Chapter 9 – MADDIE
MADDIE
Bridges Gallery had its doors propped open when I got there. Ellie stood in the middle of the floor with a clipboard, waving two men in paint-stained shirts toward the far wall.
"Higher," she called. "No. Your higher, not his. He's a foot taller than you. His higher is wrong for the whole room."
She saw me, handed the clipboard to a girl with green hair without breaking stride, crossed the floor, and hugged me hard enough to lift my heels.
"You came. I had money on you canceling."
"You bet against me?"
"I bet on last month's version of you. Happy to lose it." She held me at arm's length and looked at my face. "You look tired."
"I'm fine."
"You said that too fast for it to be true." She tugged me by the wrist. "Come on. Let me show you the bones of it before someone drops a Rothko knockoff on my foot."
It was a group show, eight artists, going up over two days. Half the walls were hung and half stood bare with pencil marks where the frames would go. There were crates everywhere and bubble wrap on the floor and a man on a ladder having an argument with a level.
Ellie walked me past what was already up and stopped me in front of a row of small kitchen scenes. A sink full of dishes. An open fridge at night, throwing its light across a linoleum floor.
"First-timer," she said. "Twenty-three. Paints her own apartment like it's a cathedral."
I leaned in. The fridge light was doing something I couldn't have managed at that age. "It's good."
"I know. I have an eye, it's my whole job." She glanced at me. "You used to have one too."
"I still have it. I just point it at seating charts now."
"Tragic waste if you ask me." She kept moving.
She took me down the line. A wall of big loose florals that looked like they'd been painted angry.
A row of photographs of empty swimming pools.
One huge canvas, nearly black, that you had to stand in front of a while before it gave anything up.
A figure first, then a doorway, then someone standing half out of the frame.
I stood there longer than I'd stood anywhere in months, and Ellie watched me do it and let me.
I couldn't keep holding a coffee while she worked. "Put me to work. I mean it."
"God, yes." She pushed a stack of little placards and a roll of mounting putty into my hands. "Labels. Eye level, left of the piece, dead straight. If they're crooked I'll see it, and then I'll see it at three in the morning, and then you'll hear about it."
We worked down the wall together. She hung, I labeled. For a while it was the level and the tap of the hammer and the green-haired girl somewhere behind us swearing at a roll of tape.
"So how's the house of Sterling," Ellie said, not looking at me, pressing a frame flush.
"Quiet. He's at the office past midnight most nights now. More than ever, and it was already a lot."
"Since Emily?"
"Since Emily."
I pressed a label and smoothed it straight. "There are stories now. Two of them. One of the business sites ran a piece about the two of them in college, with a photo I'd never seen. The comments are full of strangers making timelines between their relationship and mine."
She grimaced. "You're reading comments."
"I'm trying not to. It's harder than it sounds. You promise yourself you won't, and then it's midnight and you're four hundred replies deep into people you'll never meet deciding what your marriage is."
"Did he say anything? About not telling you she was coming?"
"He called it a personnel decision. He said there was nothing to tell."
Ellie set the hammer down. "A personnel decision."
"His words."
"Okay. I'm going to say something, and you can slap me after if you want, but I have to say it. I have never understood why you stay with him. Not since her. Before her. Years before."
I got the next label straight before I answered. "There was no before Emily."
"Meaning what?"
"Meaning she was always involved on some level.
She had already rejected Damon when we got together, but he was still holding out hope.
She's the reason I was the 'sensible' choice to begin with.
" I peeled the backing off a placard. "She left for her program, and both families looked at what was left of him and saw a gap, and I was the right size to fill it.
The girl who'd be a good Sterling and not ask for much. I knew that signing up."
Ellie was quiet a second. "So that explains back then. Why put up with eight years of it?"
I kept working, because it was easier than seeing that look on her face.
"Because I fell in love with him." It was a simple answer, but the honest one.
I was smitten with Damon Sterling from the moment we met, even though his eyes were always on another woman, but then I fell in love. "He has his redeeming qualities."
"Such as?"
I snorted. "He's measured. He's never once raised his voice to me.
He's protective. A few months after we started dating, some asshole photographer nearly ran me over trying to get a shot and Damon threw himself in front of me to push me out of the way without a thought.
When my dad had his heart scare, Damon had a plane on the runway before I'd even hung up the phone.
