23. Gracie
— ? —
Gracie
I know the exact time because I’m standing at the kitchen window with my coffee, watching the pasture go from gray to gold, and my phone starts buzzing like it’s possessed.
Then June’s ringtone cuts through, the one I set to the old Dolly song because she’d kill me if I didn’t, and I answer without looking at the screen.
“Don’t go online,” she says.
So of course I go online.
SECRET AFFAIR: THE MUSE TELLS ALL. There’s a photo of Odette looking wounded and beautiful, and a photo of me from God knows where, some gallery thing years ago, my face caught mid-word, unflattering.
And the subheading, the one that makes my coffee turn to acid: RUNAWAY WIFE FLED WHILE MISTRESS WAITED.
“Gracie? You still there?”
“Yeah.” My voice sounds far away. “Yeah, I’m here.”
“It’s garbage. Everyone knows it’s garbage. Half the quotes don’t even make sense, she’s got dates wrong, she-”
“June. I have to go.”
I hang up. I read the article. Then I read it again, because my brain won’t hold onto the words, they keep sliding off like oil, too slick, too practiced.
She’s invented six months of secret dinners.
Weekend trips I know for a fact Mal spent locked in his studio.
A tearful confrontation where I supposedly threw a vase at her head.
Details so specific they feel true even though I know they’re not, because that’s how lies work when they’re told by someone who understands the architecture of belief.
My hands are shaking. The babies kick, both of them, like they can feel my heart rate spiking.
The first car pulls up to the gate at 7:15.
By 7:30, there are six. By 8:00, I’ve lost count.
They line the county road like a funeral procession, except instead of mourners, they’re photographers with lenses longer than my arm, and instead of grief, there’s hunger.
I can see it from the porch, the way they jostle for position, the flash of glass catching the morning light.
A drone buzzes overhead. I watch it hover above the pasture, tilting its camera toward the house, and my stomach drops.
This is exactly the life I ran from. And it followed me here anyway.
“Mrs. Gracie?”
Denny’s at the bottom of the porch steps, hat in his hands, looking toward the gate like he’s sizing up an enemy battalion.
“I see them,” I say.
“You want me to run ‘em off? I got the tractor. Could make things real inconvenient.”
Despite everything, I almost smile. “Let’s hold off on the tractor assault for now.”
“Your call.” He puts his hat back on. “But I’m ready.”
The screen door creaks behind me. Mal’s footsteps are heavy on the porch boards, and I don’t turn around. I can’t look at him right now. If I look at him, I’ll either cry or scream, and I don’t know which would be worse.
“Gracie.”
“I saw it.”
“I know.” He stops a few feet away, giving me space. “Elias called. The story’s everywhere. It’s trending on three platforms.”
“Congratulations. You’re famous again.”
It’s cruel, and I know it’s cruel, and I say it anyway because my skin feels too tight and my farm is surrounded and there are strangers pointing cameras at the home I built from the wreckage of everything he broke.
Mal doesn’t flinch. “I deserve that.”
“Yeah. You do.”
We stand there in silence. Down by the road, someone shouts words I can’t make out, and a camera flashes. The drone dips lower, hovering over the chicken coop, and I watch the hens scatter in outrage.
Then Meatball, sweet, dumb, loyal Meatball, charges the fence line, and the photographers actually stumble back. One of them trips over a tripod. It’d be funny if I could feel anything other than this creeping dread, this sense that the walls are closing in.
“Gracie.” Mal’s voice is quiet. Careful. “I can end this.”
I turn around.
He’s standing with his hands at his sides, and he looks. God, he looks like he’s bracing for a blow. Like he expects me to say no and has already decided he’d deserve it if I did.
“How?”
“I go out there.” He nods toward the gate.
“I go public. The truth, all of it. The commission contract, the canceled tour, the fabricated dates. I’ve got documentation for everything.
” He pauses, and his jaw tightens. “Including every way I failed you. Every year I wasn’t there.
