Chapter 21
~CHASE
I couldn’t leave it alone.
For days the same question had been sitting under everything else-under the irritation, under the jealousy, under the stubborn insistence that had made the right choice.
Was Blair actually William Monroe’s daughter, or had she somehow used the name to make me feel like I’d made a mistake?
I started with the obvious. Search results. League articles. Old interviews. Anything that might have put a face to the Monroe daughters before the wedding photos with Grayson Shaw flooded the internet. There was almost nothing. William Monroe was everywhere. Monroe Athletics was everywhere. Ethan Monroe-quarterback, public, impossible to miss, had entire galleries dedicated to him. The daughters existed mostly as mentions. Names in a sentence. No childhood photos. No social media. No convenient images that would have settled the argument one way or the other.
I asked around carefully.
A couple of guys who had been in rooms with Monroe sponsors over the years. Someone on the business side who had once handled a charity event connected to the family. A former teammate who claimed he had seen one of the sisters at a distance years ago. Every conversation ended the same way. They knew the name. They knew the money. They did not know what Blair Monroe looked like before she became Grayson Shaw’s wife in very public photographs.
My jaw clenched as I sat at the kitchen island with my laptop still open and too many tabs crowding the
screen.
I ran a hand down my face and stared at the most recent wedding shot someone had posted-Blair in a wedding dress, Grayson beside her, the caption treating the marriage like a strategic alliance instead of the mess it actually was.
She had looked me in the eye and told me I didn’t know what I was losing.
At the time I had written it off as anger. Hurt pride. The kind of thing people said when they were being left behind. Now the words sat differently. If she really was who she claimed to be, then the quiet support, the bills that always got handled, the doors that somehow opened when I needed them most, all of it had a source I had never bothered to question.
I had been so busy believing Sophie’s version of my success that I never examined the other possibility. Blair’s connections to the team had always been vague. She knew people. She made introductions look casual. She never explained how. I had taken the help and called it luck, or timing, or my own momentum finally paying off.
Sitting here now, digging through the absence of proof, I could feel the shape of something I didn’t want to
name..
I was losing my mind trying to map it all out.
That was when I remembered the invitation.
Months ago-before the wedding, before the breakup, before any of this, Ethan Monroe had announced a private party. I had been invited through a chain of league connections I barely remembered accepting. At the time it had felt like networking. A box to check. I had RSVP’d without thinking much about it and then forgotten about it under the weight of everything else,
The party was still happening.
Successfully unlocked!
If Blair was truly Ethan’s sister, I would have the answer to my question.
Chapter 21
15 voucher
Either she would be there as family, or she wouldn’t. Either people would treat her like a Monroe, or the whole story would collapse into the desperate lie Sophie kept insisting it was.
Thad to go.
I closed the laptop, leaned back on the stool, and stared at the reflection in the kitchen window until I heard footsteps behind me.
Sophie appeared in the doorway in one of my shirts, hair pulled up, expression aiready halfway to annoyed.
“Why are you looking up Blair? Again?”
I didn’t bother closing the remaining tabs on my phone. “Because I still don’t know if she was telling the
truth.”
Sophie rolled her eyes and walked to the fridge. “You’re still on that? She’s clearly not the real billionaire. There are no proven pictures of her before this circus. If she were actually William Monroe’s daughter, someone would have a photo. A school thing. A charity event. Something. Instead all we have is her suddenly married to Grayson and expecting everyone to believe the story.”
“That’s what I’m trying to verify.”
“There’s nothing to verify.” She poured a glass of water and turned to face me, unimpressed. “She was a nobody who got dumped and latched onto the most dramatic option available. You’re giving her exactly the attention she wants by still investigating her, like she matters!
The certainty in her voice annoyed me. How could she be so sure?
I looked at her for a long moment. Sophie had always been good at sounding sure.
It was part of what had pulled me toward her in the first place-the confidence, the sense that she
understood how this world worked and where I needed to stand in it. But certainty wasn’t the same thing as truth, and the more I looked, the less solid her version felt.
“I have a gut feeling she’s telling the truth,” I said.
Sophie laughed once, sharp and dismissive. “Your gut also told you she was enough for years. Look how that turned out. Don’t start rewriting history just because she managed to land on her feet in public.”
I didn’t answer.
Because the problem wasn’t that Blair had landed on her feet. The problem was the growing possibility that she had been standing higher than me the entire time and I had been too self-absorbed to notice.
The problem was the bills I never questioned. The opportunities that arrived at convenient moments.
The quiet way she had made my life easier without ever demanding credit.
If she was a Monroe, then I hadn’t just left a girlfriend.
I had insulted a woman whose family could buy and sell the version of success I was so proud of, and I had done it while accepting help I never fully understood.
Sophie was still talking, picking apart Blair’s motives, her clothes, the ‘obvious act’ of the marriage.
My mind was already on the party. On Ethan Monroe. On the one room that might finally force the truth into the open.
I didn’t know what I would do with the answer once I had it.
I only knew I couldn’t keep pretending the question didn’t matter.
Dex Morgan
Dex works to elevate each story with clean writing, emotional balance, and thoughtful flow for readers.