d created this.

And for the last three years, I’d obsessed on failure.

The one I’d made of my marriage.

That wasn’t all on me.

It wasn’t all on Remy.

And it wasn’t all on Bea.

Last, there was no point dissecting it now because there was one thing it was.

Over.

On that thought, I set Bea aside, Myrna, and most importantly, Remy.

And I got back to work.





CHAPTER 6





Rocky





Wyn





Saturday evening, I was running on time for a change as I got ready to go to Cock and Snacktails at Kara’s house, when my phone rang with a call from my daughter.

Sitting at my vanity doing the final touches on my makeup, I put her on speaker.

“She lives!” was how I answered it.

“Boo, Mom. I’m a girl on the go.”

“So on the go you can’t return a text from your darling mother?”

“Okay, you have to promise not to get mad.”

This was never a good opening.

Nevertheless, Manon used it a lot.

I braced.

She continued.

“I had a test and paper due this week, and I couldn’t really afford the time to drive up to Phoenix for Yves’s thing. But he was ready to do it, and I couldn’t say no.” Big breath and the real whammy. “And I have a new boyfriend. He’s a graduate student. And I’m kind of…obsessed with him.”

I immediately stated the obvious.

“I hope you were more obsessed with that test and paper.”

“He finds girls who don’t take their studies seriously unattractive.”

“I like him already.”

She started laughing.

I grinned at my vanity mirror while I swiped on mascara.

“So, Yves, Sah and me have talked…a lot, and we want to know if you and Dad are getting back together,” she said.

I swiped a black streak across my upper eyelid.

“What?”

“He’s dumping that cowface,” she pointed out.

“Manon, don’t call Myrna a cowface. She isn’t a cowface.”

“Okay, I’ll call her what she is. He’s dumping that bitchface.”

She was funny.

She was also entirely inappropriate

“Is this the girl I raised?” I asked.

“Mom, she was not cool and I’m so glad she’s gonna be gone. She was just like…weird with me all the time. Sometimes, when Dad was teasing me or giving me a hug or something, I’d catch her watching us like she was watching him flirt with another woman, and it made my skin crawl.”

What?

Euw!

“You’d never told me that.”

“Because you’d probably say something to Dad about it and then you guys would fight, and it didn’t matter because Dad didn’t miss it and he liked it a lot less than me. He wasn’t ugly to her in front of me, but I knew when he’d address it because she’d be sugar sweet for a while after.”

Well, at least there was that.

“And anyway, I got the hint that he was just not ever really into her,” she went on.

I did not care about this (lie).

This had nothing to do with me (truth).

Bigger truth: I needed to let this slide and steer this conversation into different waters that included putting the kibosh on the kids thinking, now that Myrna was out of the picture, their dad and I were reuniting.

I didn’t get the chance to do that.

“They didn’t fight,” Manon said.

“Sorry?”

“They didn’t fight. It was creepy.”

I’d grabbed a Q-Tip and some makeup remover to begin the preparations to repair the mascara swipe, but I stopped moving when she spoke.

“This is why I’m obsessed with Benji,” she declared. “We fight all the time. I totally get it now.”