Chapter 7 – MADDIE
MADDIE
Iwoke late to a silent house, as usual.
Damon's side of the bed was cold, the covers thrown back hours ago and never disturbed since.
The car came for him at five most mornings, and on the mornings after the worst nights it came earlier, as though the company could smell blood and wanted him sooner.
I hadn't heard him go. That was the new part.
For eight years my body had surfaced just enough to register him leaving, a habit it had built without consulting me, and last night I'd slept through it.
My phone sat face down where I'd left it. I'd learned a long time ago to dread the first thing it told me in the morning, because the first thing was always a task.
I turned it over.
Photos ran well. Big day. Caterer needs final head count for Thursday's investor dinner by noon, can you confirm? D.
No mention of Emily. No mention of our conversation last night, if it could be called that.
I shouldn't have been surprised, and I wasn't. Disappointed? Not really. After eight years, I knew better.
The question was, what was that feeling sitting in the pit of my stomach like a rock?
I should have put the phone down. Instead I did the thing I knew I shouldn't, and thumbed past his message into the news.
It led everything. Sterling Bets on Transparency, said the business pages. Pharma Heir Opens the Books. But it was the photo every one of them had chosen that stopped my thumb, the same frame surfacing over and over as I scrolled.
Damon on the platform in his charcoal suit.
Emily a step ahead of him in midnight blue, her chin tilted up toward his, both of them caught mid-laugh in the gold light I had ordered hung.
Behind them, soft and out of focus, the trailing amaranth I'd chosen the week before. My flowers. My light. My rooftop.
And no me. I'd been standing a half-step behind him when that shutter fired. I was certain of it. The frame had simply trimmed me off the edge, the way a frame always knows what the story is and removes the parts that don't serve it.
The caption under the largest one read: Sterling Pharmaceuticals CEO Damon Sterling with newly appointed Head of R&D Dr. Emily Cavendash, whom Sterling describes as someone he has "known a very long time." Old flame?
I set the phone back down, face to the duvet.
I didn't confirm the head count.
That was the first thing I noticed about myself that morning, still in last night's mascara with the city going about its business beyond the glass.
Not that I refused, exactly. I simply didn't, and the not-doing sat there alongside that unnamed emotion in my gut like a coal I'd swallowed by accident and found I didn't entirely want to put out.
The house was its usual cathedral of quiet. I came down the stairs and went the wrong way along the east hall, past the linen closet, past the small room where I kept the family's calendars, to a door at the end with a handle gone faintly dull from a year of nobody touching it.
The studio.
Damon had it built our first year. A wedding gift, he'd called it, back before I understood that most of his gifts were investments wearing bows, and this one had purchased him a wife who stopped asking where the rest of her had gone.
North light, he'd told the architect, the way you'd specify a feature on a car.
She needs north light. He'd known that much about me, once.
The walls were still the clean white I'd chosen.
The light still came in cool and level and forgiving, the best light in the whole house, spent now on a room I passed on my way to count napkins.
The air in it had gone stale and close. I crossed and forced the window up on its old runners, and the cool of the morning came in over the sill and lifted the dust, and the room exhaled like it had been holding its breath as long as I had.
My brushes stood in their jar where I'd left them.
I lifted one and the bristles had dried stiff and splayed, set hard in a shape by paint I'd never washed out, who knew how many seasons ago.
On the easel was the canvas I'd primed one afternoon last autumn, before Curtis's birthday, with an idea I could no longer find anywhere in myself.
I stood in front of the blank canvas and waited to feel something I could use.
Nothing came. No image, no itch under the fingernails, none of the old current. Just a woman holding a ruined brush like a relic of a faith she'd stopped practicing.
I went to put it back and stopped instead at the low shelf under the window, where a stack of sketchbooks leaned in a film of dust, and pulled the top one free.
The spine cracked when I opened it, stiff from disuse.
The first pages were strangers. People on the train, a man asleep with his chin on his chest, a girl chewing the cap of a pen.
Ellie laughing with her head thrown back, charcoal laid down in quick strokes that were more her than any photograph I owned.
A study of my own hand. A dozen windows, always windows, always the light coming through.
And then, near the middle, a man in a lecture hall with his jaw on his fist, drawn by someone who plainly thought he hung the stars.
Dark hair. A hard, clean line to the mouth.
I'd done it the year I met Damon, when wanting him had still felt like something I'd chosen instead of something I'd been handed.
I'd sat three rows back in a hall I had no business being in and drawn him instead of listening, and gone home sure that one day he'd look at me the way I was looking at him on the page.
I turned past it, fast, the way you turn past a photograph of someone at a funeral.
But I'd noticed everything, that girl. The light, the strangers, the curve of a sleeping man's neck, the boy she was foolish about. She'd walked through the world with her eyes open and her hands always reaching for a pencil, and somewhere along the way I'd packed her down with all the rest of it.
I laid the sketchbook open on the tray beside the ruined brush. I didn't put either of them away.
Then I found my phone and called Ellie before the part of me that managed everyone's feelings but my own could talk me out of it.
She picked up on the fourth ring, wary. "Maddie."
"You were right," I said. "About the list."
A beat of silence. "Okay. Who is this, and what have you done with my best friend?"
"I mean it. I know it's too late for the show, but I want to see the space. And I want to have lunch with you. A real one, where I don't cancel at the door."
The quiet stretched long enough that I heard her set something down.
"What happened?" she asked. Not teasing now.
I looked at the canvas, the cool north light lying flat across the white of it.
"Damon hired Emily Cavendash," I said. "His college girlfriend. 'The one that got away.' As his new head of R&D. He announced it last night at the launch, in front of three hundred people, and I found out the same second the reporters did."
Ellie was quiet for a moment. When she spoke the warmth in her voice had gone hard at the edges.
"That son of a bitch."
"Ellie."
"No. I get this one. I've been thinking it for eight years, I've just been polite enough not to say it to your face." She let out a shaky breath. "Are you okay?"
"No," I said, and the relief of speaking the truth made my throat ache around it. "But I'd like to come anyway. Maybe especially."
"Tomorrow." She said it fast, like she was afraid I'd take it back. "Eleven. I'll have coffee waiting, and just because it's too late for you to present at the show doesn't mean you can't come."
I thought about it for a few seconds. About the investor dinner and all the Sterling fires I had to put out between now and then.
"You know what? Put me down. I'm going."
"Ooh, I like this new Maddie," she said, and I could hear her smile through the phone. "Bring her around now and again."
I couldn't help but laugh. "You might be seeing her more than you think."