Chapter 21 – DAMON
DAMON
Igot home a little after midnight, and the house told me before anything else did.
The closet was half empty. The studio was stripped, the paintings gone, the easel bare.
On the dresser, lined up in their open box where I could not possibly miss them, were the emeralds.
On the hook by the door, the envelope with the car keys, my own handwriting on the front.
She'd left me the things I bought and taken the things that were hers, and I stood in the middle of the bedroom holding a box of stones that had cost more than some people's houses and understood that I had been priced out of my own marriage with my own money.
I called her. It rang twice. I expected the recording. She answered.
"Maddie. Thank God." The relief came up so fast it hurt. "Where are you, I'll come right now, I'll?—"
"I'm somewhere safe. I'm not going to tell you where."
"You can't just disappear. We have to talk. Come home and we'll?—"
"I'm not coming home." She said it without heat, which was worse than anger. In eight years, I'd never once heard my wife cold. Indifferent. "And I won't be where I am for long anyway. I'm leaving."
"Leaving for where?" I demanded. "For how long?"
"Traveling. I don't know how long. As long as it takes."
"As long as what takes?" I was pacing the bedroom now, the box still in my hand. "Maddie, listen, tonight was bad, Emily was out of line and I should have shut it down, I know that, just come home and we can?—"
"Tonight wasn't the thing." Her voice stayed level. "Tonight was just the last time I needed proof."
"Proof of what?" The calmness in her voice scared me more than her crying would have. At least I knew how to fix that. Soothing words, gifts. Spending less time at work, even if the breaks never lasted as long as I promised. As long as I told myself they would.
"That you're never going to see me." A breath, steady.
"I waited eight years for you to look up one day and notice I was there.
And tonight, in front of three hundred people, you looked right at me, and a woman I'd never harmed told you to control your wife, and you chose her, and you didn't even have to think about it.
You don't decide a thing like that, Damon.
It's just who you are when the pressure's on.
And I can't keep building a whole life on top of waiting for you to become someone else. "
"I can change. I will change. Tell me what you need and"
"There it is again." There was something almost gentle in it.
"Name it. Anything I want. You think there's a price that makes this go away.
There isn't. The thing I needed never cost a cent and you never once spent it.
You wanted her back in college, not me, so I'm doing what I should have done back then and stepping away. You can have her."
"Maddie." My voice cracked on it, which surprised us both. "Please."
She was quiet a second. When she spoke again she sounded tired, and kind, which gutted me more than anger could have. "Take care of yourself. Eat something that isn't from the office. Don't call me."
She hung up.
I stood in the dark bedroom for a long time.
Then I did the thing I would be ashamed of later, which was decide she was overreacting.
She was hurt. She'd had a terrible night.
She'd cooled off somewhere, paint on her hands, that friend of hers filling her head, and in a week, two at the most, she'd come home and I'd fix it properly, with the trip, with a clean slate, with whatever it took.
I believed that because the alternative was a thing I could not yet pick up and hold. I set the emeralds on the dresser, exactly where she'd left them, and I left them there, and I told myself I was leaving them out for when she came back.
She didn't come back.