Page 40 of Neglected By Her CEO Husband

My hand felt strange without the weight.

"Yes," I said, my voice breaking. "One chance, Damon. And it's going to take longer than you think."

"I know." He was still on one knee. I watched his face for the winning look, the one I knew better than anyone alive. It didn't come. Only sincerity. "I'm counting on it."

31

MADDIE

The afternoon before the show, Ellie stood on a ladder with a spirit level and told me to stop pacing.

"I'm not pacing. I'm checking sight lines."

"You're pacing in front of the sight lines." She came down, took the wine glass I hadn't touched out of my hand, and looked at me. "Talk. Is it the show or the husband?"

"The show."

"Maddie."

"Both." I straightened a frame that didn't need it. "He's coming tonight. I invited him."

Ellie was quiet for a second. She'd watched the whole thing from the start, the leaving, the months away, the rooftop, and she had appointed herself my last line of defense, a job I'd never given her and never wanted taken away. "And you're worried he'll come as Damon Sterling. Press release, entourage, buys the gallery as a surprise."

"That's the test. Not whether he comes. How."

"And if he pulls it?"

"Then I'll know." I said it evenly, and meant it, and that was new too. "But Ellie, he hasn't. That's the thing. Nearly six months, and he hasn't pulled it once."

She started peeling backing tape off the price cards, listening with her eyebrows.

"He hasn't bought me anything," I said. "Not one box. He brings coffee to the studio on Saturday mornings and he gets the order right and he stays twenty minutes and leaves before I have to ask. When the boiler died in my flat he didn't send a contractor or buy the building. He showed up with a wrench and a video on his phone and made it worse, and then he sat with me on the kitchen floor for two hours waiting for the plumber, in a suit, and he was happy. I tested him once. Told him I was tired in the middle of dinner, just to see. He had his coat on before I finished the sentence. No sulk. We just left and he drove me home and that was that."

"Hm," Ellie said, which from Ellie is a paragraph.

"He's learned Hammershøi. He mispronounced him for a month and I didn't correct him because it was the only funny thing I had left, and then he went and learned it properly, and now he says things about light that are almost right. He drove me and four wrapped canvases to the framer in the Lexus and waited two hours in a loading bay. The CEO of Sterling Pharmaceuticals, sitting on a folding chair next to a fire extinguisher, reading mat samples like they were earnings reports." I ran out of tape and stopped. "He hasn't asked me to come home once. Not once since the roof. He just keeps showing up small, exactly like he said he would, and Ellie, I keep waiting for the old Damon to come back, and he keeps not coming. But the new one keeps showing up."

Ellie looked at me for a long moment. "I keep waiting to catch him performing," she admitted. "He brought you a coffee and left. Who taught him that?" Then she shrugged and went back to the cards, because she would walk into traffic for me but she'd vetted him in her own way for months, quietly, the way she does everything that matters.

It was nearly six when I caught her at the far end of the wall with the roll of red dots in her hand, pressing one onto the corner of a frame.

The harbor. The one from my twenties, the soft one, the painting I'd carried out of his house wrapped in a bedsheet and hung in my studio and almost hadn't included at all, because it was a decade old and it wasn't what I painted anymore.

"The show hasn't started," I said.

"Someone called ahead." Ellie smoothed the dot down with her thumb. "Asked for that one specifically. Paid the ask, no haggling, money's already cleared. The desk has the ticket."

"Who buys a painting they haven't seen?"

"Someone who's seen it." She picked up her ladder and walked off, and I stood in front of the little red dot with a strange feeling I didn't have time to take apart, because the caterers were arriving and the lights needed a final pass and the doors opened at seven.

People came. That was the first miracle, it always is. They came and they stayed and they stood in front of the windows with their heads tilted, and red dots went up one by one down the wall, and I moved through my own opening the new way, no room to manage, no temperature to carry, talking about light with strangers who'd come for the light.

And the whole time, under all of it, I watched the door.

By eight he hadn't come, and I made myself stop checking. He had a board meeting that week, the trial readout, a company still climbing out of the hole Emily had dug it into. There were a hundred fair reasons, and one old familiar one, and I stood with a collector who was saying intelligent things about the Prague window and felt the old bracing start up in my shoulders, the muscle that knows how to absorb a no-show and smile through the rest of an evening.

Then I felt it, being watched, and turned.