Chapter 22 – MADDIE
MADDIE
Itook the trip.
That surprised everyone, Ellie most of all, who'd assumed I'd spend the divorce hiding in her spare room. But the trip had been booked in Damon's head, a reward I'd have to be good enough and patient enough to earn, and I decided I was done earning my own life in installments.
The trial could read out whenever it wanted. I had a passport and the money I'd earned and saved over the years. I wasn't about to ask my family for more, both because I didn't need it and because then they would know I was leaving Damon. I wanted to save that for when the lawyers got involved.
Amsterdam first, because that was the one I was most tired of waiting for.
I stood in front of the painting of the wheat field with the crows in it on a gray Monday with strangers breathing around me, and I cried.
It took me a while to understand the crying wasn't about Damon at all.
It was about the years. All the years I'd spent turning my inner light into his spotlight.
Nobody ever wept in front of a perfectly run gala.
I went where I wanted after that. Taking my time, savoring it all piece by piece.
I sat in small museums until the guards got familiar with me and stopped watching.
I sketched on trains in cheap notebooks, my hands shaping other hands, faces, the particular way light comes through a smeared window in a country where you don't speak the language and nobody needs anything from you.
In one city a painter I met at a gallery opening lent me a corner of her studio for two weeks, and I painted windows.
I didn't know why, I just did it. She looked at them and said something in French I half understood.
The half I understood was that they were good, and I believed her, because she had no reason to manage me.
She didn't know I was Damon Sterling's wife.
Maybe whatever else I was underneath that could be enough.
Damon's messages continued. I stopped answering them other than a brief one to tell him I was fine every few days, because a part of me was afraid he'd send in the military otherwise, and God only knew he had the means to do it.
Somewhere in the second month I stopped checking whether I was healing. I just looked up one afternoon, in a café in a city I'd chosen for no reason but the name, with paint under my nails and a show waiting for me at home in a real gallery, and noticed I already was.
It had happened while I was busy being a person.
Nobody gave it to me. Nobody could take it back across a ballroom floor.
I paid for my coffee and I sketched the waiter's hands and I understood that whatever happened with Damon Sterling, I was never again going home to sit in a car and wait for a man to remember I was in it.