Chapter 16 – MADDIE
MADDIE
The first week after, I kept waiting for it to stop but it didn't.
Damon came home for dinner. Not once, as a gesture, but most nights.
He texted in the afternoon to ask what I wanted and a car would bring it, or he'd come through the door at seven with takeout from the Thai place we used to go to before the company ate him.
The first night he put his phone in a drawer while we ate, I watched him do it like a magic trick, and then I waited for it to ring through the wood, and it didn't, and he asked me about my day.
I didn't have an answer ready. He hadn't asked in so long that I'd stopped keeping one.
I told him about the spring wall at Ellie's, about a boy named Jason whose streetlight paintings were better than half of what hangs downtown, about a fight I'd had with a tube of cadmium that wouldn't behave.
He listened, or did a convincing impression of it, and stayed in the room for the answer.
It's a low bar, a husband who asks about your day and waits to hear it.
I'd been under it so long that clearing it felt like flight.
The trial had started for real. An independent panel ran it now, a clean read, no Brighton anywhere near the data, and it would take months.
He talked about it less than I expected.
When I asked, he gave me the short version, the panel's timeline, the long stretch of nothing we'd live through before it spoke, and then he changed the subject and I let him, because not talking about work was new and I didn't want to scare it off.
Some nights I caught the cost of it on him anyway, the trial sitting behind his eyes while he laughed at something.
He was carrying it into the one room he was trying to keep clear of it.
I decided that was a kind of love. Maybe it was.
Or maybe he just had no words for it that weren't a press release.
The gifts started small and got out of hand fast. Flowers first, every few days, then every day, until the kitchen looked like a viewing.
Then a box on my pillow with emeralds in it, drop earrings, the apology he'd skipped at the anniversary arriving in installments with interest. Then a car.
I came out one morning and there was a little vintage Mercedes in the drive with a bow on it, an actual bow, the keys in an envelope with my name on the front in his new assistant's handwriting.
I didn't need another car. I told him so. He said he wanted me to have it because I'd remarked on a similar one once while we were driving. I didn't even remember that, and the biggest shock was that he did. That did more than the lavish gift itself.
Then the art supplies. He had a whole studio's worth delivered, more than I'd buy in five years.
Hand-milled paint in tubes I'd only read about in luxury industry magazines, sable brushes, a French easel that cost more than my first real car, a roll of Belgian linen tall enough to paint a door on.
He stood in the doorway while the delivery men carried it past him, pleased with himself.
"It's the best they had," he said. "The man at the shop said it's what the serious people use."
"It's beautiful. It's too much."
"Nothing's too much." He kissed my temple. His phone was already in his hand before he reached the hall. "Paint me something with it."
I doubted he actually cared, but it meant something that he'd asked.
We planned the trip in the evenings, and I liked it more than I let on.
He'd booked nothing, because the trial reading out came first, but he kept a paper folder, and we spread it on the bed, hotels in Amsterdam, a train through to Vienna.
I didn't want to take the jet. I wanted this trip to feel special, to be something different.
He'd found the Van Gogh exhibition. He asked me where I wanted to eat.
I wanted it badly, two weeks in rooms where nobody knew us, where he'd have no office to walk out to and no Emily down the hall, where it would be us and whatever was left when you subtracted the company.
I wanted to find out what was left. I let myself want it.
"So I take it things are good," Ellie said. We were at the gallery, the spring wall bare, waiting for primer. "You're glowing in a way I find deeply suspicious."
"They're good, or at least in the neighborhood. He's trying."
"He's spending." She handed me a roller. "I need those to stay separate in your head, because they live close together and they dress alike."
I laughed. "Trust me, I know the difference."
"I know you do. I'm saying it out loud so it stays said.
" She ran a long stripe of gesso up the wall.
"Enjoy the car. Wear the earrings, they're gorgeous, and I hate that they're gorgeous.
I'm not telling you to refuse a good month.
I'm telling you to keep one eye open, because men who buy their way back keep buying instead of changing.
Buying's the part they're already good at.
The day something goes wrong, watch what he reaches for.
That'll tell you everything the flowers won't."
"You've said a version of this before."
"And I'll say it at your second wedding if I have to." She bumped my shoulder with hers. "I just want you to hold out for the treatment you deserve."
I primed the wall and didn't argue, because I'd had the same thought and put it somewhere I didn't have to look at it.
That night he came home with peonies, my favorite, which he'd finally learned without being told, and we ate on the expensive rug on the living room floor because the table felt too far apart, and he told me a story about Mark in London that made me laugh until I couldn't breathe.
For a few hours he was the man I'd thought I was marrying, and the gap between that man and the real one stopped mattering.
Later, half asleep, I asked him to come see the window painting in the morning. Really see it. The one going in Ellie's show.
"Of course," he said. "First thing."
In the morning he was gone before I woke. There was a note on the counter next to a fresh vase of peonies in a sea of roses.
Early call. Tonight.
I'd sighed and told myself it wasn't a setback. Just a little blip. Every painting had its mistakes.