Page 22 of Neglected By Her CEO Husband

13

MADDIE

By the end of the week I was at Ellie's more than I was home.

The back studio had two easels, a sink that never quite drained, and Kellan's music, which ran from tolerable to a public offense. I set up at the easel by the window. He took the one by the door. We didn't talk much while we worked. That suited us both.

He painted standing up, fast, chasing the thing before it got away from him. I painted sitting down, slow, scraping back half of what I put on. We were nothing alike at the easel and somehow it worked, two people in a small room not bothering each other. I'd forgotten company could feel like this. At home, company meant a performance. Here it meant someone else breathing the same paint smell and wanting the same quiet.

The window painting had become something I could stand in front of. I'd scraped it back twice and started over. The third time I quit fighting the light and painted what was actually there. The hard four-o'clock glare. It flattened the sill and the half-dead geranium sitting on it, and I let it stay flat, and the thing stopped looking nice and started looking like mine.

Around two my phone buzzed. Damon. Reese needs your sign-off on the vendor list for the next mixer by 5. Can you? No hello. No question that wasn't a task. Two weeks of silence in the house and the first thing he sent me was a chore.

I looked at it for a while. Then I typed back three words. Send it over. I didn't add anything else. I used to write him paragraphs. I used to soften every message so he'd never have to feel managed by his own wife. I put the phone face down and went back to the painting, and the small mean part of me that had typed three words felt better than it should have.

Kellan glanced over. "Husband sending you love notes?"

"Vendor list."

"Romantic." He kept painting. He had the diner half-finished, four in the morning, one waitress and a man who looked like he'd been left somewhere. "He any good? At the things that aren't work, I mean."

"He used to be." I worked the brush. "He came home early on our anniversary and I thought, there it is, he remembered. He'd had a breakthrough at the lab. He came home to shower. He didn't know what day it was."

Kellan didn't say anything cruel about it, which I appreciated. He just looked at his diner for a second. "My dad was like that. Brilliant at the work. Couldn't have told you my middle name." He shrugged. "I used to think it meant something was wrong with me. Took me years to figure out it just meant something was wrong with him."

"That's either very wise or a thing you read on a mug."

"Could be both." He grinned. "Wisdom's wasted if you can't fit it on a mug."

I laughed, and it surprised me, and I went back to the sill feeling lighter than the conversation should have left me.

A while later he came over and asked to see what I kept scraping back. I turned the easel. He looked at it properly, taking his time, and pointed at the bottom corner where I'd been losing the same fight for a week. "There. That's where you flinch. You go careful right there, every time. Stop being polite to the corner." He was right. I'd been babying it. I dragged a loaded brush straight through the part I'd been protecting. For a second it looked ruined. Then it didn't. Kellan said "there it is" under his breath and went back to his diner.

A little before four a woman came into the back looking for Ellie, well-dressed, the kind who buys instead of browses. She started to apologize for the intrusion, then saw the window on the easel and stopped talking. She looked at it the way I used to look at paintings, before I forgot I was allowed to.

"Is this one for sale?" she asked.

"It's not finished," I said, the reflex out before I could stop it.

"That wasn't what I asked." She studied it another moment, then set a card on the table by the sink. "When it is finished. I'd want to know." She saw herself out and I stood there holding a brush, rattled, because a stranger had wanted something I made before I'd decided it was good enough to want.

Ellie came in around four with two coffees and stopped behind me.

"Oh," she said. Just that. She set a coffee by my elbow and looked at the canvas a long moment. "Maddie. That's the best thing you've ever made."

"It's not finished."

"It doesn't have to be finished for me to be right."

She pulled a stool over and sat. "Can I ask you something without you taking my head off?"

"No," I said flatly.

"Your anniversary was last Thursday."

I kept painting. "It was."

"You didn't mention anything…" she said carefully. "So I'm taking it he didn't do anything."