21. Mal
— ? —
Mal
I can’t stop replaying it.
The shower in the bunkhouse is ancient and has two settings, scalding and broken, but I’ve been standing under the scalding spray for ten minutes now, forehead against the tile, eyes closed, watching her behind my eyelids like a film on loop.
Her laugh when I went down in the mud. The cold shock of the hose, the way she looked at me with her shirt soaked through and her eyes gone dark, the sound she made when I pushed inside her.
I’m hard again. I’ve been hard since I got in here, which is either proof of how badly I’ve been missing my wife or a sign that I’ve fully regressed to age sixteen. Both, probably.
The phone rings.
I ignore it. Nobody I want to talk to, not when I can still feel her nails in my shoulders.
It rings again.
And again.
I shut off the water with a curse, wrap a towel around my waist, and cross the bunkhouse floor dripping, leaving wet footprints on the old wood. The phone’s on the nightstand where I left it, buzzing insistently, and the name on the screen makes my stomach drop.
ODETTE VANE.
For a long moment I just stand in front of it.
She’s left me a voicemail every few days for weeks, wounded then cold then clipped, and I have deleted every one without listening.
A woman like Odette doesn’t tolerate being unheard.
If she’s calling instead of leaving another message for me to ignore, it means she has finally found a way to make sure I can’t.
The phone buzzes in my hand like a live animal with teeth, and I think about letting it go to voicemail.
Blocking the number. Throwing the phone into the pasture for Meatball to eat.
But Odette doesn’t call without a reason. And if there’s a blow coming, I’d rather see it head-on.
I answer.
“Malcolm.” Her voice is exactly as I remember it, smooth as silk, with steel underneath. “I was beginning to think you’d disappeared entirely. Not a single response to my emails. Very unlike you.”
“I’ve been busy.”
“Yes, I heard. Playing farmhand for your little veterinarian. How rustic.” A pause. “How’s Cedar Hollow treating you? Is the manure everything you hoped?”
“What do you want, Odette?”
She laughs, light and musical, the kind of laugh she practiced in mirrors. “Straight to business. I always did appreciate that about you. Fine, then. I have a proposition.”
“Not interested.”
“You haven’t heard it yet.”
I lean against the bunkhouse wall, watching the water drip from my hair onto the floor. “Whatever it is, the answer’s no. I ended the tour the week she walked out. It’s done. I’m done.”
“The tour doesn’t have to be done.” Her voice sharpens slightly, the silk thinning over the blade.
“Houston is still interested. So is Chicago. The Whitfield retrospective has extended their timeline twice waiting for you to come to your senses. All you have to do is show up, smile for the cameras, let me handle the press like I always have-”
“No.”
“Malcolm.” A long breath. “I’m trying to be reasonable here. What you did - canceling without notice, pulling the work, humiliating me in front of everyone who matters - do you have any idea what that cost me? The relationships I’ve lost? The credibility?”
“That sounds like your problem.”
“It was our tour. Our project. Years of work, and you threw it away because your wife had a tantrum-”
“Careful.” My voice drops, and I hear her pause on the other end. “Think very carefully about the next words out of your mouth.”
Silence. Then: “Fine. Let me be direct. You resume the tour - with me, as planned, all smiles for the cameras - or I give the tabloids a story.”
I go still. “What story?”
“An affair.” She says it lightly, like she’s discussing the weather.
“You and me. Dates and details, months of it. The late nights in your studio, the sessions that went long, the way you looked at me when you painted. I’ll make it sing, Malcolm.
Who’s going to doubt me? I was your muse. Everyone saw the portrait.”
The portrait. The fucking portrait. Odette reclining in white silk, painted over six months of sessions that I thought were professional, that I thought were about the work, while Gracie ate dinner alone and wondered where I’d gone.
I should have burned it the day Gracie’s face shattered at that gallery opening.
“You’re blackmailing me.”
“I’m offering you options. Come back to the tour, let me rebuild what you destroyed, and we both get what we want. Or stay there playing house with your little farm girl, and see how long your marriage lasts when every gossip blog in America is running stories about our affair.”
My hands go very still. This isn’t anger. It’s clarity, and it’s colder.
“Make it up, then.” I hear my own voice, flat and certain. “Print whatever you want. You’ll hear from my lawyers.”
I end the call before she can answer.
The bunkhouse is very quiet.
I stand there for a long moment, phone in hand, water cooling on my skin. Thinking about Odette’s voice, the calculation in it, and what she’s about to do, the headlines, the speculation, the way Gracie’s going to see my name next to lies about infidelity and wonder if maybe this time they’re true.
She’ll wonder. Of course she’ll wonder. I taught her to wonder, didn’t I? Eight years of putting everything before her, of leaving her to fill in the silences with worst-case scenarios. Even if she believes me, there’ll be a part of her that doesn’t. That can’t.
I get dressed slowly. Jeans, a clean shirt, boots that aren’t caked with mud. I should probably shave. I don’t.
When I step outside, Gracie is on the porch.
She’s changed since this morning, dry clothes, her black hair twisted up off her neck, and she’s got her arms crossed over her chest in that way that means she’s been thinking and whatever she’s been thinking isn’t good. The afternoon light catches the honey in her eyes and the set of her jaw.
“What was that?” she asks.
“Which part?”
“The phone call.” She jerks her head toward the bunkhouse. “I could hear your voice through the wall. It went flat in the middle. You only sound like that when it’s bad.”
I could lie, soften it, delay it, figure out how to frame it so it doesn’t sound as bad as it is. That’s what the old me would have done, the me who thought protecting her meant keeping her in the dark.
“That was Odette,” I say.
Gracie’s face doesn’t change. But I see her shoulders go tight, see her fingers dig into her own arms. “And?”
“She wants me back on the tour. I said no.”
“And?”
I walk up the porch steps, stopping a few feet from her because I don’t know if she wants me closer and I’m not going to assume. “She tried to blackmail me.”
“Blackmail you with what?”
I hold her eyes. I don’t look away, don’t flinch. “She’ll invent a cheating story and sell it to the tabloids. Her and me. Dates and details, the whole thing. Make it look like we were having an affair while I was still painting her.”
Gracie swallows. I watch her throat move, watch her process the information. She doesn’t ask the question underneath. Doesn’t ask anything.
So I say it anyway.
“I never cheated on you, Gracie.” I need her to hear this.
I need it to land somewhere real. “Never. Not once, not close, not in any way that counts or any way that doesn’t.
It was sessions and a commission and me being too stupid to see what she was doing - but it was never that.
I know I gave you reasons to doubt me, and I know I wasn’t there.
But that’s not who I was even when I was at my worst.”
She nods, slow and careful, her face unreadable.
Then she turns and goes inside without a word, the screen door swinging shut behind her.
I stand in the yard until the sun starts to slip toward the treeline.
Meatball wanders up to the fence and stares at me with her big stupid eyes, probably gloating about this morning’s adventure. Duchess joins her after a minute, chewing cud with the contentment of someone who’s gotten away with a crime.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I tell them.
Meatball moos.
“I’m handling it.”
Another moo, deeply skeptical.
I should go check the fence section she broke through. Should probably apologize to the fence for whatever Meatball did to it. Should definitely find my boot, still somewhere out in the mud.
Instead I just stand there, thinking about Gracie’s face when she went inside. Thinking about all the times I should have told her things and didn’t, all the conversations I avoided because they were uncomfortable, all the ways I let silence do my talking for me.
She didn’t ask if it was true. Didn’t ask for details, for proof, for anything that would let her settle the question one way or another.
Which means she’s deciding whether to believe me.
And I have no one to blame for that but the man who taught her not to.