Page 32 of Neglected By Her CEO Husband

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MADDIE

Itook the trip.

That surprised everyone, Ellie most of all, who'd assumed I'd spend the divorce hiding in her spare room. But the trip had been booked in Damon's head, a reward I'd have to be good enough and patient enough to earn, and I decided I was done earning my own life in installments.

The trial could read out whenever it wanted. I had a passport and the money I'd earned and saved over the years. I wasn't about to ask my family for more, both because I didn't need it and because then they would know I was leaving Damon. I wanted to save that for when the lawyers got involved.

Amsterdam first, because that was the one I was most tired of waiting for. I stood in front of the painting of the wheat field with the crows in it on a gray Monday with strangers breathing around me, and I cried. It took me a while to understand the crying wasn't about Damon at all. It was about the years. All the years I'd spent turning my inner light into his spotlight. Nobody ever wept in front of a perfectly run gala.

I went where I wanted after that. Taking my time, savoring it all piece by piece. I sat in small museums until the guards got familiar with me and stopped watching. I sketched on trains in cheap notebooks, my hands shaping other hands, faces, the particular way light comes through a smeared window in a country where you don't speak the language and nobody needs anything from you.

In one city a painter I met at a gallery opening lent me a corner of her studio for two weeks, and I painted windows. I didn't know why, I just did it. She looked at them and said something in French I half understood. The half I understood was that they were good, and I believed her, because she had no reason to manage me. She didn't know I was Damon Sterling's wife.

Maybe whatever else I was underneath that could be enough.

Damon's messages continued. I stopped answering them other than a brief one to tell him I was fine every few days, because a part of me was afraid he'd send in the military otherwise, and God only knew he had the means to do it.

Somewhere in the second month I stopped checking whether I was healing. I just looked up one afternoon, in a café in a city I'd chosen for no reason but the name, with paint under my nails and a show waiting for me at home in a real gallery, and noticed I already was.

It had happened while I was busy being a person. Nobody gave it to me. Nobody could take it back across a ballroom floor. I paid for my coffee and I sketched the waiter's hands and I understood that whatever happened with Damon Sterling, I was never again going home to sit in a car and wait for a man to remember I was in it.

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DAMON

Ihad run a company through the worst quarter of its life. I could run a household for a few weeks. Or so I told myself when Maddie left.

I could not, in fact, run a household for a few weeks.

It went wrong in a hundred small ways I'd never seen, because I'd never seen the work, because the work had been done invisibly by a person I'd decided was decorative.

I missed my mother's birthday. I'd never once missed it, and it took me three days to understand that Maddie was the one who had not missed it for me, every year, with a card I signed and a gift I never chose. My new secretary quit. The dry cleaning piled up. The fridge held condiments and air. I ate cereal over the sink at midnight more nights than I'll admit because takeout made me feel even more pathetic, and one of those nights I tried to remember the last meal I'd eaten that someone had made because they wanted me to have it. Not catered, not ordered, made, and I couldn't, and I put the bowl down.

I kept explaining it to myself as a rough patch. She was punishing me, fairly, and the punishment would end when she'd made her point, and then she'd come home and the house would start working again and I'd do better, be home more, the whole reformed-husband routine. I had it half scripted. I just needed her in the room to perform it at.

I messaged her less, because the messages came back mostly empty, and a man can only shout into a well so many times before the silence starts to mean something even to him. By the end of the month I'd stopped expecting the dots. The house got enormous. I started leaving the radio on in the kitchen so it wasn't so loud in there.

Then her lawyer's office sent a letter.

It was polite. It was precise. It used the word separation, which was fair, because that was what this had been for nearly two months. There was a proposed framework. There was a line about her not seeking more than what was hers, which somehow cut worse than greed would have, because greed I could have understood as anger, and this was just a woman closing a door cleanly behind her and not even taking the silver.

I stood in her studio, the room I'd walked past a thousand times, and the room I now spent most of my time in when I was home. As if staring into her paintings would help me understand why she'd left and how to bring her back.

The thing was, it was starting to. She painted so many windows. Most of them were full of warmth on the outside, but by the time the light made it through the glass, it was dim and flat.

Was this how she felt? Always observing warmth from the other side of the glass, never receiving it? She was the one who made everything perfect, beautiful. But I never saw her.

I thought I did, but I knew now that she was gone just how much her influence had touched and shaped and smoothed every aspect of my life.

Somewhere in that second month, after staring at the same paintings that had been staring back at me for years, it finally clicked.

She wasn't overreacting. She wasn't punishing me. She wasn't coming back to be performed at.

She had left, the way you leave a building that's on fire, and I was still inside it explaining to the smoke that everything was fine.

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