Chapter 7
EVIE
I feel Keegan before I see him, and I hate that my body keeps better records than my judgment.
The gallery is all white walls, suspended light, and people holding shallow glasses as if stemware proves they belong near expensive objects.
My work occupies a black velvet case beneath the far wall: six pieces in silver and platinum, each one spare enough to make the stones look inevitable.
For once, no placard beside them calls me Keegan Mattix's wife.
It says EVIE MATTIX — JEWELRY ARTIST. The name still carries his, but the work beneath it is mine.
The gallery director offered to change the placard after the photograph spread.
EVIE TAYLERE, clean and professionally uncomplicated, as though my marriage were a typographical problem she could solve before opening night.
I told her Mattix is still my legal name and my decision to keep or remove it will not be made by whoever wrote the ugliest headline.
She apologized. I thanked her. Neither of us mentioned that she had been trying to protect the room from scandal as much as she was trying to protect me.
“The hinge disappears completely,” a woman beside me says, leaning closer to the bracelet displayed at the center. She wears the assessing expression of someone who knows what precision costs. “How did you keep the profile that thin?”
“By becoming personally offended every time the metal suggested compromise.” I point through the glass without touching it. “The clasp carries the weight from underneath. The stone isn't doing structural work it wasn't cut to survive.”
Her smile arrives slowly as she bends to study the concealed hinge from another angle. “You say that as if the bracelet argued.”
“It had opinions.”
“And you won?”
“We're displaying my version.”
She laughs and asks whether I accept private commissions.
I give her the studio card I had printed before my marriage became a headline, grateful that the paper carries only my business number and address.
We discuss timing, a stone she inherited, and the difference between preserving an old setting and forcing it to bear a new design.
Her questions are exact. Mine stay focused.
By the time she moves toward another case, I have a consultation penciled in for next week.
Two people near the entrance glance from me to a phone held between them.
One looks away when I catch her. The other gives me the careful smile strangers use when they want credit for not asking a humiliating question.
I turn the display light half an inch toward the bracelet and make them look at what I came here to show.
This is why I came. Not to prove I can stand upright beneath other people's curiosity. Not to display a bare left hand where everyone can inspect it. The work earns space without asking whose wife made it. The awareness at the base of my spine does not care. I turn toward the bar.
Keegan stands near its far end in a black suit with no tie, one hand wrapped around a plain glass of iced water.
He is speaking to a man from the gallery board, but his pale eyes are on me.
He does not pretend otherwise when I catch him.
No smile. No glass lifted in salute. He simply holds my gaze across the room while condensation slips over his knuckles.
Two more tulips appeared this week. One at the studio door. One propped against the frame outside this gallery before anyone arrived. No notes, no repetition of the apartment violation, and no demand that I acknowledge either one.
Keegan says something to the board member and receives an answer without looking away from me. The room between us is crowded with silk, wool, perfume, and conversations kept deliberately below the art. He remains where he is.
Three feet has become thirty. My body objects to every inch.
I turn back to the display and nearly collide with a man wearing an immaculate suit and the confidence of someone accustomed to other people correcting course for him.
“Evie Mattix.” His gaze drops briefly to my bare hand, then returns to my face. “I was hoping I'd catch you without a crowd.”
“That sounds more ominous than flattering.” I shift half a step toward the case, leaving him a clean path past me.
He takes the space I opened and closes the distance again. “I saw your work at a private event last year. You weren't taking meetings.”
“I was taking them. We may have disagreed about what counted as an invitation.”
His laugh is too loud for the room. He lifts a hand as if the line made us intimate and touches the outside of my elbow. “Still sharp.”
I remove my arm. “Still attached.”
The man smiles as though resistance is a style of flirting he enjoys. “I have a penthouse that could use something no one else owns.”
“Try furniture.”
His attention warms for all the wrong reasons. “Dinner, then. You can tell me what I should want.”
“I charge a consultation fee for that.” I step toward the open side of the room. His body turns with mine, blocking the path without making the choice obvious to anyone who is not trapped inside it.
“Send me the invoice.” His hand moves behind me, fingers angling toward my waist.
Heat settles at the small of my back before he reaches me. A broad palm. Familiar callouses through silk. Keegan does not pull me toward him; he places his hand exactly where the other man's was headed and steps into my line, giving me space while taking all of his.
“She said no,” Keegan says.
The man's eyes rise. Recognition drains the color from his amusement. “We were discussing a commission.”
“Then you should have been listening with your hands to yourself.” Keegan's tone is quiet enough that the nearest conversation continues. His body does the volume for him. I can feel each finger against my back. Not gripping. Not claiming. Present.
The man glances at my bare hand again. “I didn't realize this was still?—”
“It is.” Keegan's voice turns to gravel.
I tilt my head toward the man. “The relevant fact is that I moved away from you. My marital status was never part of the instruction.”
His face tightens. “I misunderstood.”
“Now you don't.”