He never mentioned it again. He never expected me to thank him. "
"Those are good things," Ellie agreed. "But they're not a substitute for love and communication and care."
"I know that." I stopped and looked at her.
"I do. But I loved him anyway, all the way, and I need you to believe it, because everyone wants the story where I was trapped, and I wasn't. I walked in loving him and I spent eight years loving him and I'm only now admitting out loud that he never loved me back. "
Ellie paused, taking it in. "Has he ever said that?"
"He didn't need to. I finally worked out on the roof.
" I set the labels down. "I always thought he'd get there.
That if I made everything smooth enough, he'd look up one day and see me.
And then Emily walked in, and I watched his face the second he looked at her, and now I know what he looks like when he sees a person.
He goes quiet. He leans in like whatever you're saying is the only thing happening in the room.
Eight years, and he has never once looked at me like that.
So at least I know the look is real and he's capable of it. Just not for me."
That's what really hurts. It would be one thing if I had married a cold, callous man who was incapable of loving anything or anyone but his work. The reality is so much worse.
Ellie put her arm around me. She didn't try to fix it or talk me out of it. After a minute she handed me another stack of labels.
Later she pulled me into a smaller room off the main floor. White walls, its own clean light. "This goes empty in the spring. I run one solo show a year in here." She looked at me. "I want it to be yours."
"I don't have anything to show."
Technically, I had a studio full of things, but half of them were incomplete and the other half were so old I wouldn't even know where to begin evaluating them for show readiness. I didn't even know if I was still the same woman who created them.
"You've got until spring. And the back studio's open whenever you want it, even if it means dealing with my brother from time to time.
" She crossed her arms. "I'm not making you decide today.
I'm telling you the wall is yours if you want it.
I'd rather hold it and hear you say no than hand it to someone I don't believe in. "
I looked at the empty wall and didn't say yes. I didn't say no either. A month ago I'd have apologized my way out of the room. This time I just stood there and let myself want it.
The front door banged. "Ellie, your text said emergency. I left a wet canvas for this."
He came in with a drill in one hand and a level in the other, dark hair shoved back, paint up past the second knuckle on both hands. He had Ellie's coloring and the same easy grin.
"Speak of the devil. Maddie, this is Kellan," Ellie said with a wry smile. "My brother. He hangs better than the people I pay, and he will never let me forget I had to call."
"You say that like you don't have me doing your errands on the regular," Kellan said flatly.
He set the drill on a crate and put his hand out to me. "And you must be the famous Maddie. She talks about you so much I assumed she'd made you up."
"Completely and totally real, sadly."
"Imagine that." He looked at the wall, then back at me, a second too long. "Ellie didn't tell me you'd be here."
"She likes an ambush."
"I'm enjoying this one, actually." He grinned. "She's right. You do have gorgeous eyes."
"I'm married, Kellan." I laughed and held up my left hand and let the ring catch the light.
Four carats, emerald cut, and a simple gold band.
It had been my dream ring at the time, but lately it just felt like an overpriced symbol that I belonged to the heir of the Sterling empire, even if he didn't belong to me.
Not in any way that mattered. To him either, apparently. "It's not decorative."
"I meant it in a purely artistic sense. I'm always looking for inspiration for my paintings."
"Sure you are."
He laughed, not remotely sorry, and picked the drill back up. "Hand me the high ones, then. You can keep the short walls and your labels."
We hung the rest of it, the three of us, and somewhere in there I stopped feeling like a guest. Kellan argued with Ellie about spacing.
Ellie won. His own three pieces leaned against the wall waiting their turn.
A storm coming in over a parking lot, a diner at four in the morning, a man asleep on a bus with his head against the glass.
The paintings were good. Better than good, really. He might have been Ellie's brother, but that wasn't opening any doors his art wasn't impressive enough to get him through on his own. I told him to lead with the bus and close with the storm. He argued, then hung it my way.
By the time I left, I felt… lighter. Which was strange, all things considered.
Ellie gave me a hug and made me promise to help her pick out her gown for the show. I knew it was her way of making sure I went, but I appreciated it.
When I got home, the house was empty. As usual. I'd worried my pulling back from the role I usually would have taken with the investors' dinner would lead to a big blowup, but apparently, it had gone unnoticed.
Just like everything else for the past eight years.