Chapter 5 #4
Celine was tall and angular, sharp features caught in mid-expression — she was saying something, or about to.
Her hand on Donovan's forearm was light but certain.
She looked like someone who belonged where she was.
Not a woman hiding. Not a woman who thought of herself as the other woman.
A colleague. A partner. A person standing in broad daylight with her hand on another woman's husband.
Donovan was looking at whoever had spoken to them, not at Celine, but his body was angled slightly toward her in the way that bodies arranged themselves around people they were comfortable with. Adrienne knew that angle. She'd stood in it herself for twenty years.
She checked the date on the article — four months ago.
She would have been at home. She would have been planning the September Harvest Gala, arguing with the caterer about the wine pairings, reviewing donor packets.
She would have asked Donovan about his trip and he would have said it went fine, and she would have moved on because conferences were conferences and she trusted him.
She didn't enlarge the photo further. She didn't need to.
The image was already doing its work, rewriting the months she'd thought were normal.
Every business trip. Every late meeting.
Every time he'd come home at eleven and she'd been in bed reading and he'd kissed the top of her head and said, "Long day. "
Had Celine been at the end of those long days?
Had she been in the hotel room, in the conference suite, in whatever space they carved out between panels and dinners?
Had she touched his forearm like that — casual, possessive, public — while Adrienne was at home trusting that the man she'd married at eighteen was the man she thought he was?
Adrienne closed the laptop. Not gently. The click of it shutting was sharp in the quiet rental.
She sat with her hands flat on the table for a full minute. Then she stood up and walked to the hall closet. Opened it. Looked at the painting leaning against the vacuum, the rooftop at dusk with its thick strokes of indigo and rust and that one streak of green.
You said the painting was about the courage to add one more thing when you think you're finished.
"The courage," she said out loud, and the word tasted like rust in her mouth. What courage had it taken him to sleep with a woman who touched his arm at conferences while Adrienne was at home choosing seating charts?
She pulled the painting out of the closet.
#
She almost threw it away.
The garbage went out on Thursdays in this neighborhood, and it was Wednesday night, and for ten minutes the painting sat on the kitchen counter next to the trash can while Adrienne stood over it with her arms crossed, vibrating with a fury she could feel in her jaw, in her teeth, in the tight cords of her neck.
The painting hadn't done anything. She knew that.
It was canvas and paint and wood, and it had been beautiful to her once, and it was still beautiful now, and that was the entire unbearable problem.
Donovan had given her back something she loved — not something expensive, not something impressive, but something she had loved — and now Celine Rask's hand on his forearm was layered over it like a transparency, and she couldn't separate the gesture from the betrayal.
But she could separate the painting from Donovan.
That was the thing she realized standing there at ten o'clock on a Wednesday in a kitchen with cracked tile counters.
The painting didn't belong to him. It had never belonged to him.
It belonged to a twenty-three-year-old woman in the Outer Richmond who'd written a check she probably shouldn't have written because something on a canvas made her feel awake.
She picked it up.
She carried it down the hall, past the closet, to the wall near the front door where the previous tenant had left a picture hook.
She hung the painting. The hook was slightly too high, so the painting sat at eye level for someone about three inches taller than her, but it caught the hallway light in a way that made the green streak glow.
She stepped back and looked at it.
"I hate you for this," she said. She wasn't talking to the painting.
She wasn't talking to Donovan either, exactly.
She was talking to the version of herself that still responded to the right gesture — the version that could look at a note in his handwriting and feel something crack open in her chest despite everything, despite the texts and the photos and the year of lies.
That version of herself hung paintings at ten o'clock on a Wednesday night in a rental that leaned slightly to the left. That version of herself was still here, still alive, still hanging things on walls because they were beautiful and because she refused to let Celine Rask take that from her too.
Adrienne turned off the hall light. In the dark, the painting was just a shape on the wall. But she knew the green streak was there, holding its ground, the one brave addition that made the whole thing work.
She went to bed. She didn't sleep for a long time.