23. Elise
ELISE
I saw the car through the window of Mara's front room. Simon's black sedan, parked at the curb.
My stomach flipped. I set my coffee down harder than I meant to and the cup rattled against the saucer, spilling a few drops onto the table. Mara looked up from the toys scattered on the floor where she sat with her youngest, then followed my gaze to the window.
"Oh." She got to her feet and dusted her hands on her jeans, her expression already shifting into that careful neutrality she'd been wearing around me for weeks. "I'll get it."
Simon knocked before she reached the door.
Two measured taps, nothing urgent, nothing desperate.
He doesn't know I'm watching from in here.
I stood where I was, arms crossed tight over my chest, and told myself to breathe.
The last time I'd seen him I'd told him the divorce was going on.
That was a week ago. He'd looked at me like I'd slapped him.
Mara opened the door and Simon said something I couldn't quite hear, his voice low and even. She stepped back to let him in, glancing over her shoulder at me with a question in her eyes I couldn't answer. "Elise is in the living room," she said.
Simon came through into the doorway and stopped when he saw me.
He looked tired. The lines around his eyes were deeper than I remembered, and his tie was loose at his throat like he'd been pulling at it all morning.
There was something in his face I couldn't read, something heavy and uncertain. He nodded once. "Elise."
"Simon." My voice came out flat, guarded.
Mara glanced between us, her mouth pressed into a thin line, then bent to scoop her son off the floor. "I'll be upstairs if you need me," she said. She didn't wait for an answer, just carried the baby out of the room and left the two of us standing there in the sudden silence.
I didn't ask him to sit. He didn't move from the doorway. We stood there looking at each other like strangers, and maybe that's what we'd become. He'd been Graham's brother first, my friend second, and I didn't know which one he was being now.
He shifted his weight, looked at the floor, then back at me. God, whatever he'd come to say, he didn't want to say it. That much was obvious. My chest tightened.
"What is it?" I asked.
He exhaled through his nose, slow and controlled. "Graham signed the gallery over."
I watched him. The words didn't make sense at first, like he'd said them in another language and I was still trying to translate. "What?"
"He signed it over to a buyer. The whole thing. It's done."
My throat constricted. The room felt smaller suddenly, the air thinner. "When?"
"Last week. The paperwork went through a few days ago." Simon's voice was even, factual, like he was reporting on the weather. But his hands were in his pockets and his shoulders were tense.
I sank onto the arm of Mara's couch because my legs felt suddenly unsteady, like the floor had shifted under me.
The gallery. He'd given up the gallery. The thing he'd built for eight years, the thing he'd stopped painting for, the thing that had his name on the door and his reputation inside every wall and every collector in New York walking through it — he'd just signed it away.
"Why?" The word came out barely louder than a whisper.
Simon's jaw tightened. "I don't know."
"You don't know." I repeated it back to him like I could make it make sense if I said it again.
"No." He dragged a hand through his hair, the gesture sharp and frustrated.
"I helped him find the buyer, handled the auction for the pieces — he used my contacts, my people.
But he never said why. Never explained what he was thinking, never asked what I thought.
Just told me what he needed and that was it. "
I pressed my fingers to my temple where a headache was starting, a dull throb behind my eyes.
This doesn't make sense. Graham loved that gallery.
It was everything to him. It was the reason he got up in the morning, the reason he stayed late every night, the reason we'd stopped talking about anything that wasn't a show or an artist or a deal.
It was more than the marriage had been. More than I had been, clearly.
And now he'd just — what, walked away from it?
"Did he say anything to you?" Simon asked. His voice was quieter now, almost tentative. "Before this, I mean. Did he mention — was he planning —"
"No." I shook my head, staring at Mara's coffee table without really seeing it. "I haven't seen him in weeks. Not since —" I stopped. Not since I asked for a divorce and walked out of the house we'd shared for five years. "Not since I left."
Simon looked like he wanted to say something else, but he didn't. He just stood there with his hands still in his pockets, his shoulders tight with whatever he was holding back. The silence stretched between us, heavy and suffocating, full of all the things neither of us was saying.
"Elise," he said finally. His voice was careful, measured, like he was stepping around broken glass. "I know things are complicated right now. I know you asked for the divorce and you had your reasons. But this — what he's doing — I think he's trying to show you something. I think he's trying to —"
"Don't." The word came out sharper than I meant it to, almost a snap. I stood, my pulse kicking up hard in my chest. "Don't tell me what he's trying to do."
Simon held up one hand, backing off immediately. "All right."
"Is that why you came here?" My voice was rising and I couldn't stop it. "To tell me he's making some grand gesture and I should what, go back? Forgive him? Pretend the last eleven years didn't happen?"
"No." He cut me off, firm and immediate. "I came to tell you what happened because I thought you'd want to know. That's all. I'm not here to tell you what to do with it."
I looked away, toward the window where I could see his car still parked at the curb. My hands wouldn't stop shaking. I shoved them into the pockets of my cardigan so he wouldn't see. My throat felt tight, my chest aching with something I couldn't name. Anger, maybe. Or fear. Or both.
