Chapter 12 – MADDIE
MADDIE
We'd been living around each other for two weeks.
I'd stayed in the guest room since the night I locked the door.
Damon never asked me to come back, and I never offered.
We talked in the mornings like two coworkers passing in a hall.
Coffee's fresh. Car's outside. There's a thing Thursday.
He left before I was up most days and came home after I'd gone to bed.
He'd tried once, the first morning after the fight.
He came down and said we should sit down this weekend and talk.
I said sure. The weekend came with a board emergency in the middle of it and left again, and neither of us brought it up.
That was how Damon handled things he didn't want to handle.
He scheduled them for a later that never came.
What I did instead of being his wife was paint.
I went to the back studio at Ellie's most days.
The days I couldn't, I used the good room at home, the studio Damon built me and I'd let gather dust for a year.
The window painting had stopped going flat.
I'd taken Kellan's advice and quit trying to make the light kind, and the minute I let the afternoon glare be hard and a little ugly, the whole thing started to breathe.
Kellan said it was the first thing I'd shown him that didn't apologize for being on the wall.
I took that for the compliment it was and went home and worked until two.
Our anniversary was the fourteenth. Eight years. I knew the date well. The question was whether he did.
For eight years Patricia had put it in his calendar, ordered the flowers, booked the table, and reminded him the morning of, so he could come home and hand me a gift he hadn't chosen.
I always knew the flowers came from Patricia.
I took them anyway. This year there was no Patricia.
He'd fired her in the panic over the data and replaced her with someone else, at least as far as I knew.
So this year, remembering had to come from him.
Last year he'd handed me a Cartier bracelet at the door, still in the gift bag, and said happy anniversary in the flat voice he kept for things Patricia had put in his hand five minutes before.
I wore it to the dinner she'd booked. We sat across a table and talked about his quarter, and a waiter took our plates, and a driver took us home.
I'd called that a marriage. Plenty of people would have.
I didn't remind him. I wanted to know if the date lived anywhere in him without a secretary and without a note from me. It was a test. I knew it was a test, and I set it anyway.
I hedged, a little. I bought a bottle of the Barolo he liked and stood it in the rack where he'd see it.
I left the fourteenth blank on the kitchen calendar, one empty square in a month of his obligations.
Small flags, set where he'd trip on them if he were looking.
He didn't look at the calendar. The Barolo was still in the rack the next morning, untouched.
On the fourteenth I painted all afternoon.
I watched the real light move across the real window while I tried to get the moved light down on the canvas, and every car on the road pulled my head up, and none of them turned in.
I'd half-decided that if he came home with nothing, I'd say nothing too, and we'd both let the day be a day like any other, and that would answer the question that needed answering more than all the others.
The Lexus came up the drive at five. Five. He hadn't been home before nine in three weeks.
My heart gave a hopeful thump. Maybe he had remembered after all.
I put the brush down. I washed the paint off my hands fast, before I'd decided to, and then I stood there with clean hands feeling like an idiot for hoping.
He came in fast, calling my name before the door had shut. I hadn't seen him move like that in years. He found me in the studio doorway with my hands still dripping, grinning, and I hadn't seen him grin since before Emily had come back into our lives.
Well, into his.
"You're home early," I said.
"I know." He crossed the room. For one second I thought he was going to take my face in his hands. "We got it, Maddie. We got it."
"Got what?"
"The cardiac signal is an artifact, time of day, exactly like Emily said.
Brighton's people either faked the original numbers or were too sloppy to catch it, and either way it's finished.
The product does exactly what we always said it does and soon, the independent trial will prove that.
" He was pacing, talking with his hands.
"Any decently run trial would control for that kind of variable.
Now we just have to connect the trial to Brighton and it's back to business as usual for us. "
"That's good," I said, and I meant it. Eighteen months of his worry had lived in this house too, in the late calls and the bad sleep, even if he'd never once brought it to me as a fear. "That's really good, Damon. I'm glad."
He wasn't listening for it. He was already on the call he hadn't made yet, the room he hadn't walked back into.
By "us" he meant the stock.
I'd learned to translate him years ago. When Damon said us, he meant the company, the name, the number on the screen. The marriage had never been an us to him. It was a holding. Well run. Quietly profitable. Something you stop checking on because it never gives you any trouble.
I stood there with paint drying on my wrists and worked it out slowly.
He hadn't come home for me. He'd come home because he was too full of relief to stay in an office, and he needed somewhere to set it down, and the house was on the way to nothing in particular, and I happened to be standing in it.
"I can't stay," he said, already moving for the stairs, pulling at his tie.
"I just need a shower and something to eat, we're going back in.
Half the team's still there, we've got the board call to prep.
Is there food?" Before I could answer, he had already moved on.
"Actually, don't worry about it, Reese can order in.
" He stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked back at me, and for half a second I let myself believe he'd remembered.
"You look nice," he said. Then he went up.
I listened to the shower start. I looked at my hands, at the cadmium I'd half scrubbed away in my hurry to be ready for him. I'd washed my hands for him. I'd stood there with clean hands and hoped.
He didn't know what day it was. Eight years of anniversaries, and he didn't know. I waited to feel surprised. It didn't come.
For a long time I'd been afraid of exactly this, the day he'd finally forget, and I'd built it into a catastrophe in my head.
Now it was here and nothing broke. It only confirmed the thing I'd been refusing to write down.
He didn't see me. He hadn't in years. The forgetting was just the evidence of what should have been obvious from the beginning.
He came down twenty minutes later in a fresh shirt, smelling like the soap I bought him, scrolling his phone. "Car's coming. Don't wait up." He was halfway out the door. Then he came back, pressed a kiss to the top of my head without slowing down, and was gone.
The door shut. The car pulled out. The house went back to its enormous quiet.
I stood in the front hall in the dress I hadn't admitted to myself I'd put on for him.
I didn't cry. I'd used those tears up. I didn't call Ellie either, because I wasn't ready to say it out loud.
I went back to the studio and picked the brush up.
The light in the painting was hard and a little ugly and it was the truest thing in the house.
I worked until it was dark, and I did not set a place for two.
Around ten I made myself an omelette and ate it standing at the counter, next to the Barolo he never saw.
I opened it and poured a glass. It was too good to waste on him not noticing.
I drank it slowly. There was no one to drink it with, and that bothered me less than it should have.
I drank it looking at the window painting drying on the easel, the hard ugly honest light of it, and I thought that the painting knew more about me than my husband did. The painting had been paying attention.
I didn't know what I was going to do about any of it. I only knew the not-knowing had stopped feeling like a crisis and started feeling like a question I suddenly had all the time in the world to answer.