He retreats with the efficiency of a man who has finally calculated the social cost. Keegan waits until he crosses the room before lifting his hand from my back. The loss of heat is immediate and humiliating.
My skin knows that palm. It knows the pressure he uses when he guides me through a crowded room, the careful drag of his thumb when he fastens one of my necklaces at the nape of my neck, and the weight of his hand spreading over my waist in the dark.
One week apart has not taught my body a single useful boundary.
“You can stop looking like you're deciding whether to bury him beneath the sculpture garden,” I say.
Keegan keeps his eyes on the man's back. “I decided against it.”
“Personal growth?”
“Poor footwear. The ground looks hard.” He shifts his weight away from the path the man took and brings his attention fully back to me. “Are you all right?”
“I had it handled.”
“I know.”
The answer cuts off the argument I was prepared to have. I cross my arms, then uncross them when the posture feels too defensive. “You intervened anyway.”
“He watched you move and followed.” Keegan steps back before I ask, restoring the space between us. “You shouldn't have to escalate to make a man respect the first no.”
“Including you?”
The question lands under his ribs. I see it in the brief interruption of his breath. “Especially me.”
I glance toward the man, now laughing too loudly beside another display. The distance has restored his confidence faster than his manners. “You called me your wife.”
Keegan's attention returns to me. “You are.”
“He ignored my no until a larger man attached his name to it.”
“Your no was enough.” His hand closes around the water glass, ice pressing against the sides. “He was the one too stupid to understand it. I didn't make you credible. I made the consequences visible.”
“By putting your hand on me.”
His grip loosens. “Yes.”
“You could have put it on him.”
“Then I would have been removed from your opening, and every photograph tomorrow would be about me.” He looks toward my work rather than the man. “You deserved one night that stayed about what you made.”
The answer reaches somewhere anger cannot guard quickly enough. I look through the glass at the central bracelet, finding the concealed hinge because I know exactly where the seam lives.
Around us, the gallery keeps performing civilized interest. Ice turns softly in his glass. Someone behind me praises the use of negative space in a painting neither of us can see.
“Did you come here to monitor me?” I ask.
“No. The opening was public.” Keegan holds the glass at his side. “I came because your work is here and I missed the last important thing you tried to tell me.”
“Public does not mean invited.”
“No.” His gaze remains steady, and he does not glance toward the exit as if measuring whether I mean it. “If you tell me to leave, I leave.”
“You didn't miss it. You dismissed the opportunity to hear it.”
“You're right.” No flinch. No adjustment. “I came to look this time.”
My eyes find the water in his hand. Condensation has darkened the cuff of his shirt, but the level inside the glass has barely moved. “And be looked at.”
“That part happens when you're this pretty.”
The old charm flashes, battered but recognizable. My mouth threatens to answer before I stop it. “You should warn people humility has not survived sobriety.”
“It has been a difficult week for all of us.” The corner of his mouth lifts. “My face is coping however it can.”
I look away because his almost-smile lands too close to memory. “How many days?”
“Six.”
He does not say for you. He does not offer the number like a key. His water sweats between his fingers while a server passes with champagne and Keegan does not track the tray.
“And the support?” I ask.
“Meeting tomorrow morning. Physician again after practice. Jake has made himself unbearable.”
Facts, not promises.
“Jake was already unbearable.”
“Now he has paperwork.”
A laugh presses against my throat. I refuse it entry. Keegan sees the fight anyway, and his expression softens with the private familiarity of a man who knows exactly how my mouth betrays me.
“Don't,” I say.
“I didn't do anything.”
His mouth stays caught at the corner, familiar enough to threaten my balance. “Your face is doing it,” I tell him.
“I told you. Coping mechanism.”
“Find an uglier one.”
His gaze moves over me slowly enough to warm every place it touches.
The dress is dark green silk, cut close at the waist and low across my back, where the ghost of his hand still burns.
I chose it because it makes my eyes look nearly black and because no part of it was selected for a hockey dinner.
“You are breathtaking,” he says.
The words enter lower than praise should. I tighten my hold on the small evening bag at my side. “That line probably works better when your wife isn't actively divorcing you.”
“It isn't a line.” Keegan's voice loses its humor. “And you're still my wife.”
“A legal status is not permission.”
“I know.” He takes another step back, spending distance as proof. “It is a fact I am not ready to speak about in the past tense.”
My pulse beats at the base of my throat where he can see it. “Go home, Keegan.”
His jaw shifts. Every physical instinct in him objects, but he tips his head once. “Congratulations on the consultation.”
I should ask how he knew. Then I remember his eyes across the room, on me while I discussed the inherited stone and passed over my card. He was watching from thirty feet away.
“Good night,” I say.
“Good night, Evie.”
He sets his water on the bar and walks out without looking toward the man he left standing only because the room was watching. The crowd closes behind him. I remain beside my work with the absence of his hand louder than it should be and my own name printed on the wall.