25. Elise
ELISE
I told myself I was only going for the books.
I waited until Graham would be out. I didn't ask where. I didn't want to know.
The house looked smaller than I remembered. Narrower. Like it had folded in on itself while I'd been gone. The windows stared back at me, dark and uninviting, and I sat in the car for a full minute trying to convince myself to get out.
This was ridiculous. It was my house. Technically, anyway, until the lawyers finished dividing it up like everything else.
I let myself in with the key I still carried.
The lock turned smoothly, the same way it always had, and my stomach twisted.
Everything about this felt wrong — sneaking into my own house, timing it so I wouldn't run into my husband, planning my exit before I'd even stepped inside. God, what did this mean?
The entryway smelled like linseed oil.
That stopped me cold. Graham didn't paint anymore.
He'd given it up when the gallery opened, traded the brushes for contracts and donor lunches and speeches where he never said my name.
The smell didn't make sense. It belonged to a version of him I hadn't seen in eight years, the one who used to come to bed with paint under his fingernails and tell me about the colors he was chasing.
I set my bag down and went upstairs.
The bedroom looked exactly the same. Same bedspread. Same curtains. Same stack of art magazines on his nightstand that he probably hadn't touched since I left. For a second I just stood there in the doorway, feeling like an intruder.
My books were still on the shelf where I'd left them.
The art history texts I'd read cover to cover, the monographs on color theory, the exhibition catalogs from galleries that didn't exist anymore.
I pulled them down one by one and stacked them in my arms. They were heavier than I expected.
I'd arranged them by subject years ago because I thought that's what you did when you built a life with someone.
You made space for your things. You assumed they'd stay.
Like an idiot, I thought it would feel like taking something back.
It just felt like stealing.
I brought the books downstairs and set them by the door.
The stack looked pathetic sitting there on the floor — years in this house and all I wanted was a handful of books I could have bought again for less than two hundred dollars.
Three trips, maybe four. I could be out in twenty minutes if I didn't stop moving.
But the smell of linseed oil was stronger now, pulling at me.
I went back upstairs and down the hall to the spare room — the one with the north-facing window. My pulse kicked up with every step, which was ridiculous. It was my house. I had every right to be here.
The door was open.
I stepped inside and the air left my lungs.
The room was full of paintings. Not finished ones — works in progress, propped against the walls, stacked on the floor, pinned to a makeshift board he must have built himself.
Sketches covered the desk, some of them detailed studies and some just loose gestural lines like he was working something out.
Tubes of paint sat open on the windowsill, their colors dried and cracking at the edges.
A jar of brushes stood in the corner, the water inside gone cloudy.
The north light from the window illuminated everything.
And in the center of the room, on the easel, was the canvas.
I couldn't look away.
It wasn't finished. I could see that immediately. But something about it made my throat go tight, because I knew exactly what he was doing. It was how I saw things. How I'd always seen things.
He was painting the way I would have painted it.
My hands started shaking. I curled them into fists and pressed them against my sides, but it didn't help.
My whole body felt like a live wire, humming with something I didn't have a name for.
I wanted to leave. I wanted to stay. I wanted to touch the canvas and see if the paint was still wet. I wanted to run.
Four boxes sat stacked in the corner. The top one had a label in my own handwriting: Acquisitions 2015–2017.
Gallery acquisition files. He'd gone through the records.
Every piece I'd chosen for the gallery over eleven years.
He'd studied them. He'd learned what my eye was.
He'd reverse-engineered my taste from a decade of choices nobody had ever credited me for, and now he was using it. Learning from it.
And then he'd started painting again.
I stepped closer. I shouldn't have. I should have turned around and walked out and pretended I'd never seen it, but my legs carried me forward anyway. He'd always been good. Before the gallery, before he decided business was safer than art, he'd been better than good.
But this was different.
This was him looking at the world the way I looked at it.
My chest ached. It was a physical thing, sharp and insistent, like something inside me had cracked open and couldn't close again. I pressed my hand against my sternum, but the pressure didn't ease. My throat burned. My eyes stung.
Ugh. I blinked hard and forced the feeling down, but it didn't go anywhere. It just sat there, heavy and stubborn, refusing to be ignored.
I wanted to know if it would last.
The thought arrived fully formed, unwelcome.
I tried to push it away but it dug in, stubborn as a dog with a bone.
Because this — the painting, the brushes, the smell of oil in the house again — this could be temporary.
This could be him trying to prove something, throwing himself into a project because his lawyer told him the divorce was going ahead and he needed to do something with the feeling.
Men did that. They threw themselves into work, into projects, into anything that let them avoid sitting still with what they'd lost.
And when the paperwork went through and I was gone for good, he'd pack the paints away and go back to being the man who built the biggest gallery in New York without ever picking up a brush.
I didn't know if I could stand that.
The idea of it — of him painting for a few weeks or a few months and then stopping, of this just being a phase he worked through and left behind — made my stomach drop.
Which was insane. I'd asked for the divorce.
I'd been the one to leave. I didn't get to stand here in his painting room, shaking and flushed and wanting him to keep doing this, wanting it to mean something permanent.