"I should go," Simon said.
I nodded without looking at him. I didn't trust my voice.
He hesitated in the doorway for a moment, like he was going to say something else, something more, but then he just turned and left.
I heard the front door open and close, heard his footsteps on the porch, heard the car door shut and the engine start.
And then he was gone, and I was standing alone in Mara's living room with the silence pressing in around me.
I stared at the window. At the empty space where his car had been.
Graham had signed the gallery over. Just like that. Like it was nothing. Like eight years of work and reputation and every deal he'd ever made and every artist he'd courted and every opening night where his name had been on the invitation didn't matter anymore. Like he could just walk away.
It felt like a trick. Like smoke and mirrors, like one of those illusions you see coming but still can't figure out how it works.
One big move to make me think he'd changed, to make me come back, and then what?
A month from now, two months, he'd wake up and realize what he'd given up.
He'd resent me for it. He'd blame me. He'd find a way to build it all back up again and I'd still be standing in the background, choosing the art and talking to the artists and being introduced as the woman who picked the flowers.
Or maybe it's real.
The thought hit me like whiplash and I hated it. I hated that I didn't know. I hated that I couldn't tell the difference between him trying to change and him trying to win. I hated that after eleven years of marriage I couldn't read my own husband well enough to know which one this was.
I needed to know. The not knowing was going to eat me alive, was going to keep me up every night wondering and second-guessing and driving myself crazy with questions I couldn't answer.
But I couldn't go to him. I wouldn't. Not after everything.
Not when I'd been the one to leave, the one to ask for the divorce, the one to finally put my foot down and say enough.
But I could see him. Just see him. Just watch and know if this was real or if it was the same as it had always been.
I grabbed my coat off the back of the chair and left before I could talk myself out of it.
Mara caught me in the hallway, coming down the stairs with her son on her hip. "Elise?"
"I'm just going out." I pulled the coat on, my fingers clumsy with the buttons.
She looked at me for a long moment, her expression worried, reading me the way she always could. "Are you sure that's a good idea?"
"Probably not." I managed something like a smile, though it felt shaky. "I'll be back later."
She didn't stop me. I think she knew better than to try.
The gallery was twenty minutes away by subway.
I took the train in a daze, wedged between strangers with their coats and their bags and their lives I knew nothing about.
My mind kept turning over what Simon had said, what it meant, what Graham could possibly be thinking.
By the time I got off at the right stop my hands had gone numb in my pockets and my heart was hammering against my ribs like I'd been running.
I walked the three blocks to where the gallery sat and stopped across the street.
The building looked wrong. The windows were dark, the lights inside switched off even though it was the middle of the day.
The sign was still there above the door, Graham's name in those clean black letters he'd chosen when the place first opened, but everything else looked abandoned.
Empty. Like nobody had been inside for days.
I stood on the sidewalk with my coat pulled tight around me and just watched.
I didn't know what I was waiting for. Some sign that he was still there, maybe.
Some proof that he hadn't really walked away from it, that Simon had gotten it wrong or the lawyers had made a mistake.
I felt like an idiot standing there on the cold street, staring at a building like it could give me answers.
And then the door opened.
Graham stepped out onto the street.
My breath caught. He locked the door behind him with a key, tested the handle once to make sure it held, then pocketed the keys and turned to walk away.
He didn't look up. Didn't glance across the street.
Didn't see me standing there frozen on the opposite sidewalk.
He just walked, his hands shoved deep in his coat pockets, his shoulders hunched against the wind.
He looked — God, he looked tired. Older, somehow, like the last few weeks had worn him down in a way I'd never seen before.
His hair was too long, falling into his eyes.
His coat was wrinkled. There were shadows under his eyes even from across the street.
He walked past the corner and turned down the next block, and then he was gone.
I didn't move. My feet stayed where they were, planted on the cold pavement, and I watched the empty space where he'd been. My chest ached. My throat burned. My hands were shaking again and this time I didn't bother to hide it.
Go after him. Just go. Just run across the street and call his name and talk to him.
But I didn't. I couldn't. Because if I went to him now, if I let him see me and let him explain and let him pull me back in with whatever words he'd rehearsed or whatever promises he'd made to himself, I'd never know if it was real.
I'd never know if he'd changed because he wanted to or because I'd asked for a divorce and he was scared of losing me.
And I needed to know. I needed to be sure this wasn't just another version of the same man who'd stood silent at the gala while I was dismissed, who'd let me work in the background for eleven years without saying my name.
So I stood there on the street as the wind picked up and the afternoon light started to fade, and I let him walk away.
He didn't see me. He didn't know I'd come. He just left, walking away from the gallery he'd built, and I stayed on the other side of the street watching him go, and the space between us felt like the widest thing in the world.
I pulled my coat tighter around me and turned to go back to the subway. My chest felt hollow. My hands were still shaking.