Chapter 3 #2
Which Park Avenue power couple is heading for a very private — and very expensive — split?
Friends say the wife decamped from their Hamptons retreat last weekend, and the husband's been burning up phone lines trying to get her back.
No word yet on whether lawyers are involved, but with a fortune this size, they will be.
Annabel read it twice. Her face felt hot. The flush climbed her collarbones, the way it always did — that visible betrayal of her own skin, announcing what she was feeling before she'd decided to feel it.
"It could be anyone," Corinne said.
"It's us."
"It could be—"
"Corinne. It's us."
Their world was small. The Hamptons, the Upper East Side, the foundation circuit — everyone knew everyone, and everyone talked.
Someone at the Montauk Yacht Club had seen her leave.
Someone at the club had noticed Alistair dining alone on Saturday.
Someone had picked up a phone and traded a piece of her life for the minor currency of being the one who knew first.
She set Corinne's phone on the table and finished her coffee. It tasted like nothing.
"This doesn't change anything," she said.
"No," Corinne agreed. "But it means people will start calling."
"Let them call."
#
She went to the gallery that afternoon. Not her gallery — she hadn't had one of her own in years — but the one in Chelsea where she'd curated her first two exhibitions before the marriage, before she'd let her career compress into the role of Alistair Stirling's wife.
The space had changed. The walls were different — someone had taken down the temporary partitions she'd installed for the Nakamura show and opened the floor plan into one long, unbroken rectangle.
The current exhibition was a series of large-format photographs, black-and-white, coastal landscapes stripped of people.
They were technically impressive and emotionally flat, and Annabel stood in front of the largest one and thought about the woman she'd been when she worked here.
Twenty-four. A year out of her master's program.
She'd talked her way into the assistant curator position with a portfolio and a fifteen-minute pitch about accessibility in contemporary art, and within two years she'd built a program that brought emerging artists from Red Hook studios into a space that usually showed established names.
She'd bought the watch then. The one on her wrist now — the only expensive thing she'd ever purchased for herself, paid for with her own money, the day after her first opening drew three hundred people.
She'd worn it every day since, through the wedding and the move to Park Avenue and the slow process of becoming someone whose name only appeared next to his.
Annabel Stirling. Before that, Annabel Keyes. And before that, just Annabel — a woman who walked through galleries with her own ideas and her own ambition and didn't check her phone to see if her husband had texted.
She stood in the empty gallery for a long time.
A young woman behind the desk asked if she needed help, and Annabel said no, and the woman went back to her laptop without recognizing her.
Good. She didn't want to be recognized. She wanted to stand here and remember what it felt like to belong to herself.
#
Wednesday afternoon, she sat in Judith Crane's office on the thirty-second floor of a Midtown tower and signed the retainer.
The office was all glass and pale wood. Judith was older than she'd sounded on the phone — mid-fifties, silver rings on three fingers, reading glasses on a chain around her neck.
She laid out the process in measured terms. Filing.
Response period. Discovery. The prenuptial agreement, which Annabel had signed at twenty-five with her own attorney's advice and which was, Judith said after reviewing it, "fair but not generous. "
"He'll fight the filing," Annabel said.
"Possibly. Some husbands contest to delay. Some contest because they believe time will change the outcome." Judith folded her hands on the desk. "My job is to protect your interests regardless of his timeline."
Annabel signed where Judith pointed. Three signatures, three initials.
The pen was heavy in her hand. She thought about the last document she'd signed with this much weight — the marriage license, in a clerk's office downtown, Alistair's hand on the small of her back and both of them laughing at the fluorescent lighting.
She handed the pen back.
"What happens now?" she asked.
"Now I send a letter. And then we see what he does."
Annabel stood. She shook Judith's hand. She walked to the elevator and pressed the button and waited, and when the doors opened she stepped inside and watched the numbers fall — thirty-two, thirty-one, thirty — and for the first time since Friday, she was standing on something.
Not solid ground. Not yet. But something with edges. Something she could map.
The floor was gone. She knew that. She'd left it behind in East Hampton, on a Friday night, in a bedroom that smelled like sea air and someone else's perfume.
But she was standing.
She walked out of the building and into the heat of a Manhattan afternoon, and she did not check her phone.