Updated Apr 9, 2026 • ~5 min read
Chapter 16: Blair
Kennedy
She almost didn’t answer.
The number was unknown, which she generally didn’t pick up, and it was a Tuesday in the first week of December, which was a busy time of the year — assessments due, parent conferences scheduled, the grade-level performance she’d been coordinating since October. She had three unanswered voicemails from people she knew and had been meaning to call back. She had no good reason to answer an unknown number.
She answered it.
“Is this Kennedy Wells?” The voice was young. Controlled but not quite steady.
“It is. Who is this?”
“My name is Blair. I’m — I’m Tyler’s girlfriend.” A pause. “I’m sorry to call you like this. I got your number from — it doesn’t matter. I’m sorry.”
Kennedy sat down.
“It’s okay,” she said. “What do you need?”
There was a breath on the other end of the line. The specific breath of someone who’d been holding themselves together through something.
“He’s been cheating on me,” Blair said. “For at least — I don’t know how long, I’ve only found three months, but the woman I found out about said it’s been longer.” Another breath. “I’m sorry to call you. I know this is strange. I just — someone in his circle told me he did the same thing to you. That you caught him. And I wanted to know if it was true, and I wanted to know how you —” She stopped. “How you got through it.”
Kennedy was quiet for a moment.
She thought about the specific texture of the night she’d found the texts. The way the kitchen had felt after. The two weeks she’d spent moving through her apartment like she’d lost something she couldn’t name the location of.
“It’s true,” she said. “He cheated on me for at least the last several months of our relationship. Possibly longer.”
“Okay.” Blair’s voice was very small.
“How are you doing right now?”
“I —” A pause. “I confronted him this morning. He denied it for about twenty minutes and then he didn’t deny it anymore. And then I left.” The breath again. “I’m in my car in a parking lot. I don’t really know who to call.”
Kennedy thought about that for a moment. She thought about herself six months ago in her apartment with Tyler’s blocked number and the strange new quality of a Tuesday that had been permanently altered.
“Can I ask you something?” she said.
“Yes.”
“Do you have a friend you can call? Someone who knows you — not someone who knows Tyler, someone who’s yours?”
“My friend Margot.” A small pause. “I was embarrassed. About being — about not seeing it.”
“Blair,” Kennedy said. “Listen to me. I’m a teacher. I spend a lot of time working on the difference between what kids think they should have known and what was actually available for them to know.” She paused, finding the version that was true without being prescriptive. “You don’t miss what you’re not looking for. Tyler is very good at being the person he needs to be until he’s not. That’s his skill. It’s not your failure.”
A silence. Then: “Thank you.”
“Call Margot,” Kennedy said. “Go be somewhere that’s yours for a while. The rest of it —” She thought about Dr. Osei, about the specific value of the hour every other Tuesday. “There’s no rush on the rest of it. Give yourself today.”
“Okay.” Blair sounded slightly steadier. “Can I — is it okay if I text you? If I have questions about — I don’t know. What it was like. What he —”
“Yes,” Kennedy said. “You can text me.”
“Thank you.” A pause. “I’m sorry this happened to you too.”
“Me too,” Kennedy said.
She hung up and sat for a long moment with her phone in her hand.
She thought about the pattern that was becoming visible now: not Kennedy and the bad luck of Tyler, but Tyler and the sequence of women he’d moved through in the same way, each one managing the same discovery, each one in her own parking lot somewhere trying to reconstruct the shape of something she’d trusted. Three names in Kennedy’s texts. Blair now. Probably others.
She thought about what Vaughn had said on the bench on Fletcher: *Tyler uses charm as a technique. By the time you noticed, you’d been explaining it to yourself for so long you didn’t trust your own read.*
She thought about the fact that Vaughn had known. Had watched the pattern. Had felt the guilt of not naming it.
She texted him: *Blair called me.*
He responded in four minutes: *Oh no.* And then: *Is she okay.*
*I think she will be. She caught him.* A pause, and then: *Vaughn, how many people does he do this to.*
A longer pause.
*I don’t know the number,* he said. *I know it’s more than one.*
She sat with that for a while.
She typed: *Thank you for telling me the truth when I asked.*
*I should have told you without being asked.* A pause. *I’m still sorry about that.*
*I know you are,* she said. *I’ll see you Thursday.*
She put her phone in her bag and went back to her assessment spreadsheet and thought about Blair in a parking lot calling Margot and the specific kindness of being able to say *you don’t miss what you’re not looking for* because someone had eventually said something like that to her too.
She thought about the texture of a pattern when you could see the whole of it rather than just your piece.
She thought about Tyler’s face in the parking lot outside her school: *Did you even think about how this would feel for me?*
She had an answer to that question now that she hadn’t had then. The answer was: no, Tyler. No, you didn’t. You don’t ask that question, genuinely, of people you have thought about.
She filed it and got back to work.
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