Chapter 5
The buzzer rang at ten past eight on a Tuesday morning, and Annabel almost didn't answer it. She'd been standing in Corinne's kitchen with a mug of coffee she hadn't touched, watching pigeons fight over a crust on the fire escape. She wasn't expecting anything. She wasn't expecting anyone.
"Delivery for Stirling," the voice said through the intercom. Flat. Bored. A man doing his job.
She pressed the button and waited by the door. Corinne was already at work — Tuesday meant an early production meeting at the magazine, and the apartment was quiet in the specific way other people's apartments are quiet. Not peaceful. Just empty of any sound that belonged to you.
The delivery driver was young, maybe twenty-two, and he held a rectangular package wrapped in brown kraft paper. Not large. Maybe two feet by eighteen inches, an inch and a half thick. He extended a clipboard.
"Sign here."
She signed. He left without looking at her.
Annabel carried the package to the kitchen table and set it down.
No card. No envelope tucked under the twine.
She turned it over and found a printed shipping label from a storage facility in Long Island City — a name she didn't recognize, just a company logo and an account number. The sender field was blank.
She knew it was from Alistair before she unwrapped it.
The way she knew things about him now — not through evidence, not through logic, but through some low-frequency awareness that lived in her body.
Eight years of proximity had given her that, at least. The ability to identify his presence even in an unmarked box.
She almost set it aside. Almost carried it to the bedroom and put it in the closet with the garment bag of clothes she still hadn't fully unpacked. Almost decided she didn't care what was inside.
But her hands were already pulling at the twine.
Under the brown paper was a layer of acid-free tissue. Under the tissue was bubble wrap, professional-grade, the kind galleries used. She peeled it back and her breath caught.
It was a small oil painting. Maybe fourteen by ten inches, unframed, the canvas edges raw.
A winter landscape — not romantic, not pretty.
A frozen creek bed in upstate New York, the water visible through a thin skin of ice, bare trees leaning into each other overhead.
The palette was muted: grays, pale blues, the faintest suggestion of rust where dead leaves clung to a branch.
She knew this painting.
She knew it because she'd hung it herself, nine years ago, in a group show she'd curated at a gallery in Chelsea that no longer existed.
Her first exhibition. Twenty-three artists, most of them recent MFA graduates, none of them represented.
She'd been twenty-four, an assistant curator at a mid-tier institution, and the show had been a side project — nights and weekends, calling in favors, begging the gallery owner for the dates between his scheduled programming.
The painting was by a woman named Sara Koh.
Annabel remembered her clearly: small, serious, paint under her fingernails even at the opening.
The piece had been priced at eight hundred dollars, which Sara had set herself with the apologetic shrug of someone who wasn't sure she was allowed to charge money for what she made.
Someone had bought it. Annabel remembered the red dot going up on the second night — pride had surged through her, like the sale validated not just Sara's work but her own judgment in selecting it.
She'd never found out who the buyer was.
The gallery handled the transaction, and she hadn't thought to ask.
Alistair had bought it.
She sat down at Corinne's kitchen table and placed both palms flat on either side of the painting. She stared at it. The ice on the creek. The bare trees. Sara Koh's careful, unshowy brushwork.
He'd bought it nine years ago. A year before they were married.
When he was twenty-nine and she was twenty-four and they'd been dating for — what?
Three months? Four? She tried to place the timeline and couldn't, not precisely.
But he'd come to the opening. She remembered that.
He'd worn a suit that was too expensive for the room, and he'd walked through the show slowly, stopping at each piece, and she'd been nervous that he'd say something dismissive about the work because that was what she expected from men with money, and he hadn't.
He'd asked her about each artist. He'd listened to her answers.
And then he'd gone back, apparently, and bought this painting.
And he'd never mentioned it. Not when they were dating.
Not during the engagement. Not in eight years of marriage.
Not when she'd told him stories about that first show — the stressed-out nights, the broken track lighting, the artist who'd had a panic attack in the bathroom ten minutes before the doors opened.
