Chapter Six
Madrigal
She allowed herself the small pleasure of wondering what the evening looked like in the Carrington house.
She was at her gallery—her actual gallery, the working one, not the event space she rented for client receptions—standing before a new acquisition she had paid too much for and loved completely.
It was an abstract piece, all controlled violence, sharp diagonals and deep burgundy.
She liked things that contained their force.
The photographs had been her best move yet.
She had taken them herself over three weeks, patient and careful, always at a distance, always at angles that told a story without technically lying.
The Post-it note was a nice touch—she was proud of the note.
You deserve to know what's happening. Sympathetic.
Designed to feel like a gift from a stranger who cared about the wronged wife.
She had placed the envelope in Townes's file cabinet on the one afternoon she'd been alone in the executive suite for twenty minutes while he was in a partner meeting.
She'd slipped in and out while Jaynelle, his assistant, was at lunch.
Simple. Clean. Devastating, she hoped.
She poured herself a glass of red wine and stood before the painting.
She was not a woman who questioned her methods.
She was a woman who identified what she wanted and built the architecture to get it.
If the Carrington marriage couldn't survive a set of photographs, the marriage was already failing.
She was just illuminating an existing crack.
She thought about Townes's face in his office that morning—he had been distracted, she'd noticed, which was unusual for him.
She wondered if Winona had found the envelope yet.
She wondered if Townes had come home to a wife who had finally opened that composed face of hers and shown what was underneath.
She should have felt something, she supposed, about Winona Carrington. The woman had done nothing to her. She was, by all accounts, decent. But Madrigal had not come this far by allowing other people's decency to be her constraint.
She took a long sip of wine.
She wondered if she'd miscalculated him, though.
He was harder to move than she'd anticipated—most men registered the signal and at least leaned, even if they didn't follow through.
Townes had not leaned even fractionally.
He had redirected every approach with a precision that would have been funny if it weren't so frustrating.
But none of that mattered now. The photographs were planted. The marriage was cracking. When the fallout came—the argument, the doubt, the cold anger—Townes would need somewhere to put his hands, emotionally speaking. She would make sure she was there.
She allowed herself the pleasure, one more time, then put the glass down and went back to work.