Every time I chose wrong. I tell them all of it, on camera, and I let them print whatever they want. ”
“Mal-”
“It’s your life too.” He says it like it costs him. Like the words are being pulled out of him one by one. “I don’t get to decide what the world knows about you. Not anymore. Not ever again.” His eyes meet mine, pale blue and steady. “I’m not doing this without your yes.”
The drone buzzes closer. I can hear the whir of its rotors, the click of cameras, the low murmur of voices at the gate. Thirty strangers, waiting to devour whatever scraps we throw them.
But Mal isn’t looking at them. He’s looking at me. Asking.
He never asked. Not once in five years of gallery openings and press tours and interviews where I smiled for cameras until my face ached. He decided, and I followed, and at some point I forgot I was allowed to have an opinion about my own life.
He’s asking now.
“What about your career?” I say. “If you go out there and say all that-”
“My career.” He laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “Gracie, I burned my career before I ever got in the truck to come find you. This isn’t a sacrifice. This is cleanup.”
“The art world won’t forgive you. You know that.”
“Good.” His voice is flat. Final. “I don’t want their forgiveness. I want yours.”
He’s close now, near enough that the exhaustion carved into his face is plain, the paint he never fully scrubs out of his knuckles, the pulse ticking at the side of his neck.
My whole body is wound tight and humming, and I tell myself it’s fear, because fear is reasonable.
Fear is what a woman feels with strangers pointing lenses at her house.
It isn’t only fear. That’s the ugly truth of me, standing on this porch with my life smeared across every phone in the country.
I’m scared and I’m furious and I want to fist my hands in that shirt and drag his mouth down to mine, right here, in front of all of it.
I want him. Now. Which is insane, and the worst possible timing.
And none of that makes it one degree less true.
His attention slides to my mouth, just for a beat. And I know he feels it too, the pull of it, the wanting that doesn’t care about cameras or headlines or the five months I swore I needed. He leans in. Half an inch. I feel the heat come off his skin.
Then a camera shutter fires off in a rapid burst somewhere down the drive, and whatever was about to happen folds back up and goes still. He straightens, and I breathe. Not with cameras twenty feet away. But God, it was close.
Down by the gate, a car horn honks. Someone yells a question I can’t quite hear, about Odette, about the affair. The word “mistress” reaches me on the wind, and my jaw locks.
“Do it,” I say.
“You’re sure?”
“Do it,” I say, straightening my spine, feeling the weight of the babies shift. “Go tell them the truth. And tell them-” My voice catches, and I have to swallow hard before I can finish. “Tell them the titles are mine. Every single one. Make sure they know that part.”
The line of his mouth eases, almost a smile. “Yes ma’am.”
He walks down the porch steps. Across the yard. Toward the gate, where the cameras are already swiveling to track him, where the photographers are pressing closer, hungry for the shot.
And then a figure steps out from between the parked cars, and my stomach drops.
Odette.
She’s dressed for cameras, of course she is, cream silk blouse, perfectly windswept hair, sunglasses pushed up on her head like she’s posing for a magazine cover.
Her face is arranged into an expression of wounded softness, and she’s angling her body toward the photographers, positioning herself so they can capture the moment.
The muse and her painter, reunited in the country dust. The reconciliation shot.
Her arms are already slightly open as she walks toward him, ready for the embrace she’s already choreographed in her head.
She flew here for this. She planted the story, waited for the circus to arrive, and flew here to collect her prize.
The cold dread melts. What floods in behind it is heat, pure and furious.
Oh no.
Not here, not on my land, not in front of my home with my animals in the pasture and my husband at the gate and my babies kicking under my heart.
I pull out my phone. My hands aren’t shaking anymore.
Sheriff Pete picks up before the first ring finishes. “Gracie. Saw the news. What do you need?”
I pitch my voice to carry. Calm as Sunday morning, steady as the ground I’m standing on.
“Pete? Gracie Tate. I’ve got about thirty vehicles obstructing a county road, a drone violation, and one trespasser on private property who’s about to have a very bad afternoon.” I pause, watching Odette’s perfect smile falter as my words drift down the drive. “Bring the tow truck. Bring both.”