God. Heat flooded my face, alone in an empty room, because even thinking it made me feel like I was hoping for something I had no right to hope for. The divorce was going ahead. I'd asked for it. I'd meant it.
But I hadn't thought he'd do this.
I looked at the sketches on the desk. There were dozens of them, studies of light and shadow, compositions worked out in pencil and charcoal.
Some of them were dated. The earliest one I could see was from October.
He'd been doing this for months. Painting again.
Working again. Building something that looked like the world through my eyes.
My hands were still shaking.
I made myself step back. Then another step. I forced my eyes away from the canvas and turned toward the door, focusing on the mechanics of it — one foot, then the other, don't trip over the paintings on the floor, don't look back, don't stop moving or you'll stay here forever.
I grabbed my books from the entryway and walked out.
The door clicked shut behind me. The sound of it felt final in a way it hadn't four months ago, when I'd left for the last time and told myself I wasn't coming back.
That had been fury. This was something else.
This was walking away from evidence that he'd heard me, that he'd understood, that maybe he was trying.
I loaded the books into the car. My hands were still shaking. I gripped the steering wheel until my knuckles went white, trying to get a grip on the feeling rattling around inside my chest.
It didn't work.
The drive to Mara's took twenty minutes, but I didn't remember any of it. I parked outside and sat there with the engine running, staring at the steering wheel like it might tell me what to do next.
It didn't.
I turned the car off and went inside.
Mara was in the kitchen, washing greens at the sink. She looked up when I came in and her whole face shifted — not quite worry, but close. The kind of look that said she could tell something had happened and she was deciding whether to ask about it or wait for me to bring it up.
"How'd it go?" she asked.
"Fine." I set my keys on the counter, too loud. "Got the books."
"That's it? Just books?"
"That's it."
She dried her hands on a towel, watching me in that way she had, like she could see straight through to the parts I wasn't saying. "Elise."
I looked at her directly. "What?"
"You look like you've seen a ghost."
Maybe I had. I didn't know how else to explain it — the paintings, the colors, the evidence that he'd spent months learning to see the way I saw. That he'd signed the gallery away and picked up a brush and started over. That he was painting again and it looked like me.
But I couldn't tell her. Not because she wouldn't understand. Mara would understand better than anyone. She'd been the one who took me in five months ago and never once asked if I was sure.
I couldn't tell her because saying it out loud would make it real.
And if it was real, I'd have to decide what it meant.
I'd have to sit with the fact that he'd done this, that he'd learned my eye and started painting again, and then I'd have to figure out if it changed anything.
If it changed everything. If the divorce was still the right answer when he was finally becoming the person I'd needed him to be all along.
I wasn't ready for that.
"I'm fine," I said.
Mara looked at me for a long moment. I could see her weighing it, deciding whether to push or let it go. Then she nodded and turned back to the sink. "Okay."
She didn't push. She never did. That's why I'd come here in the first place — because she knew when to ask and when to let me sit with it, and she trusted me to know the difference.
She'd done it five months ago when I showed up at her door.
She'd done it every day since, letting me figure out how to be a person who'd walked away from her marriage without forcing me to explain myself before I was ready.
I leaned against the counter and watched her rinse the greens, my pulse still racing. My hands had finally stopped shaking, but the ache in my chest hadn't gone anywhere. If anything, it had gotten worse.
The painting was still there. In the house. On the easel.
He was still painting.
I didn't know if it would last. I didn't know if he'd keep going after the divorce went through, or if this was just something he needed to do to get through it.
I didn't know if he even wanted me to know, or if finding it had been an accident he'd regret.
Maybe he'd realize I'd been there — I hadn't exactly covered my tracks, hadn't closed the door to his painting room, hadn't hidden the fact that I'd taken the books.
Maybe he'd come home and see the empty shelf and know I'd been there.
Maybe he wouldn't care.
But he'd done it.
Those boxes in the corner. Every record, every archive, eleven years of choices I'd made that nobody credited me for. He'd studied them. He'd learned my eye. And then he'd started painting again — not the way he used to paint, but the way I would have painted if anyone had ever let me.
I pressed my hand flat against the counter. The marble was cool under my palm, grounding.
Mara glanced over at me. "You staying for dinner?"
"Yeah." My voice came out steadier than I expected. "If that's okay."
"It's always okay." She said it easily, like it was the simplest thing in the world. "Patrick's bringing pizza home. The kids have been asking about you."
Something in my chest loosened, just a fraction. "Yeah?"
"Yeah." She smiled at me, small and genuine. "They made you a drawing. It's on the fridge."
I looked. There it was — a crayon disaster of stick figures and what might have been a house or a dinosaur, I couldn't tell. My name was spelled wrong at the top in wobbly letters.
"It's beautiful," I said, and meant it.
Mara laughed. "It's terrible. But they worked hard on it."
She went back to the greens. The water ran in the sink.
Somewhere upstairs one of the kids laughed, high and bright.
The house smelled like rosemary and warm bread, and for a second I let myself believe that this was enough — that I could stay here and build a life that didn't include him and eventually the ache would fade.
That I could be Aunt Elise who stayed for dinner and had drawings made for her and never thought about the man who'd learned to paint the way she saw the world.
But I knew better.
I'd seen the painting.
And I couldn't unsee it.