Chapter 25 – MADDIE
MADDIE
I'd stopped moving.
The fortnight Sylvie offered me in her studio had turned into something longer, and we never put a date on it, because she liked another pair of hands at the brushes and I liked a reason to stay still.
The town was small and white and stacked above a harbor, and the light came off the water like nowhere else on earth, which was why painters had been coming down here for a hundred years to lose their minds over it.
I got up over a bakery's croissants and espresso every morning and walked the same three streets to the studio and painted windows. More windows, the same plain sills and the same hard grudging light, and no two of them came out the same. That was the discovery I'd crossed an ocean to make.
I'd spent eight years certain I had one good painting in me and that it was behind me. I had a hundred in front of me. They'd been waiting for me to stop running a house long enough to let them out.
No one in that town needed a single thing from me, and that took the longest to get used to.
For eight years I'd walked into every room already reading it, who hadn't been greeted, whose glass had gone empty, which conversation was tilting toward trouble and where to stand to catch it.
I did it without deciding to. Here there was no room to read.
There was a wall and a brush and Sylvie humming something tuneless across the studio and my own work drying in a row, and it took me weeks to stop scanning for whatever needed me, and longer to believe the answer was nothing.
The baker downstairs called me the painter and never asked for more than that. I bought the same bread every morning and he never once needed me to be charming about it.
Sylvie watched me work the way one painter watches another, which is to say she left me alone and only spoke when it mattered.
One morning she stopped behind me at the window I'd been fighting for three days, the harbor going flat and silver under bad weather, and she said, in her careful English, that I painted like a woman apologizing, and that I should stop. I asked her what she meant.
She said I kept softening the ugly corner, tucking the gray back under, making the picture easier to live with. It was similar enough to what Kellan had told me that I believed her.
I had spent eight years tucking the gray back into every room I walked into. It turned out I'd been doing it to my own work too, and no one had ever told me, because no one had ever looked at it long enough to notice. Until Ellie and Kellan and Sylvie, I had never let anyone look.
Other than Damon. I had given him the same access to my paintings he had to the rest of me, but he'd never really looked at them.
A dealer came in one afternoon during somebody else's open day.
He'd driven down from Paris for an opening two doors along and had an hour before his train.
He walked the studio without once looking at me, which is its own kind of manners, and stopped in front of the meanest window I'd hung, the one where the light goes gray and stingy along the bottom edge.
He stood there a long while saying nothing.
Then he asked Sylvie, in French, who had made it, and she tipped her chin at me.
My French was getting good enough to listen, but speaking was still iffy.
He didn't know my name. He didn't know there was a Sterling fastened to it, or a gallery in another country holding a wall. He knew the painting. He asked what I wanted for it, and I said a number that scared me, and he paid it without a flicker and asked whether there were more.
I sold three paintings to a stranger that afternoon, and not one person had managed it for me.
No one steered him by the elbow. No one leaned in to mention that the painter was married to a man worth being gracious to.
He wanted the work because the work was good, and the work was mine, start to finish, mine.
I sat on the studio steps after his train carried him off, the folded receipt in my hand, and understood that this was what the emeralds and the car and the bolts of Belgian linen had only ever been pretending to be.
Damon had spent a month buying me evidence that I mattered.
A stranger had handed me the real thing in an hour and gone to catch a train without asking for anything in return but the work he'd paid for.
Ellie called that night. The show was still on and my wall was still ready. Assuming I'd be back in time.
That was the question, wasn't it? Until that point, it had felt like returning home would be returning to Damon, but now I felt…
settled. Whatever I'd been trying to find out there, I had found it, or at least realized it was already within me.
And I trusted myself, too. I trusted that going back didn't mean going back to the way things were, because I was never again going to be the woman who'd accepted them.
I sat in the window of the room over the bakery and listened to my best friend read me the date, and I booked the flight home before we'd hung up.
Going toward a wall with my name on it, in a city I had chosen to live in, was a different errand altogether from crawling back to a house or bolting from a husband, and I'd had to leave the country to feel the difference in my own feet.
Ellie stayed on afterward and went quiet, which with her meant she was deciding whether to tell me a thing. Then she told me. Damon was not doing well. It was clear from the press conferences. Rumor had it, there was trouble in the family.
And here I'd expected the rumors to be about him and Emily in my absence.
For eight years, he'd treated me like the thing that was keeping him from her.
As if we hadn't both been just kids freshly out of university, pushed together and trying to make our way in the world without ruffling our powerful families' feathers.
Now that he had the freedom to pursue her, and she clearly wasn't going to rebuff him as she had back then, why wasn't he?
The old reflex came up right on schedule.
Eight years of muscle, the pull to ask whether he was eating, to wonder who was reminding him of his mother's birthday, to start, even now, even from a windowsill across an ocean, quietly running his life again.
I felt it rise. I'd have called it love once and let it carry me back into the car.
It found nowhere to go. I asked Ellie how Kellan's show had gone and whether the streetlight kid had sold anything, and we talked about that instead, and the reflex stood there a moment with nowhere to put itself and then sat back down.
His comfort had stopped being my job somewhere over the Atlantic.
His message came while Sylvie and I were closing up.
They'd been thinning for weeks, the volume coming down message by message, and this was the quietest yet, three lines, no gift folded inside and no come home, only that he hoped I was somewhere good and that he wasn't writing to ask for anything. I read it twice.
I felt the plain fact of him, a husband I had loved and married and run an entire life for, who had never once turned his head while I did it, and then I put the phone in my bag and helped Sylvie carry the canvases in out of the evening damp.
I didn't answer him. There was nothing in me that needed to, and I had learned, finally, to stop performing a feeling just to keep a man comfortable.
I went back to the room over the bakery and packed, slowly, the good clothes and the old jewelry and the receipt for three sold paintings, and in the morning I started the long way home, toward my own name on a wall and a future that was unwritten.