Chapter 20 – MADDIE
MADDIE
Imade it through the lobby and out the revolving door before my hands started to shake.
The valet asked for my ticket. I had it in my hand, the little paper stub, and I stood there looking at it and could not make myself hand it over, because handing it over meant standing on this curb until Damon's car came around, and getting in beside him, and riding home in the dark.
I knew with a clarity that frightened me that if I got into a car with him tonight I would find some way to make this smaller than it was by morning.
I always had. It was the thing I was best at, after running his parties.
Making the unbearable manageable. Filing the worst of it somewhere it wouldn't show.
So I told the valet never mind, and I walked.
It was cold, and I was in heels and the navy dress with no coat, and I walked anyway, four long blocks before I let myself stop and call a cab, and somewhere in those four blocks I quit protecting myself from the size of it and just looked.
The softest heart in the building. Half of why I married him. Leave the wording to the lawyers, love.
What I kept coming back to was that he hadn't thought about it.
There had been no moment where he weighed me against Emily and chose her.
There was no choosing in it at all. The room got dangerous, and he reached for the person he trusted, and the person he trusted was her, and I was the soft thing you pat on the head and steer out of the way with a hand at the base of the spine.
Eight years of running his life. Eight years of knowing every name in that ballroom, of being the entire reason those people felt held by the Sterlings. And in the one minute it counted, in public, he handed my dignity to a reporter to keep a share price from twitching.
Ellie had told me to watch what he reached for when something went wrong. I'd thought she meant the gifts. She'd meant exactly this. Something had gone wrong, and he'd reached for Emily.
The earrings. The car with the bow. The Belgian linen he'd bought by the yard and never once watched me touch. A month of spending, and the first time the spending was tested against an actual choice, the choice cost him nothing, because to him it wasn't one.
The little flicker of hope I'd carried home in the dark two weeks ago, the small stupid one I'd refused to put out, went out somewhere around the third block. I didn't kill it. It just stopped, the way a flame stops when the oil burns down.
The house was dark when the cab finally let me out.
I didn't turn on more than I needed. I went up to the bedroom we'd shared again for three good weeks, and I got the good bag down from the top of the closet, the one I packed for his trips, and for the first time in eight years I packed it for myself.
I left the emeralds on the dresser, lined up in their box where he'd be sure to see them.
I left the envelope with the car keys on the hook by the door.
I didn't want to be the woman those things had been bought for.
I packed my own clothes, and the old jewelry I'd had before him, the small pieces with less resale value and all the meaning.
Then I went down the hall to the studio.
The window painting was still leaning where I'd carried it weeks ago, the hard ugly honest light on the sill, the best thing I'd ever made and the one thing in that house he had never bothered to look at.
I wrapped it in a clean sheet and carried it down to the car.
Then I went back for the harbor from my twenties, the one I'd been so certain no one would ever want.
Whatever else happened, I wasn't leaving either of them in his house to be dusted by a service and never seen.
I sat down on the cold front step with the bag at my feet and called Ellie.
She answered on the second ring. "Maddie? It's nearly eleven. What's wrong?"
"Can I stay with you? For a little while." My voice came out steadier than the rest of me. "Just until I figure out where I'm going. I think I'm going to travel, but I haven't decided where."
There was the smallest pause, and then Ellie, who had never once made me explain before she helped, said, "I'm putting the kettle on now.
Drive safe. Take the long way if you need to fall apart in the car first. The spare room's been made up since the night you started sleeping in your guest room there. I never unmade it."
I hung up and sat a minute longer, looking at the house.
All that glass and stone he'd bought to hold a life I ran for him while I disappeared into the middle of it.
He didn't even know yet that I was gone.
He was still in that bright loud ballroom steadying skittish investors, certain his wife was waiting in the car the way his wife always waited.
I wasn't waiting anymore.