“Just tell me what I can do.”

Suzze began to pace. “I’m not sure where to begin.” Myron was about to speak when she held up her hand. “And if you dare say, ‘Start at the beginning,’ I will rip off one of your testicles.”

“Just one?”

“You’re engaged now. I’m thinking of your poor fiancée.”

The pace turned more into a stomp, picking up speed and intensity so that a small part of Myron feared that she might go into labor right here in his recently refurbished office.

“Uh, the carpet,” Myron said. “It’s new.”

She frowned, paced some more, started biting her exuberantly polished fingernails.

“Suzze?”

She stopped. Their eyes met.

“Tell me,” he said.

“You remember when we first met?”

Myron nodded. He was just a few months out of law school and starting up his fledgling firm. Back then, at the inception, MB Reps had been known as MB SportsReps. That was because initially Myron represented only athletes. When he started representing actors and writers and others in the field of the arts and celebrity, he dropped the Sports from the name, ergo, MB Reps.

Again with the literal.

“Of course,” he said.

“I was a mess, wasn’t I?”

“You were a great tennis talent.”

“And a mess. Don’t sugarcoat it.”

Myron put his palms toward the ceiling. “You were eighteen.”

“Seventeen.”

“Seventeen, whatever.” Quick memory flash of Suzze in the sun: blond hair in a ponytail, a wicked grin on her face, her forehand whipping the ball as though it had offended her. “You’d just turned pro. Adolescent boys hung your poster in their bedrooms. You were supposed to beat legends right away. Your parents redefined pushy. It’s a miracle you stayed upright.”

“Good point.”

“So what’s wrong?”