Chapter 25
25
The skilful leader subdues the enemy’s troops without any fighting.
THE ART OF WAR , SUN TZU
Bella drew the covers over her head the moment her phone sounded the message from the Just Desserts WhatsApp Group. She knew the girls were trying to keep her spirits up, making sure she was okay, but she just didn’t have the energy to pretend any more.
She’d taken a car home yesterday morning, after the girls had spent what was left of the night before with her. They’d waited on the sidewalk as her bags were loaded into the car, all pretending not to watch the street for any sign of Chase.
She’d even held her breath, hoping that maybe, just maybe, she’d earned a Hollywood happy ever after, where Chase was going to come running, yelling her name, and stopping her from leaving at the very last minute. But he hadn’t.
And she’d hated the fact that instead of being thankful her friends were waving her off, worry hidden behind supportive masks, she’d been desperately sad. She’d held it together through the long journey back to her parents’ house. She’d held it together as she’d promised them she was fine, before going to her room, locking the door and letting herself fall apart.
That had been eighteen hours ago.
Her phone beeped again and Bella tried not to cry, because she knew that it wasn’t Chase. That he’d never want to see her again and her lips wobbled, and her jaw ached and her eyes leaked tears she’d thought she’d exhausted by now. It hurt so damn much. So much, that it ached to take a breath.
A knock sounded on her door and she wanted to ignore that too.
She knew this routine. Her parents would leave her to it. They always did. Because they knew she’d fix it eventually. But she just wasn’t sure she could this time.
‘Coming in,’ her father warned before slowly opening the door.
Shocked, she threw the comforter over her head and did exactly what she’d accused Chase of doing: she hid.
She felt the bed dip from where he sat, just by her knees, and was torn between desperately wanting him to leave and wanting to hurl herself into his arms. But that was what Bea did. Bella wasn’t that daughter. She was the daughter who didn’t need things like that. And thinking it just made her want to cry again.
‘It’s a funny thing,’ her father said, voice muffled by the covers. ‘When you called so late the other night… I was almost happy.’
Bella blinked and risked peeking out from beneath the covers.
‘Happy?’ she couldn’t help but ask, scarcely believing that when she’d been so miserable he’d been happy .
‘No, not like that,’ he quickly corrected. ‘But I have waited so long for you to want to come home.’
Bella pushed up fully out from under the covers and sat against the headboard. ‘I think I’m still missing something,’ she confessed, anger beginning to well up from deep within where she’d barely ever looked. ‘Because it sounds like you think I always had a choice,’ she said, her chest aching from the fact that he didn’t see, didn’t know how hurt she’d been over the years.
It was as if everything that had happened with Chase, not the argument, not the hurt, but before then; the way he’d encouraged her not to smooth things over, but to make waves. To stand her ground. To have the arguments. He’d been right. He’d been preparing her for this.
Her father at least had the grace to look ashamed.
‘You’re talking about when Bea was sick.’
And that was it. Right there. Because in his mind, it wasn’t about her . Bella. ‘I’m talking me . About you sending me away.’
Her mother appeared in the hallway, leaning against the frame, watching her and her father.
Bella swallowed. ‘And not just when I was younger. But last year too,’ she said, the hurt bursting into life like a firework, blooming and mushrooming, and raining down a thousand different hurts over the last twenty years. And this time she couldn’t hold back the tears, even if she’d tried.
‘Why did you always have to send me away?’
‘Oh sweetheart. We didn’t want to. Ever. When Bea was sick,’ his father tried, ‘we didn’t want you anywhere near the hospital. We didn’t want you to see how scared we were, and we didn’t know how to explain to you what was going on. We thought it best that you had some semblance of stability.’
‘I thought it was because it was easier for you,’ Bella confessed, her throat thick and swollen.
‘God no, Bella. It was awful. We wanted you with us all the time. It was horrible without you when all we wanted was to see both our girls, all the time. We didn’t want to let you out of our sight for a single second. But… it was a hospital. Bea was so sick. We thought it was best for you. But it wasn’t. And we didn’t like the way it made you.’
‘The way it made me?’
Her mother nodded to her father, as if encouraging him to continue.
‘We know how much you took on so that we could focus on Bea,’ he said. ‘We know you did that out of love, but when that became a habit for you, we worried about you. Worried that you’d lost your voice, your confidence.’
‘You used to be so bossy. So determined,’ her mother said with a laugh.
‘But that was gone when you returned, and it was our fault that we were just so relieved to have everyone back under one roof that we didn’t challenge it, challenge you.’
‘And what about after the wedding? Me going to France?’
Her mother looked at her father. ‘We didn’t want you to go, but we didn’t want you to stay with all the press around the wedding.’
‘I thought you were worried about the foundation,’ Bella confessed.
