Chapter 23
23
There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.
THE ART OF WAR , SUN TZU
Chase put down the phone and stared at it for a moment, the feeling of relief coursing through his veins.
‘Well?’ Bella asked, and he looked up to find the entire staff of Nayak, including Tej, who was leaning against the door frame, hands in pockets, staring at him with the same expectation.
‘He’s in,’ Chase said, nodding slowly, not quite believing it himself.
Cheers filled his office as Maurice hugged Bella before he realised what he was doing and nearly pushed her away again. Ali jumped up and down beside Ye-Joon and Bella’s gaze was locked onto his, heat and happiness beautiful on her face. Tej nodded, saluted him with two fingers and left for the date that his mother had arranged for him while he was in New York.
Christ, he was glad it had worked. Zadzisai had just met Sascha who had walked him through the body of work for her exhibition. It had been a conditional part of the agreement, which was absolutely fair enough. Zadzisai had to approve of both the artist and the work, before he could ‘present’ it at the opening of Nayak New York.
This way, everyone came out looking like they’d won, especially if it was presented as having been the plan all along. Zadzisai would provide a few unseen pieces for the gallery that worked with Sascha’s debut exhibition.
How better to debut the gallery than with a debut artist? Bella had asked.
Of course, it had all been her suggestion. And that was what he was struggling with. He wasn’t jealous, or resentful, but deep down he knew that it should have been his idea. That if he was any good at his job, it wouldn’t just be relief he was feeling. It should be excitement, right? Pleasure? Pride? Anything but plain and simple relief.
‘Everything is ready,’ Bella informed them all, cutting into his thoughts. ‘The tweaks to the final news blast for the subscribers and the fresh website content. Just say the word.’
‘The word,’ he said wryly and everyone laughed. Bella did too, but he’d seen the small second’s-worth of frown as if she could sense something was wrong.
‘Okay, people, we have just four days before the pre-opening. I’m sure we have better things to do than sit round my office, let’s get to it,’ he commanded. Bella left him a lingering glance, but she was probably the busiest of them all, so she smiled before returning to her desk.
Everything would be better after the pre-opening, Chase decided. It would be easy after that. And maybe he’d stop feeling like such a fraud.
* * *
Private WhatsApp Group, 3 members. 16.42EST.
Sienna
So I’m setting this chat up without Bella because, has anyone heard from her recently?
Astrid
She’s pretty busy with the gallery opening.
I still feel bad about the article.
Sienna
Me too. But she’s worked her ass off to undo the damage from it.
Paige
She absolutely has.
And, so I had this idea…
Astrid
?
Sienna
I just think… what if we went to support her?
Astrid
Ohhh! I’d love that.
Paige
Do you think she’d want me there? I wouldn’t want to spoil the night.
Astrid
NOOOOO! Not at all. You HAVE to be there.
Sienna
Of course you have to be there!
Paige
Are you guys sure?
Astrid
Definitely. Can you get over here in time?
Paige
Yes I think so. Sienna?
Sienna
It’ll be a push, but I can make it work.
Paige
Wait, what happens when Chase sees Astrid?
Astrid
Shit.
Sienna
Wear a disguise.
Astrid
What, like a trench coat and a hat?
Paige
A hat could work. A really HUGE hat.
Sienna
Astrid
I think I actually have one of those.
Paige
Of course you do.
Sienna
Okay. So, you’re in? We’ll meet in NY before the opening. For Bella.
Astrid
For Bella!
Paige
For Bella!
* * *
Bella couldn’t sleep. She’d left Chase in bed, not wanting to disturb him, and come out to the living room. She walked to the window and looked down on the city that also wasn’t sleeping. Slashes of lights down below made it look like the night sky, as if she were peering down on an alternate universe.
I’m not going anywhere. And neither are you.
Would he still feel that way if he found out about the revenge plan? Would he still want to be with her if he found out that she wasn’t just Good Bella or Bad Bella, but some crazy combination of both?
Because that’s what had happened to Bella since coming to work at Nayak. At first she’d been so hell-bent on destruction, she hadn’t worried about being perfect and keeping the peace. And she’d actually enjoyed being bad. Being naughty, being… oh, just not worried about making sure Chase didn’t leave her like everyone else, because she hadn’t cared about him then. Not really.
But now? Now she knew that she’d be devastated if he walked away from her. Just the thought of it tore her apart in ways that Olly running away hadn’t even touched. And as if just thinking about it had conjured it to being, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something bad was going to happen. It was as if it was already slipping through her fingers and this time, the future she wanted so badly she could taste it.
