Page 89 of The Marriage Clause

Untouchable.

Very Everett.

He glanced up once when I told him I was going into town, gave me a clipped nod, and went right back to whatever deal or crisis or spreadsheet had his attention.

So I left.

And now I'm standing on a sun-drenched street in Cannes with a coffee I didn't have to make for someone else and nowhere to be but exactly where I want.

That alone feels dangerously close to freedom.

The promenade isn't hard to find. I just follow the water and the crowds and the rows of shops spilling luxury into every window. Designer bags. Gold sandals. Jewelry that looks too delicate to survive ordinary human life. There are women in linen trousers and giant sunglasses who look born to belong here, and men with expensive watches and open collars and the kind of tans Seattle billionaires can only buy in twelve-day increments.

I pass them all slowly, drinking in the colors.

The Riviera doesn't do subtle.

The water is too blue. The flowers are too bright. The buildings are too beautiful. Even the air feels saturated—salt and citrus and sun-warmed stone.

My mother would have loved every inch of it.

The thought catches me off guard, sharp enough that I stop walking.

Not because it stings.

Because it doesn't.

Not the way it used to.

For so long, thinking about her felt like opening a wound I could barely survive. Today it feels like she's here in the edges of things. In the painted shutters. In the bougainvillea spilling over balconies. In the language drifting around me like music I grew up hearing before I understood the words.

I take another sip of coffee and keep walking.

The art supply shop almost gets missed.

It's tucked between a boutique selling silk scarves and a little bookstore with sun-faded postcards in the window. Small. Easy to overlook. But the second I see the brushes lined up in a ceramic jar and the stacked canvases in the display, my feet stop moving.

My heart doesn't.

It starts beating too hard.

The paper cup crinkles a little in my hand.

Three years.

That's how long it's been since I let myself do this. Since I stood in front of paint and canvas and possibility and called any of it mine.

I told myself I stopped because life changed. Because my mother died. Because my father needed me. Because grief rearranged everything and art belonged to a version of me that got trapped under the wreckage.

But staring into that tiny shop window, I know that isn't the whole truth.

I stopped because painting made me want things.

And wanting things after the accident felt selfish.

Like betrayal.

Like if I reached for beauty again, I was somehow admitting I could survive losing her.