‘Not more than we were worried about you, Bella. God, I’m… so sorry you even thought that,’ her father said, the tears in his eyes shocking Bella deeply. ‘We love you. So much,’ he said, choking on the words as her mother came to also sit on her bed, reaching out an arm to touch her.
‘So, so, much,’ her mother echoed.
Fissures turned to cracks, emotions flooding from the dam she’d kept them stopped up behind. They poured out of her, the debris of hurt and pain, moments clung to and remembered, released and free-flowing like a river to make space for new emotions, clean ones, not stagnant, but moving and changing and Bella took great gulps from it.
And her parents held her through it all, weathered them with her, as they’d always wanted and she’d always wanted.
She spent the entire day with her parents telling them about meeting the girls, about researching Chase. About starting work and how much she’d loved the people, how she’d pranked Chase and accessed his password. How she’d convinced a journalist to do a hit piece on a man who didn’t deserve it, even though her mother was firmly on the side of Bad Bella. She wasn’t willing to share about the studio and Chase’s art because that was personal to him and she’d betrayed him enough, even though her father insisted that what had happened wasn’t entirely betrayal.
It felt amazing to have her parents on her side. And she felt desperately sad for the little girl who’d missed that feeling, missed out on that support growing up – not for a single second begrudging the care and attention her sister had needed.
‘That’s a lot to have happened in three short months,’ her mother observed.
Bella nodded, but it wasn’t the end, because there was one last thing she wanted to ask her parents, still unsure of how far she could push their acceptance of her.
‘I don’t know what’s going to happen with Chase and the gallery, but… I do know that it’s made me re-think what I want. For the future,’ she said haltingly.
‘You mean the foundation?’ her father asked.
Bella nodded. ‘I don’t… I don’t want to work there,’ Bella said, realising just how much she didn’t want that. She wanted something for herself, like Paige had. Something that made her shine, like Astrid had. Something that she worked hard for, like Sienna did. She couldn’t very well go back to Nayak… but perhaps there was something else she could find.
‘Of course, Bella. We…’ Her mother looked to her father who nodded. ‘We only wanted you to be part of it, if that was what you wanted. It was a selfish way of us keeping you, I suppose,’ she said with a sad shrug. ‘But, you need to find something for you,’ her mother assured her, rubbing circles on her back.
Bea and her fiancé arrived just before dinner and Bea promptly stopped upon entering the kitchen.
‘Oh my God, what happened?’
‘What do you mean?’ Bella asked on a hiccupped laugh, eyes puffy and red from crying and her mother wiping her own tears back.
‘Did someone die?’ Bea demanded.
‘Hopefully only Good Bella ,’ her father said laughing and her sister stared at them all like they were mad.
‘Here,’ Derek, Bea’s fiancé said to Bella, as he pressed a signed-for envelope into her hands. Bella frowned, tearing it open as her parents tried to explain to her sister what had happened.
You are invited to the opening of the Nayak New York, a contemporary gallery opening under the directorship of Chase Miller on behalf of Tejvir Nayak.
There must be some mistake, Bella thought, scanning the invitation that shouldn’t have come to her. She wasn’t on the mailing list. Nor did they send out invitations via signed-for mail. She turned the invitation over and saw, Please Come, written in Chase’s handwriting.
‘What’s that?’ her father asked.
‘An olive branch, I think,’ Bella replied and her father’s eyes twinkled with a hope that matched what she felt in her heart.
* * *
Chase had never been more nervous in his entire life. Not when he’d first left for London, not his misplaced wedding day, not even his first exhibition.
‘Are you okay, man? You look like you’re gonna be sick,’ Tej asked, genuinely concerned.
Chase nodded and rolled his shoulders. ‘Fine.’ The word turned into a cough when Tej slapped him on the back a little too hard.
‘She’s gonna show,’ Tej said with a confidence Chase didn’t feel.
He smiled and nodded as a smartly dressed couple passed them, the woman wearing nearly half a million in diamonds, and Chase couldn’t have cared less. Ali came bounding up to them, her excitement irrepressible, no matter how much Maurice tried to iron it out. Chase was beginning to suspect that most of Maurice’s attempts were for show, because they all secretly enjoyed her eternal optimism.
‘Sascha just sold three paintings,’ she whisper-hissed, as Maurice appeared at her side, with a shhh and a, ‘Keep your voice down.’
Chase scanned the heads of the rich, famous and just lucky enough to be here at the opening of Nayak New York, and found Sascha staring wide-eyed at a man who seemed to be in the process of telling her about her own work. She caught his gaze and her expression read, WTF? Not about the guy, but about selling her paintings. He could read it because he knew it, that feeling.
Christ, he’d love to be at the beginning of this journey all over again. Would he do things differently? He wouldn’t marry Annalise, he thought. He hadn’t been right for Annalise and that had made her angry and resentful, not his fault, but not entirely not his fault either. He’d buried his head in the sand and ploughed on, ignoring the warning signs, just like Bella had said.
