15. Neil
— ? —
Neil
Day nine, and Anika had a secret.
I found out about it when she gave me an address I didn’t recognize and told me to drive with no explanation. Just that look in her eyes that said this was important and I’d better not screw it up.
Before we left, she held out her hand. I gave her my phone without being asked. She dropped it in the glovebox and pocketed the keys.
“You’ll get it back when we’re done,” she said.
I didn’t argue.
The building was tucked into a block I’d never had reason to visit. Converted lofts, iron fire escapes, a bodega with a hand-painted sign. It looked nothing like our world of glass towers and designer everything.
Anika led me up three flights of stairs to a door with a rusted number seven and a smear of blue paint on the frame.
“This is where I work when I need fresh ideas,” she said, unlocking the door. “I haven’t been here since you came begging at Anwesha’s door.”
She pushed the door open, and I stepped into a room that made my chest ache.
It was small. Maybe a quarter the size of the studio in our penthouse. The floors were splattered with paint, and the windows were so old they rattled in their frames.
It was also the most alive space I’d ever seen.
Canvases everywhere. Stacked against walls, propped on chairs, hanging from clips attached to string. Not the polished gallery pieces I’d seen in her shows. These were raw, angry, and beautiful in a way that felt dangerous.
Most of them were empty rooms.
Our living room, seen from the couch where she used to wait.
The bedroom at dawn, one side of the bed untouched.
The dining table set for two, candles burned down to stubs.
The kitchen island with a single coffee cup.
The triplex terrace at night, city lights blurring through what might have been tears on the window or tears on her face.
Empty rooms. Rooms where someone should have been and wasn’t.
And then, scattered among them, the ones of me.
The back of my head. A dozen times at least, maybe more. Me walking through doorways, turning corners, disappearing down hallways. Always leaving, never arriving.
“When did you do these?” My voice came out rough.
“The last two years. When you were at the office.”
“I didn’t know you had this place.”
“That’s the point.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
She was standing by the window, her arms crossed, her face unreadable.
“I’ve been paying for it out of the weekly allowance you set up when we got married. It barely registered against what you gave me.” She shrugged. “You never noticed the line item. Never asked what it was for. I could have been funding anything, and you wouldn’t have known.”
The words landed like a blade between my ribs.
She was right. I’d set up that account and never looked at it again. Never wondered what she spent it on, whether she needed more, whether the money meant anything to her at all. I’d just assumed it was handled. That the money alone was enough to make her happy.
“I would’ve told you,” she continued. “If you’d ever asked about my day and meant it. But you always just assumed I was home, waiting for you to come back. It never occurred to you that I might have somewhere else to be. Someone else to be.”
I walked through the space slowly. Each canvas felt like a confession. A document of all the ways I’d failed without knowing it.
I stopped in front of a painting of an empty room. Our living room, I realized. The view from the couch where she used to wait. The windows showing a night sky. The coffee table with two cups, one untouched.
“This one,” I said. “When was this?”
“Our sixth anniversary. You texted that you’d be late. I waited up until two. Made dinner with the chef. Opened wine.” She shrugged. “You got home at four. I pretended to be asleep.”
I remembered that night. I didn’t remember the dinner, or the wine, or the waiting. I remembered being exhausted and collapsing into bed. Assuming everything was fine because she didn’t say it wasn’t.
I sat down on her paint-stained couch. Put my head in my hands.
“I missed everything.”
“Not everything.” Her voice was softer now. “Just the important parts.”
I looked up at her. She was watching me with an expression I couldn’t read.
“Show me,” I said. “All of it. Every painting you did while I wasn’t paying attention.”
“That could take a while.”
“I have time.”
Something flickered in her eyes. She studied me for a long moment, like she was deciding whether I meant it. Then she nodded.
“Okay.”
She showed me for three hours. Every canvas, every sketch, every half-finished piece she’d abandoned because she couldn’t find the ending. She told me the stories behind them. The nights that inspired them. The feelings she’d tried to capture because she couldn’t say them out loud.
I didn’t interrupt. Didn’t look toward the glovebox where my phone sat useless and dark. Didn’t do anything but look and listen and try to understand the woman I’d been married to for eight years and never really seen.
When she finally stopped, we were sitting on the floor, surrounded by canvases, the late afternoon light painting everything gold.
“These are better than anything you show in the gallery,” I said.
“Emotions do make you more creative.”
“Why aren’t they in the show?”
“Because they’re not for sale. They’re for me.” She pulled her knees to her chest. “This studio, these paintings, this is the part of myself I kept when everything else became about being your wife. I needed something that was just mine.”
“I understand.”
“Do you?”
“I think so. I think I gave you a life that looked perfect from the outside and felt empty from the inside. And you built this place so you’d have somewhere real to exist.”
She looked at me.
“That’s… yes. That’s exactly it.”
I turned back to the paintings of me. The ones where she’d captured the back of my head with devastating accuracy. Always walking away. Never turning around.
“Can I buy one?”
“No.”
“Can I earn one?”
The question was left unanswered for a minute. She was quiet for so long I thought she might not answer.
“Maybe,” she finally said. “I’ll think about it.”
It wasn’t yes. But it wasn’t no, either.
We sat there in her secret studio, surrounded by the proof of everything I’d missed, and I didn’t say anything else. She’d set a term and I wasn’t going to renegotiate it.
I was going to earn it.