Chapter Thirty-One
ARIA
Morning comes slow and ugly.
For a few disoriented seconds, I don't remember why my chest already hurts.
Then I turn my head.
His side of the bed is untouched.
And it all comes back at once.
The foyer. His suit still on. The papers on the entry table. The way he said the arrangement like that word was big enough to cover everything that had actually happened between us.
It wasn't.
I shut my eyes again.
Bad idea.
The dizziness gets worse when I sit up—a low rolling wave that makes me brace one hand on the mattress until the room steadies.
Heartbreak, apparently, has physical side effects.
Good to know.
I stay in bed longer than I mean to. Not sleeping. Just staring at the ceiling and trying not to think about how, less than twenty-four hours ago, I still thought I was building a life here.
I try not to think about it.
I think about it anyway.
Eventually I drag myself into the shower because lying here any longer feels too much like surrender.
The water helps a little. Just enough to make me feel human-shaped again.
Afterward I wander downstairs in one of Everett's T-shirts and a pair of leggings, hair still damp down my back and make coffee out of habit. The kitchen still smells like his soap because nothing in this damn house has figured out he left yet.
The first sip turns bitter in my mouth and settles wrong in my stomach.
I set the mug down and try toast, managing half of one bite before the idea of swallowing feels impossible.
That's fine. Normal. Entirely what happens when your husband dismantles your marriage like a quarterly restructuring and drives back to Seattle before you finish crying.
I take the coffee upstairs anyway. To the studio, because if there's one place in this house that's told me the truth lately, it's that room.
The light is soft this morning and the moment I step inside, my chest tightens so sharply I almost turn around. The painting is still on the easel. The aisle. The flowers. The man waiting at the end of it.
Our wedding. Painted by my hand before I was brave enough to say out loud what it meant.
I stand there holding my coffee and looking at it, and all I can think is that my hand figured it out before I did. Or maybe my hand was just as stupid as the rest of me. The room is full of him.
Not literally. He's not here. That's the problem.
But every inch of it feels chosen by him.
The drafting table. The sink. The stacked Belgian canvases.
The expensive brushes I never would have bought on an assistant's salary.
The north-facing windows he picked because I mentioned once that north light is the best for painting, and he apparently filed that away like it was a quarterly report worth memorizing.
He built me a studio and then stood in the foyer and told me we were beneficial.
I set the coffee down harder than I mean to. It sloshes over the rim.
"Great," I mutter.
I force myself toward the easel anyway, picking up a brush and then squeeze out paint.
White. Gray. A little blue.
I stare at the palette and yet nothing happens.
No instinct. No pull. No truth trying to get out through my hand.
Just a room I thought meant love and now don't know how to stand in.
I put the brush back down when I realize that nothing is coming to me.
It would be one thing if I were just heartbroken but this room was becoming mine.
And now even this feels contaminated. Like every brushstroke I make in here belongs to him somehow.
Like the art only came back because he gave it a place to live. Without him it'll just... stop again.
I hate that thought more than anything he said last night.
Now all I see now is the life I thought we were building. The bed where he held me, and the studio where he gave me back something I thought grief had taken for good.
Only now every room feels like a place he was waiting me out.
Waiting until the trust let him go.
My stomach turns again, emptier this time. I press a hand to it and breathe through the wave of nausea until it passes.
I should eat something.
I should probably do a lot of things.
Instead I sit on the floor with my back against the wall and stare at the wedding painting until practical thought finally drags its way through the wreckage.
If I can't stay here, I need somewhere else.
A small apartment would work for now and then I'd need to find something bigger later when Dad gets out of Brookhaven.
I still have the payout from the contract, but the thought of touching it makes my skin crawl. Like using the corpse of my marriage to pay the first month's rent.
Penelope would tell me to take it. She'd say his money, his guilt, your survival, do the math. Cammy would say something worse. They'd both be right, and I'd still feel sick about it.
But I have the storage unit.
The old paintings. The canvases I boxed up after the accident. The pieces from art school and the early gallery days and the life I stopped looking at because I thought it had stopped being mine.
Some of them are good. Some of them might sell. And maybe that is the part that finally makes me get to my feet.
For the last three years, painting has only been about grief and healing and survival, but maybe it can be a way of life. Maybe the same thing that brought me back to myself is the thing that gets me out of his world.
My phone buzzes on the drafting table and I almost don't bother to look. Then I see Cammy's name.
What do you mean you two broke up? I just saw you at the game. That man couldn't take his eyes off you.
