2. Gracie
— ? —
Gracie
I’ve never liked champagne.
It tastes like headaches and bad decisions, and the bubbles always make me sneeze, but I’m on my third glass because it’s the only thing getting me through this evening.
The gallery is huge and white and filled with people who look like they were born knowing how to hold a wine glass, and I’m standing in the corner in a black dress that probably cost too much, watching my husband disappear into a crowd that wants him more than I do.
We arrived together. That matters, apparently, the optics, the image, the careful performance of a happy marriage.
His hand was on my back as we walked through the door, warm and steady, and for a half-second I believed we were okay.
Then a woman with architectural hair and a clipboard swooped in, and Mal was swept away to shake hands and smile for photos, and I was left standing by the hors d’oeuvres table with nothing but tiny crackers and my own bitterness for company.
That was forty-five minutes ago. I haven’t seen him since.
I grab another glass of champagne from a passing waiter and take a long sip.
The gallery is arranged in a maze of white walls, the paintings hung with museum precision, each one lit by its own individual spotlight.
I recognize Mal’s work on every surface, the brushstrokes, the color choices, the way he captures light like he’s trapping it in amber.
Some of these pieces are years old. Some are new, from the last few months, work I’ve never seen because at some point he stopped showing me.
There’s one painting near the entrance that I remember watching him create.
It’s a landscape of Cedar Hollow, our farm at sunset, the barn glowing gold in the dying light.
He painted it three years ago, during one of our rare trips back, and I remember standing behind him while he worked, watching his hands move, feeling like I was witnessing a sacrament.
He sold it six months later. I found out from the gallery’s Instagram.
It went for one-point-four million. I remember the number because it was more than my father’s entire farm was worth, land and house and every animal on it, and my husband had made it in an afternoon and hadn’t thought to tell me it was gone.
That’s the kind of money we have now. The kind that buys a house I rattle around in like a coin in a jar, a closet full of dresses I don’t recognize, a life so comfortable it took me years to notice I was suffocating in it.
I turn away from the painting and scan the room again, looking for a familiar head of brown wavy hair above the crowd.
There, by the back wall, surrounded by a cluster of people who are laughing at a joke he made.
Mal doesn’t make people laugh. He’s awkward and blunt and usually says the wrong thing at the wrong time.
I push through the crowd to get closer, champagne sloshing in my glass, and that’s when I see her.
She’s standing next to him, close enough that her shoulder nearly brushes his arm.
Tall and angular, with cheekbones that could cut glass and hair so blonde it’s almost white, swept up in an elegant twist. Her dress is red, not a subtle red, not a tasteful red, a red that dares you to look away.
She’s laughing, her head thrown back, one hand resting on Mal’s forearm like she has every right to touch him.
I know who she is before I even process the recognition. I’ve seen photographs, old ones, from his years abroad. The ex-girlfriend, the gallerist, Odette Vane.
She looks exactly the same, and also nothing like the photos, because the photos didn’t capture the way she moves, the way she commands space, the way everyone in her orbit leans in like she’s a sun they’re trying to get warm from.
I stop walking. I’m close enough now to hear them, if I strain, and I shouldn’t strain, I should walk away and find another glass of champagne and wait for this night to be over, but my feet are rooted to the floor and my heart is pounding in a rhythm I don’t want to name.
“-nearly fell asleep on my couch Thursday,” Odette is saying, her voice low and warm with amusement. “I had to practically pour coffee down your throat to keep you going.”
Mal laughs. Actually laughs, a real one, not the forced sound he makes at social events. “The 2 a.m. session was worth it. The light was finally right.”
“The light is always right when you’re too tired to overthink it. Remember Munich? That piece you finished at four in the morning, the one with the cathedral?”
“You hated that piece.”
“I hated that you made me stay up to watch you finish it. The piece itself was extraordinary.” Her hand is still on his arm. Her fingers squeeze, just slightly. “You’ve always been extraordinary, Mal. You just needed someone who understood that.”
I can feel the champagne turning sour in my stomach.
Thursday. He was at her couch on Thursday.
Wednesday he came home at midnight, said he’d been working.
Tuesday I made dinner and ate alone. Monday, the same.
Every night for the last three months, the same story, working late, lost track of time, the painting is almost done, and the whole time, he was with her.
Not with her. I don’t know that, and I don’t have any proof of anything except late nights and private jokes and his hand under hers like it belongs there.
But I know what I’m looking at. I know the way a woman touches a man she’s slept with, the ease of it, the familiarity, the comfort of skin that’s already been mapped.
