Chapter 5 #2
Corinne dropped her bag on the floor. "It doesn't mean nothing.
She was at a Foundation dinner. Your Foundation.
" She held up a finger before Annabel could interrupt.
"And before you do that thing where you rationalize it, let me be clear — there is no professional reason for Daphne Thiessen to be at a Stirling Foundation advisory dinner three weeks after your husband's affair became semi-public knowledge. None."
"It's not semi-public."
"Annabel. Page Six."
"Page Six doesn't name names."
"Page Six describes her hair color. That's naming names for anyone who matters." Corinne shrugged off her coat and threw it over a chair. Then she saw the painting on the table. "What's that?"
Annabel hesitated. She hadn't planned to show it to Corinne — hadn't planned anything, really, hadn't moved past the paralysis of holding two contradictory truths at the same time.
But Corinne was already crossing to the table, already turning the canvas over, already frowning at the winter landscape.
"Where did this come from?"
"It was delivered this morning. From a storage facility. No note."
"And you know it's from him because..."
"Because I curated the show it was in. Nine years ago. My first exhibition."
Corinne looked at the painting. Then at Annabel. "He bought a piece from your first show?"
"He never told me."
Corinne was quiet for three full seconds, which was unusual for her. She picked up the painting and held it at arm's length, studying it with the same critical attention she brought to photo layouts at the magazine. Then she set it back down.
"That's a good move," she said. "I'll give him that."
"It's not a move."
"Everything he does right now is a move, Annabel.
He's lost the high ground and he's trying to get it back.
The separation offer, the waived non-disparagement clause, the cash that exceeds the prenup by forty percent — those were the opening salvos.
This is phase two. Phase one was supposed to overwhelm you with generosity.
Phase two is supposed to overwhelm you with sentiment. "
"He bought this painting before we were married."
"And he's sending it to you now. The timing isn't an accident. He kept it in storage for nine years, which means he's known about it for nine years, which means he chose this exact moment to deploy it. That's not vulnerability, that's strategy."
Annabel wanted to argue. She opened her mouth to say something about the fact that strategic people don't sit on assets for nine years without using them, that the whole point of a chess piece is that you play it, and keeping it in a box in Queens for a decade suggested something other than calculation.
But the words felt thin even before she spoke them.
"And while he's sending you sentimental paintings," Corinne continued, "his mistress is eating dessert at your Foundation's table. So which one is the real message?"
"She's not his mistress."
Corinne raised an eyebrow.
"There's no evidence it was physical," Annabel said. "The messages were — they were emotional. Intimate. But not —"
"Annabel."
"I know." She pressed her fingers to her temples. "I know how that sounds."
Corinne sat down across from her. Her voice softened, which was almost worse than the sharpness.
"He doesn't get to send you proof that he loved you nine years ago while the woman he betrayed you with shows up in your professional spaces.
Those two things can't coexist. Either he's serious about making amends, or he's not managing the situation at all, and I'm not sure which one is worse. "
"He might not have known she'd be there."
"Then he's not paying attention to his own Foundation's guest list, which is a different kind of problem."
Annabel looked at the painting. The frozen creek bed.
The thin ice. Sara Koh had priced her work at eight hundred dollars because she hadn't believed she was worth more.
She wondered if Sara had ever sold another piece, if she was still painting, if she knew that the canvas she'd made in her twenties had ended up in a storage unit belonging to a billionaire who'd never hung it.
"It doesn't change anything," she said.
Corinne studied her face. "Okay."
"It doesn't."
"I said okay."
But Annabel heard what Corinne didn't say, which was that she'd said it twice, and people who meant things only needed to say them once.
After Corinne went back to work, Annabel sat alone in the apartment with the painting.
She'd propped it against the backsplash on the kitchen counter, where the light from the window caught the pale blues in Sara Koh's ice.
She should put it away. She should wrap it back up in the tissue paper and the bubble wrap and return it to the box and set it by the door for — what? To send back? To leave for the trash?
She didn't do any of those things.
Instead she pulled her laptop from her bag and opened her email.
She scrolled past the messages from Judith Crane's office — the separation agreement was still unsigned, still sitting in a folder on her desktop like a document she'd downloaded by accident.
She scrolled past the automated notifications from the Foundation's grant portal.
She stopped at an email from the Foundation's executive director, a woman named Helen Park, sent yesterday afternoon.
Annabel — I know you're on a leave of absence, but I wanted to flag that the advisory dinner last night included a guest I wasn't expecting.
Daphne Thiessen attended as a plus-one with Marcus Webb (senior partner, Stirling Capital).
I didn't have context for this until I saw the dinner photos this morning and recognized her from a media event last fall.
I'm flagging it because I think you should know, and because I want to confirm how you'd like me to handle guest list protocols going forward. Please call me when you have a chance.
So it hadn't been a coincidence. It hadn't been some random invitation from a tangential board member.
Marcus Webb was Alistair's senior partner.
His second-in-command at the firm. He'd brought Daphne Thiessen to a Foundation dinner the way you'd bring a date, and either Alistair had approved it or Marcus had done it on his own, and Annabel wasn't sure which possibility was worse.
She closed the laptop. Opened it again. Closed it.
The painting watched her from the counter. Quiet. Unassuming. A frozen creek in upstate New York, painted by a woman who'd charged eight hundred dollars for her work because she thought that was all she deserved.
Annabel picked up her phone and typed a text to Corinne: You were right about the dinner. Helen Park confirmed. Daphne was Marcus Webb's guest.
The reply came in under a minute: I'm going to kill him.
Which one?
All of them. Every man associated with Stirling Capital Partners. I'll work my way down the org chart.
Despite everything, Annabel almost smiled. Almost. The muscles in her face moved toward it and then stopped, the way a car stalls at an intersection.
She looked at the painting one more time.
She thought about the twenty-nine-year-old version of Alistair — before the affair, before the marriage, before the prenup — standing in a Chelsea gallery with his too-expensive suit, asking her about each artist, listening to her answers.
She thought about him going back to buy a painting he'd never hang, never mention, never leverage.
She thought about the word attention and what it meant when it was real, and how it was possible for the same man to pay the deepest kind of attention and still betray you.
She left the painting on the counter. She didn't wrap it back up.
She told herself this meant nothing, and she almost believed it, and the almost was the part that frightened her — because it was new. Two weeks ago there would have been no almost. Two weeks ago the answer would have been clean.
The painting stayed on the counter, leaning against the backsplash, catching the late-morning light.
And Annabel went to the bedroom and sat on the edge of the too-short couch and pressed her hands together between her knees and breathed and breathed and breathed until the tightness in her chest resolved into something she could carry.
It didn't change anything.
It changed the shape of the question.