Chapter 23 – DAMON
DAMON
Ihad run a company through the worst quarter of its life. I could run a household for a few weeks. Or so I told myself when Maddie left.
I could not, in fact, run a household for a few weeks.
It went wrong in a hundred small ways I'd never seen, because I'd never seen the work, because the work had been done invisibly by a person I'd decided was decorative.
I missed my mother's birthday. I'd never once missed it, and it took me three days to understand that Maddie was the one who had not missed it for me, every year, with a card I signed and a gift I never chose.
My new secretary quit. The dry cleaning piled up.
The fridge held condiments and air. I ate cereal over the sink at midnight more nights than I'll admit because takeout made me feel even more pathetic, and one of those nights I tried to remember the last meal I'd eaten that someone had made because they wanted me to have it.
Not catered, not ordered, made, and I couldn't, and I put the bowl down.
I kept explaining it to myself as a rough patch.
She was punishing me, fairly, and the punishment would end when she'd made her point, and then she'd come home and the house would start working again and I'd do better, be home more, the whole reformed-husband routine.
I had it half scripted. I just needed her in the room to perform it at.
I messaged her less, because the messages came back mostly empty, and a man can only shout into a well so many times before the silence starts to mean something even to him.
By the end of the month I'd stopped expecting the dots.
The house got enormous. I started leaving the radio on in the kitchen so it wasn't so loud in there.
Then her lawyer's office sent a letter.
It was polite. It was precise. It used the word separation, which was fair, because that was what this had been for nearly two months.
There was a proposed framework. There was a line about her not seeking more than what was hers, which somehow cut worse than greed would have, because greed I could have understood as anger, and this was just a woman closing a door cleanly behind her and not even taking the silver.
I stood in her studio, the room I'd walked past a thousand times, and the room I now spent most of my time in when I was home. As if staring into her paintings would help me understand why she'd left and how to bring her back.
The thing was, it was starting to. She painted so many windows. Most of them were full of warmth on the outside, but by the time the light made it through the glass, it was dim and flat.
Was this how she felt? Always observing warmth from the other side of the glass, never receiving it? She was the one who made everything perfect, beautiful. But I never saw her.
I thought I did, but I knew now that she was gone just how much her influence had touched and shaped and smoothed every aspect of my life.
Somewhere in that second month, after staring at the same paintings that had been staring back at me for years, it finally clicked.
She wasn't overreacting. She wasn't punishing me. She wasn't coming back to be performed at.
She had left, the way you leave a building that's on fire, and I was still inside it explaining to the smoke that everything was fine.