‘Are you okay?’
She clenched her jaw to stop herself from saying, No. No, I’m not. I lied to you and I don’t think you’ll be able to forgive me.
Chase came to stand behind her, pulling her against his chest and wrapping his arms around her.
‘Can’t sleep?’
Bella shook her head.
‘It’ll be okay you know,’ he whispered.
She nodded.
‘You’ve done amazing things, Bella Carmichael, I hope you know that,’ he said, resting his head on hers.
A part of her rejoiced, and the other twisted in shame.
‘We could never have turned things around without you. The team, me. We all came together with you. And it’s… special. You should know that.’
His praise meant the world to her. It was special. They’d become like a family. Like Paige, Astrid and Sienna had become her family. Ones that meant more because they’d chosen to work together, chosen to be together. Not because of blood, but because of friendship. And the thought of either of those two groups, Nayak or the girls, disappearing from her life was so devastating that Bella chose the present. Tomorrow would come and would bring what it would bring. But for now, she just wanted as much time with Chase as she could get.
‘Take me to bed?’ she asked.
‘Your wish is my command.’
* * *
Even though it was a pre-opening, everyone was still making an effort to dress in their finest. Ali was putting on her make-up and Bella had offered to do her hair, which had pretty much made Ali’s entire year. The boys were getting ready in Chase’s office, Maurice pushing both Chase and Tej from making a mess of Ye-Joon’s tie.
Bella watched with a smile, the feeling of warmth in her chest spreading. A message pinged from her parents.
Good luck!
They’d offered to come tonight, but she’d assured them that it was better for them to come to the actual opening next week. Tonight, she wanted this to be about the gallery, about Chase. She didn’t want to spend the entire evening making sure they were okay.
Ali craned her neck, trying to get another glimpse of Ye-Joon and Bella gave up fighting her smile.
‘It’s like prom, isn’t it?’ Ali said with an eager smile.
‘I guess so,’ Bella hedged.
‘You guess?’
‘We had a family emergency, so I missed mine,’ Bella said, remembering how Bea had spiked a fever, and her parents had taken her to the hospital and she’d had to stay at home with her grandmother who had been too upset to leave alone that night.
‘I’m so sorry.’ Ali’s sincerity hit her like a blast, but Bella waved it away, like she always did.
Ye-Joon appeared in the doorway and Ali practically jumped out of her seat, just as Bella was putting the last pin in her hair. Ye-Joon only had eyes for Ali and as she looked over the top of his head to see Maurice, Tej and Chase all standing there looking like proud older brothers, she felt connected to these people in ways she hadn’t experienced before. And was suddenly sad at the idea of leaving them. She didn’t want to. She didn’t want to have to walk away after the gallery opening.
Maybe she could make this work. Maybe, if she told Chase, he might understand. Or maybe she didn’t even have to tell Chase. She could just shove it all down and pretend that she hadn’t sabotaged him. And they could all just carry on like this.
Oh, she wanted that so badly.
‘You look beautiful,’ Chase mouthed to her over the heads of the others and she felt herself blush.
‘Thank you,’ she mouthed back. She didn’t have to verbalise her appreciation of Chase dressed in a suit. Her gaze ate him up and, noticing, he raised an eyebrow in mock admonishment.
‘Right,’ Maurice said, rubbing his hands together. ‘Who’s ready to kick this off?’
They all cheered and Tej gestured for Chase to lead the way. He cast a glance back over his shoulder at Bella, and that was almost the last she saw of him for the next sixty minutes.
* * *
It was a rush seeing the gallery full of people, mixing, mingling, looking at the art. The walls looked spectacular and the sound of excited voices filled the room. Bella hung back, taking it all in, an adrenaline rush fizzing in her veins at the sight of the gallery’s success.
Sascha was beaming, hovering by Zadzisai’s side, as he introduced her to some of the journalists invited to the preview, to help whet expectations for the opening next week. Tej was skirting the crowds, hoping to avoid the date his mother had invited for him. Bella wincing as he glared at her, holding her personally responsible. Chase had assured her she’d done the right thing. Tej would forgive her but when they’d spoken on the phone, Bella had quickly realised that Adite Nayak was a formidable woman that few would say no to and survive unscathed.
She continued to scan the guests looking for one person amongst the many faces of an almost packed to the brim gallery, until she felt a tap on her shoulder and turned to stare into familiar eyes, with just a few more wrinkle lines.
