A Perfect Life: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

successful in a competitive milieu, where few people lasted, and careers usually ended early. But by sheer grit and talent and perseverance, Blaise had risen to the summit and stayed on top. It was an enviable life, one that others longed for and dreamed of, and would have snatched from her if they could.
    What they didn’t see was the solitude, the loneliness, the privatemoments devoid of people to love and support her. They had never felt the betrayals she had lived, at the hands of men like Andrew Weyland, or the false friends who had fallen by the wayside, the people who had wanted to ride on her coattails or use her in some way. It was in fact a lonely life, and she smiled when she went back to her desk, and glanced at a magazine Mark had marked for her and slipped into her briefcase. It was a brief profile of her in some magazine that had done a puff piece on her. Above a photograph of her they had gotten from the network was the heading in bold letters: A Perfect Life. And that’s what it appeared to be. Only Blaise herself knew different. It was no more perfect than anyone else’s life, and in many ways it was harder. Every day was a constant fight so as not to lose what she had, or the ground she had fought so hard to gain. She was alone on the mountaintop, and had been in hotel rooms all over the planet, sick in places no one would want to go even if they were well. And she spent her life getting on and off planes. No one really knew what went with the life they envied, or the price she’d paid. It was far from a perfect life, as Blaise knew only too well, but no matter how hard or how solitary, Blaise wouldn’t have traded her life for anything in the world.

Chapter 2
    The alarm went off at four o’clock, just as it did every morning. Without opening her eyes, Blaise reached her hand out and turned it off. She lay there with her eyes closed for a few minutes and forced herself to get up. It was still dark outside, and on Fifth Avenue, you could already hear the rumble of cars and trucks. She loved knowing that New York never fully slept. There was always someone awake. She found that comforting as she walked into her bathroom, pulled up her bright red hair, and held it with an elastic so she wouldn’t get it wet. She had washed it, as she always did, the night before. The hairdresser on the set would do it when she arrived, and the makeup artist she always used did her makeup every morning, as she took a last look at her research.
    She slipped into the enormous bathtub with the view of the park, and sat relaxing for a few minutes in the warm water, before she had to rev up her engines and start the day. This was usually the last moment of peace she had, and that night she would be on a plane.
    At a quarter to five, she was in the kitchen, and put on water fortea. She went to the front door and got the newspapers. She always tried to get a good look at
The New York Times
and
Wall Street Journal
before she went to work. And then she checked online for anything that might have happened since. Anything even more recent than that would show up on her desk at work before the morning news, and Mark would make sure that she saw it if it was breaking news.
    The shooting at UCLA was on the front page, and she saw as she read it that Pat Olden was still alive. The article said that he was on a respirator, clinging to life by a thread. She couldn’t help wondering, if Pat survived, how severely he would be impaired. It seemed inevitable that wounds like the ones he had sustained would take a serious toll. And she wondered how his wife and children were. The shooting was going to be the main focus of her morning editorial, followed by a financial piece that she had carefully researched about a recent upturn in the stock market and what it meant.
    She ate a single piece of whole wheat toast, along with her tea. It was too early to eat anything else. And there was fruit and a spread of breakfast food she didn’t eat when