I stare at the text.
Of course word got out fast. Of course in this city nothing stays quiet. Somebody saw the town car. Somebody talked to somebody. The Seattle billionaire rumor mill moves faster than actual journalism.
I type back slowly.
It's a long story. And not one I can really share over text. Coffee at Serendipity's later?
Her response comes almost immediately.
Of course, girl. Name the time.
Then Penelope, thirty seconds later:
Cammy just told me. I'm coming too. Don't argue.
I wasn't going to argue. If I'm being honest, I was counting on it.
For the first time since last night, something in my chest loosens. Not relief exactly. But something close to not entirely alone, and right now that's enough.
I need to run an errand first. I'll text you.
Cammy: I'll be there.
Penelope: Can't wait to see you.
I slip the phone into my back pocket, look once more at the painting on the easel, and know with absolute certainty that I cannot spend another full day in this house waiting for him to change his mind.
So I go downstairs.
I change into jeans and a sweater. Pull my hair into a knot at the base of my neck. Try another sip of coffee and give up after one mouthful. I grab my keys, my purse, and the storage unit key from the junk drawer in the kitchen where I shoved it years ago and never touched again.
The drive feels longer than it should.
Probably because I'm tired enough that the sunlight hurts a little. Probably because my stomach still feels vaguely wrong and empty. Probably because everything in me is dragging and the only thing keeping me upright is stubbornness and half a piece of toast.
By the time I pull into the storage facility, I'm shaking again.
Not from crying this time.
From hunger and grief and something I don't have a name for yet.
I sit in the car for a second longer than necessary, forehead resting against the steering wheel.
Then I get out.
When I roll the metal door up, my whole life is sitting there in rows. The storage unit smells like dust and old cardboard and years I tried not to think about.
Boxes labeled in my handwriting, a standing mirror from the house we had to sell, my mother's easel, three flat files of old work, and a stack of framed canvases wrapped in blankets.
For a second I just stand there.
This is the first time I've looked at any of it since the accident. Since the hospital bills. Since Dad forgot where he was and I sold the house because I didn't know what else to sell. Since grief became administrative.
I step inside slowly. My fingers find the edge of one of the canvases wrapped in an old quilt and peel it back. An oil from art school.
Big. Messy. The kind of ambitious painter I used to be. The funny thing is… it’s good. Actually really good. Good enough that Gabriel wouldn't laugh me out of a room for bringing it.
Another one leans behind it. Then another.
A still life my mother loved. A self-portrait I forgot I ever finished. A cityscape from my senior year that suddenly makes me remember exactly how certain I once was that art would be my life.
I sit down on an old banker's box because my legs stop cooperating. The tears come again, but quieter this time. Not just for Everett.
For me. For the girl who painted these and thought the world would open for her.
For my mother, who would've hung every single one.
For the house that held all of this before it held debt instead.
For the fact that I'm sitting in a storage unit full of the life I packed away, trying to figure out whether old canvases and stubbornness are enough to start over.
And then—because apparently grief and comedy have the same damn landlord—I laugh.
Small. A little broken.
Because of course this is where I end up. Heartbroken, nauseous, starving, sitting on a box in a ten-by-ten storage unit giving myself a pep talk surrounded by art I haven't looked at in five years.
My mother would be so proud. And then she'd ask if I'd eaten, and I'd lie, and she'd know.
I wipe my face and stand back up and then I start sorting. I take photo and send them to my old curator. She loves them… wants to show them but I tell her that I'm not ready yet.
This stack stays. That stack goes in the car. Pieces that could sell. Pieces that might matter. Pieces I want to look at with clearer eyes when I'm not running on caffeine fumes and heartbreak.
By the time I'm done, the backseat is full and my arms ache and my stomach still feels wrong.
I tell myself it's because I've had three sips of coffee and half a piece of toast in the last twenty-four hours.
Which is probably true… Mostly.
I stand there in the afternoon light with my keys in my hand and my whole body feeling wrung out staring at the pieces that I can barely believe I completed.
My phone buzzes again.
Cammy.
Still on for coffee tomorrow?
I look at the loaded backseat through the car window. At the old paintings. At the life I boxed away once and might have to live inside again.
Then I type back:
Yes. See you tomorrow.
Because I may be heartbroken and I may be humiliated that I stupidly fell in love with my fake husband.
I may have let a man build me a studio and a future and then talk me out of both in the same damn breath.
But I am not going to lie down in his beautiful empty house and disappear.
Not if I can help it.