7. Neil
— ? —
Neil
The flashbulbs were blinding.
I stood at the podium with the Sundream logo blazing on the screen behind me and smiled for the cameras.
This was supposed to be the moment. Six months of negotiations, eighteen-hour days, and three near-collapses of the deal.
Three point two billion dollars, the biggest acquisition in Franco Holdings history, and my name in every business publication for the next month.
Richard Lee was shaking my hand. His grip was firm, his smile practiced. We’d been adversaries for half a year and now we stood shoulder to shoulder like old friends.
“Neil, a few words for the press?”
I leaned into the microphone. The room was packed. Reporters, investors, board members, all of them waiting to hear me declare victory.
“Today marks a new chapter for Franco Holdings,” I began. “The acquisition of Sundream represents not just a financial milestone, but a…”
I saw him before I understood what was happening.
A man in a cheap suit, pushing through the crowd. Security moved to intercept him, but he was fast. Determined. He reached the edge of the stage just as two guards caught his arms.
“Neil Franco?”
“Sir, you need to leave…”
“I have a delivery for Neil Franco.”
He held up an envelope. White and official that made the guards hesitate.
“Let him through,” I heard myself say.
I don’t know why. Instinct, maybe. Or the calculation that whatever was in that envelope, refusing it in front of a hundred cameras would be worse than taking it.
He walked up to the podium and extended it.
“You’ve been served.”
I took it and opened it without thinking, the way I’d opened ten thousand documents before it. Could just be a pathetic case from the court. It happens from time to time to big companies like mine. Just another thing requiring my signature.
The first line hit me like a bullet.
Petition for Dissolution of Marriage.
The room went silent. Or I went deaf. I couldn’t tell the difference.
I read it again. The words didn’t change.
Petitioner: Anika Franco.
Respondent: Neil Alexander Franco.
Grounds: Irreconcilable differences.
Yesterday, I watched my wife wheel a suitcase into the elevator and disappear behind the closing doors.
I thought she just needed to gather herself for a few days, so I’d spent my time here instead.
Prepping talking points. Reviewing the slide deck.
Telling myself I’d fix it after the signing, the way I’d told myself I’d fix everything after the next thing, and the next, for eight years.
“Neil?” Richard’s hand landed on my shoulder. “Everything okay?”
Every lens in the room was pointed at me. Some even pointed at the document in my hands. A hundred cameras capturing the exact second Neil Franco understood that his wife had ended their marriage, and had chosen this room, this podium, this morning to do it.
She’d picked the place. She’d known exactly where I’d be.
“Mr. Franco.” Someone from PR materialized at my elbow, voice bright and low. “We should keep going.”
“The presentation is over.”
My voice came out wrong, hollow. Like it belonged to someone standing across the room.
I walked off the stage and through the crowd. Past the shouted questions and the security detail trying to clear a path and the board members trading looks I’d be paying for all quarter.
I made it to the hallway before my legs went.
Giovani caught me. That’s what Giovani was for. Cleaning up the mess, making sure the world never saw Neil Franco as anything less than invincible.
“Sir. We need to get you out of here.”
I let him steer me to the car. I sat in the back with the papers open in my lap and watched the city slide past the tinted glass.
Irreconcilable differences.
Is that what we had? Differences that couldn’t be reconciled? I thought about the diary. The gala. The table she’d set with candles and the text I’d sent instead of showing up.
My phone buzzed. Mateo.
It’s trending. The video. Don’t look at it.
I looked at it.
Fourteen seconds. Someone’s shaky phone footage from the third row. You could see the exact frame where my face changed. Two hundred thousand views and climbing, and the top comment said he looks like someone just unplugged him.
I closed the phone and put it face down on the seat.
Three point two billion dollars. The biggest deal of my life, closed that morning, and I couldn’t remember a single thing about the handshake.
***
Two weeks later, I stood in her studio at three in the morning.
I’d been avoiding the room since she left. Crossing the threshold felt like admitting something. But tonight I couldn’t stay away.
I turned on the light.
Her easel was folded against the wall. That was the first thing I noticed.
Anika never folded her easel. She left it standing in the center of the room like a sentinel, always ready for the next burst of inspiration.