Maybe I’m wrong, paranoid and jealous and seeing things that aren’t there because my marriage is falling apart and I need someone to blame.
But every unanswered text, every empty evening, every night I went to bed alone while he was supposedly working, it all reorganizes itself in one nauseous second, and the pattern is so clear I can’t believe I didn’t see it before.
All those nights he was working, he was working with her.
I take a breath. Then another. The room is too loud and too bright and I need to get out, I need air, I need to not be here watching my husband smile at another woman like she’s the only person in the room.
But before I can move, the lights dim.
A spotlight snaps on at the far end of the gallery, illuminating a small stage I hadn’t noticed before. A woman in a sleek gray suit steps up to the microphone, the same woman with the clipboard who stole Mal away earlier, and clears her throat.
“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us this evening for a very special unveiling.”
The crowd shifts, turns, gathers toward the stage like moths to a flame. I’m caught in the movement, carried along despite myself, until I’m standing in the middle of a sea of strangers, champagne clutched to my chest like a shield.
“Malcolm Koch has been one of the most exciting voices in contemporary art for the past decade,” the woman continues.
“His work captures light and emotion in ways that feel almost supernatural. Tonight, we’re honored to present his newest masterpiece - a piece that has taken six months to complete, and which represents, in his own words, the purest expression of his artistic vision to date. ”
I scan the crowd for Mal and find him at the edge of the stage, Odette still beside him.
His face is unreadable, the careful blankness he wears when he’s overwhelmed.
For a moment I feel a surge of what might be sympathy, he hates this, the attention, the performance, the expectation. He always has.
Then Odette leans in and whispers in his ear, and he nods, and whatever sympathy I felt curdles.
“Without further ado,” the woman says, “I give you: his muse.”
She gestures, and two men in black pull a velvet drape from an enormous canvas at the back of the stage, and I see it.
It’s Odette.
Odette, larger than life, rendered in oil and light with the kind of obsessive detail I remember from the early days of our marriage, when Mal used to paint me like he was trying to memorize my soul.
She’s reclining on a chaise I don’t recognize, her hair loose around her shoulders, her eyes half-closed, her lips parted in a smile that’s almost private.
The light in the painting is golden and warm, caressing her skin like a lover’s hand.
Every brushstroke radiates devotion. Every color choice screams intimacy.
This is the painting, the masterpiece he’s been working on for months, the one he missed our anniversary to finish, the one that was so important he couldn’t come home.
It’s not me. It was never me.
The room erupts in applause. I hear gasps of admiration, murmured superlatives, the click and flash of cameras. Odette steps forward to take a bow, gracious and glowing, and the crowd parts for her like the Red Sea.
Someone touches my elbow. “Isn’t it magnificent? The way he captured the curve of her throat-”
I don’t hear the rest. I’m staring at the placard beneath the painting, the title printed in elegant black letters.
Golden Hour.
I didn’t name this one. I always name his paintings, it’s our ritual, has been since the first piece he ever showed, the farm landscape he finished two weeks after we started dating. He painted, I named. It was ours.
But this painting has a name, and I didn’t give it, which means someone else did.
Odette named it. Odette got the first look. Our ritual, our tradition, the last thread connecting us to who we used to be, he gave it to her.
I stand very still in the middle of the crowd. The applause washes over me like water over stone. I watch Mal shake hands with collectors, accept congratulations from critics, pose for photographs with the woman he painted. His wife is standing thirty feet away, and he hasn’t looked at her once.
And then, because the universe has a sense of humor I’ve never appreciated, I hear his voice.
He’s stepped away from the main crowd, standing in a doorway that leads to what looks like a back room, talking to someone I can’t see. I’m close enough to catch the words, carried on a draft of air-conditioned gallery air, and I wish I wasn’t.
“-not the same anymore,” he’s saying, low and rough and tired. “Things aren’t the same. Not like they were.”
I don’t hear the response, and I don’t need to. The words hang in the air like smoke, curling into shapes I don’t want to recognize.
Things aren’t the same anymore. Not like they were.
No, they’re not.
I set the champagne glass down on the nearest surface with absolute care, making sure it doesn’t tip, making sure it doesn’t spill.
I smile at a woman I don’t know. I nod at a man who’s trying to talk to me about brushwork.
I walk through the gallery like I know exactly where I’m going, like this is a choice and not an escape, like I’m not shattering into pieces with every step.
The front door. The valet. My keys, handed over with a smile that feels like a wound.
I make it all the way to the car before I stop holding it together.