He'd listened to all of those stories, and he'd never once said, I bought one of the pieces.
He'd kept it in a storage facility in Long Island City.
She didn't know what to do with this information.
The flowers had been easy. Expensive, generic, the reflexive gesture of a wealthy man who'd been told to make amends.
She'd thrown them out and felt nothing. The texts were the same — carefully worded, probably reviewed by his therapist or his publicist or both, full of the right vocabulary.
I take full responsibility. I know words aren't enough.
She'd read them and felt the dull throb of irritation, and that was all.
This was different.
This was nine years different. This was proof that he'd been paying attention before there was anything to pay attention for — before she was his wife, before she was anyone's wife, when she was just a twenty-four-year-old with paint-smudged exhibition notes and a borrowed blazer.
He hadn't bought the painting to impress her.
He hadn't told her about it to earn credit.
He'd simply seen what she cared about, and he'd cared about it too, and he'd kept the evidence in a box in Queens for nearly a decade.
She wanted to hate the gesture. She tried.
She sat at the table and reminded herself of the messages on the iPad — the timestamps, the frequency, the "D.T.
" in his contacts that he hadn't even bothered to disguise.
She thought about six months of mornings when he'd kissed her goodbye and gone to his office and typed things to another woman that Annabel couldn't unread.
She thought about Daphne Thiessen's auburn hair and her polished composure and the particular cruelty of being replaced by someone who looked like she'd been selected from a catalog.
But the painting sat on the table between her hands, and it was nine years old, and he had never used it.
That was the part that undid her. Not that he'd bought it — money was easy for him, meaningless — but that he'd never leveraged it.
Never brought it out during an argument to prove his devotion.
Never mentioned it casually to remind her that he'd been there from the start.
He'd kept it in storage, and if he hadn't sent it to her now, she would have gone her entire life without knowing it existed.
She was still sitting at the table when her phone buzzed. A text from Corinne:
Check the Post's Page Six. Don't freak out.
Annabel set the painting facedown on the table — gently, despite everything — and opened the browser on her phone. She didn't have to scroll far.
The item was small, five sentences, the kind of blind-item-adjacent gossip that the Page Six editors loved because it was technically not actionable but entirely transparent.
Which Manhattan philanthropist was spotted at last night's Stirling Foundation advisory dinner, looking very much at home among the board's inner circle?
Insiders say the auburn-haired guest — not the foundation's co-chair — arrived with a senior partner and stayed for dessert.
Annabel read it twice. Then a third time.
The Stirling Foundation. Her foundation.
Not legally — Alistair had provided the endowment, his name was on the letterhead, and the board answered to him.
But the programming was hers. The curatorial fellowship, named after her maiden name.
The grant cycles for emerging artists. The summer benefit in East Hampton that she'd planned every year since its inception.
She had built the Foundation's cultural identity from the inside out, and everyone in their circle knew it.
And Daphne Thiessen had been at an advisory dinner.
She put the phone down. Picked it up again. Put it down.
It was possible that Daphne's presence was unrelated to the affair. She worked in media — PR or communications, Annabel couldn't remember exactly, and didn't want to remember. Advisory dinners drew from a wide pool. A senior partner could have invited her for legitimate professional reasons.
But Page Six didn't run items about legitimate professional reasons. And "stayed for dessert" was the kind of detail that meant something, that someone at the table had noticed and found worth mentioning.
The painting, still facedown on the table — the careful wrapping, the acid-free tissue. And then Daphne Thiessen eating dessert in a room where Annabel's name was on the fellowship program, and the two images existed side by side in her chest like two hands pressing in from opposite directions.
Her phone rang. Corinne.
"Did you see it?"
"I saw it."
"I'm leaving the office. I'll be there in twenty minutes."
"You don't have to —"
"Twenty minutes."
Corinne arrived in eighteen. She came through the door with her coat still on and her bag slung crosswise over her chest and her curly hair pushed back from her face like she'd been running her hands through it on the subway.
"Tell me everything," she said.
"There's nothing to tell. It's a Page Six item. It might mean nothing."