‘Ms Carmichael?’ he asked, holding his hand out for her to shake.
She smiled, relief and happiness exhaled on a sigh. ‘Mr Miller,’ she said, taking Chase’s father’s hand. ‘It’s very nice to meet you.’
Mr Miller looked around the room, impressed and a little overwhelmed at the noise and the sight of it all.
‘My son did all this?’
‘He had a little bit of help, but yes. He brought all of this together.’
Mr Miller nodded and took a deep breath, impressed.
‘I went to an exhibition of his once. He doesn’t know about it,’ Mr Miller confessed. ‘I…’ He shrugged. ‘It’s hard for me. His mother understood this part of him and I always thought that maybe when he lost her, he’d lost someone who understood him in that way.’ Bella watched him swallow and gather himself. He pressed a thumb to the corner of his eye and she looked away, knowing that he’d hate to have that moment of vulnerability witnessed. Over the last week, they’d spoken a number of times, and she already knew that Mr Miller was a man of few words, but deep emotions.
‘But this is good,’ he said, nodding to himself. ‘He’s doing for others what was done for him. She definitely taught him that,’ he said, his head bobbing again, as if that was the only way he could show his appreciation of what his son had achieved.
‘Dad.’
This time, it was Bella who swallowed as she turned to face Chase coming up behind them.
‘Hi, son. I hope you don’t mind me being here?—’
‘No,’ Chase said, as if surprised himself that he didn’t mind. ‘Of course not,’ he said, his gaze flicking between him and Bella.
‘Why don’t you show your dad round, and we can catch up later?’ Bella suggested as Chase mentally tried to figure out how his father had come to be there tonight.
She excused herself and made her way into the crowd, telling herself that she wasn’t running away before Chase could tell her off. She felt his eyes on her back as she slipped through the people and found her way to where Ali and Maurice were standing.
‘I think it’s going well,’ Maurice said nervously. ‘It’s going well, right?’ he asked, turning to Bella, looking for confirmation.
‘It’s going brilliantly!’ Ali beamed and Bella smiled and agreed.
‘Well, in that case,’ Maurice said, grabbing three glasses of champagne from the passing waiter and sharing them out between them. ‘We did it,’ he said by way of a toast, and with a broad grin took a mouthful of the sharp bubbles.
Deciding that everything was firmly in control, and that she could breathe a little, Bella took a mouthful just as Ali asked, ‘Who is the woman in the hat?’
Turning, Bella caught sight first of the hat, then the two people beside the hat, then the person under the hat, and promptly choked on her champagne.
* * *
Chase wasn’t quite sure he was happy about Bella and his father going behind his back, but he was really touched that his dad was here. And then because of that, felt ashamed that he hadn’t invited his father himself.
But instead of saying ‘thank you for coming’, Chase said, ‘You didn’t have to come.’
And instead of saying, ‘I wanted to’, his father said, ‘Bella made it hard to say no.’
Chase huffed out a laugh at the thought of Bella and his father having that conversation.
‘I like her,’ his father said, looking at a piece on the wall as if not quite sure why anyone had called it art.
‘I do too,’ Chase admitted, warmth spreading through his chest and limbs as he said it.
‘Daisy would have liked her.’
And Chase nodded, because he knew that too.
They moved from piece to piece and for the first time, Chase didn’t feel the need to ask about the garage, didn’t feel the need to fill the silence between them because it wasn’t uncomfortable. The background noise, so unusual in a gallery, gave them a base colour from which to work and they were picking their paint colours carefully.
His father stopped at one of Sascha’s large canvases and considered it carefully.
‘This reminds me of one of yours.’
Chase waited for the twist, the anxiety, the rush to hide the block that had all but crippled him for the last eighteen months. ‘It’s not.’
‘No, I know,’ his dad said with a conviction that took Chase aback. ‘Yours are different,’ he said, shrugging. ‘I don’t know the fancy way of saying why, but I know it’s not yours but it’s like yours. The’ – he waved his hands in the air, struggling to articulate what he was seeing – ‘stuff is different, but…’ And his father shrugged again, pulling at the neck of the shirt he’d worn to the gallery.
Chase cleared his throat. ‘It feels different.’
His father didn’t argue with the description which was as much as Chase could have hoped for. They circled the far wall of the gallery until they reached a series that made his father say, ‘Oh.’