But not any more. He was making changes, starting tonight, whether Bella was here or not. But Christ, he hoped she would be.
Chester C. Carlton swanned past superiorly, ignoring Chase so hard it defeated the man’s objective. When he’d found out what Bella had done, he hadn’t bothered trying to correct the record. Because, in rereading the article, there was nothing in there that couldn’t have been found without a bit of digging. Bella might have pointed him in the right direction, but the man was a gun loaded from four years before, because Chase had been moody, arrogant and dismissive of the way the art scene worked. The only way to change Chester’s mind about Nayak was to bring him in, rather than alienate him more, so Chase smiled at the man who promptly squeaked and disappeared into the crowd.
‘Making friends and influencing people?’ Tej asked with a smirk.
‘Always.’
‘Your dad not making it tonight?’
‘No, he’s got a big job on in the morning. He wished us all good luck.’
Chase had gone to see him a few days ago. They’d sat down and finished the heart-to-heart that Bella had started here in the gallery. Chase had wanted to ask about the child he’d been before his mom had been hospitalised. Before he’d taken her dreams and made them his own. He’d been doing it for so long, he couldn’t remember what had come before.
‘You’d always wanted to paint. You didn’t know it was a job, then. But yeah. Paint, pencils, you’d always been covered in some kind of colour. But Chase, she didn’t say that to you to put pressure on you.’
‘I know,’ he’d replied and he did.
‘She really struggled with it. How much to say, what to tell you, how much to love you, knowing that she wouldn’t…’
His dad had trailed off and looked away until he’d got his feelings back under control. He’d wanted to tell him that he didn’t have to do that. He didn’t have to hide them from him, but he could see how uncomfortable it made him. Chase just had to make sure that he was different.
‘She wanted to write you a letter. You know, open when you get married, open on your fiftieth,’ his dad admitted. ‘But she got too sick,’ his father said with a nod. ‘But honestly, the only thing she wanted for you was to be happy.’
And then it was Chase who could only nod.
‘Are you ready?’ Maurice asked, interrupting his thoughts and checking his watch.
Chase scanned the room, knowing that Bella hadn’t entered yet, but secretly hoping that she might have. He looked to Tej, who winced in sympathy, knowing how much this meant to him.
Chase shrugged off the hope that Bella would be here and approached the centre of the gallery. Sascha excused herself from the man still pointing at her paintings and she and Zadzisai joined him. A hush descended over the packed gallery and the lights suddenly felt a lot harsher than they had a few minutes ago.
He wasn’t going to miss this part of the job one bit, he thought, which made him smile and the first few people at the front smile back.
‘I would like to thank you for coming here tonight and to officially welcome you to the Nayak New York.’ He paused for the applause that seemed requisite. ‘I hope that you can now see that we have a special gallery here. One that shows art and joy from established talents, emerging talents and future artists in the making,’ he said, speaking of the elementary school art, still in pride of place among household names like Zadzisai. ‘Art should be accessible to everyone,’ he said passionately. ‘Art should be a place and an expression that explores who we are, how we are, how we feel and process the world around us, especially when that world becomes unrecognisable or hard to be in. All of the artists here do exactly that and I am proud and impressed by what the team at Nayak have managed to do,’ he said, truly meaning it.
He caught a flash of blonde and tried to ignore the way that goosebumps danced out over his skin and his heart jerked in his chest.
‘I consider myself incredibly lucky to have been a part of the first exhibition at Nayak and it will always be something that stays with me. However,’ he said, taking a deep breath, ‘I think we can all agree that I perhaps haven’t been the best gallery director the art scene has ever known,’ he admitted ruefully, and gentle laughter rippled out across the room. ‘And if it hadn’t been for the incredible team here, I’m not sure we would have made it.’ He grimaced and turned to Tej. ‘Sorry.’
Tej shrugged easily and more people laughed.
‘But seeing the art world from this vantage has given me a greater understanding of why we do what we do and how important it is to do that with integrity and honesty. So, I’m going to be stepping down after this event and Nayak will be trialling a programme of visiting artists to assume the role of gallery director, with the support of the permanent members of staff, Maurice Bamboux as archivist and registrar, Alison Burberry as gallery assistant, Ye-Joon Yoo as gallery associate and,’ he said, looking directly into the wide grey eyes staring up at him as Bella pushed her way to the front of the crowd, ‘Bella Carmichael as communications director. Whoever is next, will be in their most capable hands.’
He clapped alongside the guests filling the gallery to the staff that had made this evening happen. The staff that had become the friends he’d not known he’d needed. But his eyes were only for Bella.
* * *
He was stepping down? Oh my God, what had she done?
