Page 34 of Neglected By Her CEO Husband

He didn't know my name. He didn't know there was a Sterling fastened to it, or a gallery in another country holding a wall. He knew the painting. He asked what I wanted for it, and I said a number that scared me, and he paid it without a flicker and asked whether there were more.

I sold three paintings to a stranger that afternoon, and not one person had managed it for me. No one steered him by the elbow. No one leaned in to mention that the painter was married to a man worth being gracious to. He wanted the work because the work was good, and the work was mine, start to finish, mine.

I sat on the studio steps after his train carried him off, the folded receipt in my hand, and understood that this was what the emeralds and the car and the bolts of Belgian linen had only ever been pretending to be. Damon had spent a month buying me evidence that I mattered. A stranger had handed me the real thing in an hour and gone to catch a train without asking for anything in return but the work he'd paid for.

Ellie called that night. The show was still on and my wall was still ready. Assuming I'd be back in time.

That was the question, wasn't it? Until that point, it had felt like returning home would be returning to Damon, but now I felt… settled. Whatever I'd been trying to find out there, I had found it, or at least realized it was already within me. And I trusted myself, too. I trusted that going back didn't mean going back to the way things were, because I was never again going to be the woman who'd accepted them.

I sat in the window of the room over the bakery and listened to my best friend read me the date, and I booked the flight home before we'd hung up. Going toward a wall with my name on it, in a city I had chosen to live in, was a different errand altogether from crawling back to a house or bolting from a husband, and I'd had to leave the country to feel the difference in my own feet.

Ellie stayed on afterward and went quiet, which with her meant she was deciding whether to tell me a thing. Then she told me. Damon was not doing well. It was clear from the press conferences. Rumor had it, there was trouble in the family.

And here I'd expected the rumors to be about him and Emily in my absence. For eight years, he'd treated me like the thing that was keeping him from her. As if we hadn't both been just kids freshly out of university, pushed together and trying to make our way in the world without ruffling our powerful families' feathers.

Now that he had the freedom to pursue her, and she clearly wasn't going to rebuff him as she had back then, why wasn't he?

The old reflex came up right on schedule. Eight years of muscle, the pull to ask whether he was eating, to wonder who was reminding him of his mother's birthday, to start, even now, even from a windowsill across an ocean, quietly running his life again. I felt it rise. I'd have called it love once and let it carry me back into the car.

It found nowhere to go. I asked Ellie how Kellan's show had gone and whether the streetlight kid had sold anything, and we talked about that instead, and the reflex stood there a moment with nowhere to put itself and then sat back down.

His comfort had stopped being my job somewhere over the Atlantic.

His message came while Sylvie and I were closing up. They'd been thinning for weeks, the volume coming down message by message, and this was the quietest yet, three lines, no gift folded inside and no come home, only that he hoped I was somewhere good and that he wasn't writing to ask for anything. I read it twice.

I felt the plain fact of him, a husband I had loved and married and run an entire life for, who had never once turned his head while I did it, and then I put the phone in my bag and helped Sylvie carry the canvases in out of the evening damp.

I didn't answer him. There was nothing in me that needed to, and I had learned, finally, to stop performing a feeling just to keep a man comfortable.

I went back to the room over the bakery and packed, slowly, the good clothes and the old jewelry and the receipt for three sold paintings, and in the morning I started the long way home, toward my own name on a wall and a future that was unwritten.

26

DAMON

Iwas in Emily's office, which had become command central for the Playne family debacle, and I stayed there because my own office had a view of the parking spot where Maddie's car used to sit when she was here.

That was the state of me by then. I could run a board meeting and answer a reporter and sign what needed signing, and underneath all of it, every hour, I was drafting messages to my wife and throwing them away. I had one open on my phone right there at Emily's side table, four lines I kept rewriting, and I must have been staring through the markup in front of me, because Emily put her pen down hard enough to click.

"Where are you?" she asked. "Because you're not in this letter and we have to finish it tonight."

"I'm here."

"You're not. You've been gone for weeks." She came around the desk and perched on the edge of it, close, arms folded. "We are eleven days from the independent read, the press is asking questions with teeth in them, and the CEO drifts off mid-sentence because his phone might buzz. She left, Damon. She walked out on you in the middle of all this and your brain went with her."

There was a sound under it I'd been hearing for months without letting myself name the sound. It wasn't a colleague's irritation. It was older and more personal, and it had a wife-shaped hole in the middle of it.

"Watch how you talk about her," I said. I should have said it that night when Emily humiliated her in front of all those people. Instead, I stood by and let her do it. I didn't defend my wife, the one person in this world who's always been at my side.

"Someone has to say it." She softened, and that was worse. She moved behind my chair and her hands came down on my shoulders and started working at the knots, like this was something we still did. Something it had been okay to do since we were actually together. "Look at you. You're a wreck. You don't eat, you don't sleep, you're grinding yourself to powder for a woman who won't answer a text. You deserve better than this. Let me help you, I've always been able to."

The thing about a few months of small touches is that each one arrives deniable. A hand on the forearm in a war room. Fingers brushing yours on a handoff. Straightening your collar before a press conference, laughing, intimate, while your wife watches from the doorway.

Each one costs nothing to allow and is awkward to refuse, and they accumulate the way water accumulates, and then one afternoon a woman is standing behind your chair kneading your shoulders like a wife while she talks your actual wife down to you, and you finally see it all at once. All the things you've been blind to.

I stood up. Her hands fell away.

"Don't touch me again," I said. "Not my shoulders, not my collar, not my arm in meetings. None of it. That ends today, and I should have ended it the first week. I'm married, Emily. Whatever this is that you've been doing, in front of staff, in front of my wife, it's done."