Interspersed between larger pieces were the drawings by the children from Castledine Elementary, still displayed in their elaborate gilt frames. Bella had pitched it as ‘surprising and whimsical, but also pertinent to the gallery’s ethos’.
‘We have an ethos?’ he’d asked.
‘You have an ethos,’ she’d told him seriously. ‘And it’s admirable and unique and worth holding on to.’
And he hadn’t been able to hide from that in a joke or a kiss and it had sunk into his skin like ink from a tattoo.
‘These are great,’ his father exclaimed with more enthusiasm than when he’d looked at a painting that would probably fetch somewhere in the region of half a million. That was how his father valued things. ‘This she would have loved ,’ he said, looking Chase in the eye and he knew he meant it.
His father might have found it difficult to talk about feelings and emotions, but his reaction to the thing that brought him joy was just as visceral as Bella’s had been to the paintings in the gallery warehouse nearly a month and a half ago. And that was why Chase had wanted to include the piece here. Art should be accessible in whatever form, wherever it comes from, for whoever views it.
And Bella had seen that. Seen that that was how he felt.
He caught Maurice’s eye and nodded him over. He needed to find her. He wanted… well, he didn’t quite know what he wanted but he wanted to go to her.
Maurice cut through the gallery and Chase introduced him to his father. Two more opposite men you could probably struggle to find, but they immediately fell into a good-natured conversation about the children’s pictures as Maurice gestured towards the front of the gallery where Bella was standing with her back to him.
* * *
‘Oh my God, what are you guys doing here?’ Bella asked as she took in Sienna, Paige and Astrid – wearing the most ridiculous hat she’d ever seen.
And then, shockingly, she felt herself tearing up as she looked at the gorgeous faces of the women she’d missed as if they’d been scattered pieces of her heart.
‘We came to surprise you!’ Sienna exclaimed until she saw the tears welling up in Bella’s eyes. ‘Or not…?’ She trailed off with a concern. ‘Oh hun, are you okay?’
Bella nodded like a hula girl on a dashboard driving over the Brooklyn Bridge, which only seemed to make the girls more concerned.
Astrid pushed in for a hug, sending the other girls packing as the brim of the oversized dramatic hat got in their way. Paige rescued the glass of champagne she’d been holding as Bella felt Astrid’s strong arms around her, squeezing tight to the point of near pain, until Bella tapped her on the arm.
‘I’m good, I’m good,’ Bella promised, the threat of tears over.
‘Okay,’ Paige replied, her eyes forecasting that she wasn’t convinced. ‘You look like you could do with this,’ she said, handing the glass back to her.
Bella ignored the glass and grabbed Paige for a hug.
‘It’s so good to see you,’ she said truthfully and nearly started crying again. ‘I’m so happy for you and Olly. We…’ Bella sighed. ‘We would have made a terrible mistake if we’d got married that day. I think… I was looking for the full stop on what I thought I should be doing. I think we both were, really. But he was always more of a friend to me than anything else,’ Bella confessed.
‘Are you sure?’ Paige asked, her own eyes glistening.
‘Absolutely. I promise. On red velvet cakes,’ Bella said, drawing an X over her heart with her fingers. ‘And I think you all know how seriously I take my cakes,’ she said, looking around the smiling faces of the group, these women her friends. Friends she’d missed more than the family who had never really seen the real her, because she’d never really let them. ‘Now tell me, how are you all here?’ she asked as her voice broke with emotion.
‘I thought it would be nice to be here for you tonight,’ Sienna explained.
‘And we agreed, but it was going to be tricky because we needed invites and we couldn’t just ask because you were the one in charge of that,’ Paige explained.
‘And I said, who needs invites, when we can simply crash the event?’ Astrid inserted. ‘But of course, I couldn’t just rock up so – ta da! You like my disguise?’
‘The hat?’ Bella asked, eying the monstrosity that had nearly decapitated one waiter, blinded one of Maurice’s friends and drawn more attention than Zadzisai’s new artwork. ‘The hat?’ she repeated, questioning the collective sanity of the group.
‘And the glasses,’ Astrid insisted. ‘Although I may have perhaps overestimated their suitability as a disguise,’ Astrid admitted and they all dissolved into giggles.
‘But you can’t stay,’ Bella groaned miserably. ‘If Chase finds you here, he’ll?—’
‘He’ll what?’ demanded a horrifyingly familiar male voice from over her shoulder. ‘What will Chase do?’ he asked. And when Bella turned to face him, his eyes flickered to the group behind her and then stuck. ‘Astrid?’