Everyone was applauding, but panic broke out in a sweat at the back of her neck as horror filled her chest. Chase must have seen it, because he frowned for a moment and then, with a comment about not wanting to steal the limelight, he handed over to Zadzisai and walked towards her, grasping her by the elbow and leading her away from the crowd, the gallery and out onto the street.
‘You can’t!’ she cried the moment she hit the sidewalk. ‘You can’t leave. Oh, God, this is all my fault.’ She felt wretched. No, she would fix this. ‘You can change your mind,’ she told him, not quite sure why he was smiling.
‘Is that why you wanted me to come here? So that I’d see you quit?’ she asked, the thought making her feel sick. Oh God . And she’d thought that he had wanted her there.
‘Bella—’
‘We’ll speak to Tej, I’ll explain everything,’ she said, her hands twisting and barely able to meet his eye.
‘Bella,’ he tried again and she bit her lip.
He reached up and with his thumb, gently pressed her lip free from her teeth. He lifted her chin and drew her gaze to his.
‘Bella. I’m okay. This is the right thing.’
‘But if I hadn’t tried to sabotage you?—’
‘Then I quite probably wouldn’t have realised that this – gallery director – is absolutely the worst thing that I could possibly do with my life. I wasn’t lying. I’m a terrible gallery director,’ he admitted. But why was he so happy about it?
‘I’m really confused, Chase,’ she admitted helplessly.
‘I’m not. For the first time in ages, I’m not confused at all,’ he assured her. ‘I know exactly what I want,’ he insisted, with a heat that Bella felt flash over her from head to toe.
God, she wished she wasn’t imagining things. It was all because she’d had to rush here when the car hit traffic just outside of the city.
Who knew there would be traffic? On a Friday night. Heading into Manhattan.
‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, feeling the emotions well up from deep within.
‘You’ve said that, and you’ve said it enough. It’s my turn now,’ he said, cupping her jaw and she couldn’t help but lean into the palm of his hand.
‘You were right,’ he confessed. ‘I’ve been hiding. For quite a while now. It certainly didn’t help my art, or my marriage, and I wasn’t lying when I said the only reason there’s a gallery opening is because of the team. And I’m happy to be stepping down. Because I’m going to try and start painting again.’
His jaw flickered in the light of the gallery bleeding onto the sidewalk, letting her know that it wasn’t an easy decision.
‘I… want to take some time,’ he explained. ‘Just find my feet with it again without the pressure or the weight of having to produce for exhibitions and shows and sales. I want to have fun with it. And I would never have seen that without you,’ he explained, her heart easing, knowing that she’d done something for him. That she’d helped after hindering him so much.
‘You were willing to show me what I’d been hiding from, no matter what it cost you,’ he said, reaching for her hands and pulling her against his body. Her hands pressed against his chest, her palm against the racing of his heart.
‘You were willing to risk your job, and what we shared, to show me that, and I don’t know how to thank you. I’m not saying that my creative block has suddenly lifted and I can magically work again, but I want to try and work through it now. For me. To find what kind of artwork I want to do now .’
Pride and happiness shot right through her.
‘But you need to come back to the gallery.’
‘I’m not sure, Chase. What I did, it was unforgiveable. And Tej?—’
‘Tej knows. He wants to know how you got my password. I want to know how you did the salt,’ he said, leaning in with a smile, as he seemed to breathe her in with a satisfied sigh.
‘He knows? And he’s okay with that?’
‘As long as it doesn’t happen to the next gallery director, I think he’s going to be fine,’ Chase assured her.
‘Are you… going back to England?’ she asked, fearing that he’d return to his studio there.
‘Nope. I’m going to stay right here,’ he said, bringing her closer to him. ‘Where I can keep an eye on you. I’m going to work at the studio and stay in New York.’
She looked up at him, his lips barely an inch from hers.
‘Then—’
‘Fuck’s sake, Bella, can you stop asking me questions and let me kiss you now?’
She squeaked at his confession and he laughed.
‘I’m trying to tell you that I love you. That I made a monumental mistake letting you go. And that I’m devastated that I for one minute made you think that you were unwanted because you made a mistake. So together, perhaps we can make mistakes and learn from them and love each other despite them? Because Bella Carmichael, Good Bella, Bad Bella, whatever way you want to be, I am hopelessly, irrefutably, incontrovertibly in love with you.’
She gasped in shock and Chase took advantage and pulled her into a kiss that was sure to get them arrested for lewd conduct. After a heady two minutes, Chase pulled back, both of them a little breathless and a lot happy.
‘Well?’
‘Well, what?’ Bella asked. ‘You want marks out of ten?’ she asked with a laugh.
‘No, Carmichael, I want to hear that you love me too.’
‘Oh, yeah that. Maybe. We’ll have to see how that goes,’ she said, and pulled him in for the first of many, many millions of kisses to come.