Book II of the R&B Memoirs Tetralogy

New York City, 1998. Before social media. Before dating apps. Before relationships could hide behind screens and disappearing messages. Back when love unfolded in real conversations, late night train rides, and R&B slow jams drifting from apartment windows and car radios. Twenty-one-year-old Bronx native Monét La Roux relocates to Manhattan with a notebook full of song lyrics and a quiet determination to find her place in the music industry. By day she works inside a powerful record label, learning the business from the shadows. By night she sells couture at L’impasse, a chic French boutique in the Village that outfits club royalty, magazine editors, and rising artists. Surrounded by ambition, style, and sound, Monét believes she’s exactly where her life is supposed to begin.

Then she meets Bryan Cole. Older, magnetic, and dangerously confident, Bryan introduces Monét to a world that feels thrilling and grown in ways she’s never experienced before. He brings excitement, influence, and a set of carefully crafted rules about love, desire, and independence that seem sophisticated at first glance. Through him, Monét begins to understand how easily attraction, ambition, and power can blur together in a city where everyone is chasing something.

But just when Monét believes she’s figured out the emotional game of New York, another man enters her life and quietly changes the rules entirely. Charles Theodore Winston, known to most as Teddy B., is creative, passionate, and impossible to ignore. With him, Monét experiences a connection that feels deeper than excitement and more dangerous than she expects. For the first time, love stops feeling like strategy and begins to feel like something real.

Set against the intoxicating rhythm of late-90s R&B and the restless energy of pre-millennium New York, Almost Doesn’t Count is a story about ambition, desire, timing, and the complicated ways love can shape a woman before she fully discovers herself. Because sometimes love almost works. Sometimes a man almost becomes the one. But sometimes the most important lesson a woman learns is that almost… doesn’t count.