I used to tease her about it. Used to say she treated that easel better than she treated me.
She’d laughed. “The easel doesn’t leave me alone when I need it the most.”
I should have heard it then. Should have heard the hurt underneath the joke. But I’d been checking my phone, probably. Reading an email that felt urgent at the time and now meant nothing.
Her brushes were gone. The mason jars she kept them in, the ones with paint crusted around the rims in layers that told the story of everything she’d ever created.
Gone. The palette she’d had since art school, the one with the chip in the corner from when she’d dropped it the night I proposed. Gone.
Four canvases leaned against the far wall. I turned the first one around.
It had been scraped almost clean. Violent palette knife marks carved through what might have been a figure, leaving raw canvas exposed like wounds. I could just make out the ghost of a silhouette underneath. A man, maybe. Or the absence of one.
The second was the same. Layers built up and then torn away, like she’d been trying to capture something and kept destroying it instead. The anger in the marks was palpable. I could feel it coming off the canvas like heat.
The third was more intact, but only barely. My outline, I realized. She’d been painting me. Then she’d attacked it before finishing, scraping away my face, my hands, leaving just the suggestion of a body inside a field of gouges.
The fourth one made me stop breathing.
It was barely started. A sketch in raw umber, the underpainting for something larger. A table and a lonely woman’s hands folded in her lap.
Then she’d slashed it. Three long cuts through the center. Like she couldn’t bear to finish it or to leave it whole.
I sat down on the floor.
My legs just gave out. I was on the hardwood with my back against the wall, staring at that ruined canvas like it might tell me how to undo what I’d done.
The show I never asked about. Thirty paintings, and I’d dismissed them with three words and a reach for my wine glass.
I never asked what she was painting. Never asked what the show meant to her. Never asked about the fear or the pressure or the weight of finally having her name on a banner after fifteen years.
Downstairs, the dining table was still set.
I hadn’t touched it in two weeks. The housekeeper had asked once and I’d told her to leave it. Two places. Napkins folded into swans, the creases gone soft. The candles burned down to stubs, wax pooled across the white linen and gone hard.
She’d done all of that herself with no caterer and no staff. And I’d sent a text and gone to dinner with Richard Lee.
The diary was still on my desk where she’d left it. I’d seen it every day since she filed, sitting there like an accusation. Tonight, I picked it up.
I flipped to a blank page and uncapped a pen. Tried to write something. An apology or an explanation. Anything that might make sense of how I’d ended up on the floor of my wife’s abandoned studio at three in the morning, surrounded by canvases that showed exactly how invisible I’d made her feel.
I thought I was building something for us.
The pen stopped. The sentence sat there, incomplete, mocking me.
I tried again.
I thought I was building something for us. I was building something instead of us.
I stared at the words until they blurred, then set the diary down carefully, pages still open, and stared at the wall instead.
I pulled out my phone and called Mateo.
He answered on the fourth ring, his voice thick with sleep. “It’s three in the morning, Neil.”
“I know. I need to find her.”
A long silence. The sound of blankets rustling. “She’s at Anwesha’s. You know that.”
“I need to see her.”
“I’m a hundred percent sure she doesn’t want to see you.”
“I don’t care what she wants.”
The words came out before I could stop them. Mateo’s silence on the other end was deafening.
“That’s why she left, Neil.”
I opened my mouth to argue and to defend myself. To explain that I didn’t mean it like that.
But I did mean it like that. That was the whole problem.
“I have to go,” I said.
I hung up before he could answer.
Fourteen days of calls she never picked up. Twenty on the first day alone. Then twelve. Then eight. Voicemails that went unreturned, messages that stayed unread, and every one of them proof that I still hadn’t understood a single thing she’d told me.
I sat on the floor of her empty studio and stared at her name on my screen. My thumb hovered over the call button. All I had to do was press it. Hear her voice and beg.
For the first time in my life, I had to not do something.
The screen went dark.
I watched her name disappear into the black glass, and my own face came up in its place. Hollow-eyed and unshaven. Somebody I didn’t know.
I didn’t call.
Three point two billion dollars.
It meant nothing. None of it meant anything without her.