24. Mal
— ? —
Mal
The cameras swing toward me like flowers following the sun. Twenty lenses, maybe more, all that black glass reflecting the Texas morning back at me in fractured pieces.
I’ve done this so many times it’s muscle memory.
Press lines, gallery openings, carefully managed interviews where Elias fed me talking points and I performed the version of myself they wanted to see.
The tortured artist, the brooding genius, the man who painted beautiful women and let the world assume he was sleeping with all of them.
Today I’m not performing.
Behind me, carrying clear across the yard, I hear Gracie’s voice: “Bring the tow truck. Bring both.”
The grin tries to surface. I fight it down, but God.
THERE she is. The woman who runs this land, who saved her old horse’s life with her bare hands in the middle of a thunderstorm while I held the light, who bought a sitting with me in front of the whole town and let me grovel at her feet.
She’s not hiding on the porch waiting to be rescued, she’s handling it.
I plant myself at my own gate. The photographers crowd closer, shouting questions over each other, a wall of noise that used to make me want to disappear into my own skin.
“Mr. Koch! Malcolm! Is it true about the affair?”
“What do you say to the allegations in-”
“When did your wife find out about-”
“Quiet.” I don’t shout it. I barely raise my voice. But whatever they see in my face shuts them up, and the sudden silence feels like the moment before a canvas takes its first stroke.
“I’m going to say this once,” I tell them. “You can record it, quote it, print whatever you want. But I’m not taking questions, and I’m not doing a second take.”
The cameras adjust. Red lights blink on. Someone in the back mutters into a phone.
I take a breath.
“My wife left me four months ago. She left me a note and her wedding ring, and she was right to do it.” The words come out flat, factual.
No performance in them. “I neglected her for years. I let my work become more important than my marriage. I missed dinners, I missed holidays, I missed-” My throat tightens.
“I missed the death of her father because I was at a gallery opening I could have skipped. I chose not to.”
A murmur ripples through the crowd. I keep going.
“Gracie was my first model. She was my first believer. She named every painting the world loves - the titles are hers, every single one - and I let a gallery and a schemer erase her from her own life’s work.
When the press started calling someone else my muse, I didn’t correct them.
I was too cowardly and too flattered to tell the truth. ”
Movement at the edge of my vision. Cream silk, wounded eyes, a careful performance of heartbreak. Odette stops six feet away, positioning herself in frame, waiting for her cue.
I don’t look at her.
“My wife left me a note that said I’d made her smaller. That I’d turned her into a background figure in her own life.” My voice stays level. Steady. “It was the most honest review my work has ever gotten. I’ve spent every day since trying to become a man who deserves a different one.”
“Malcolm.” Odette’s voice is soft, trembling, pitched perfectly for the microphones. “Malcolm, please, we should talk about this privately-”
I keep my eyes on the cameras.
“The woman standing next to me is Odette Vane. I painted her once, this past year. It was a commission - paid work, documented by contract. I have that contract. It’s dated and signed, and my lawyers already have copies.”
Odette’s face flickers. Just for a second. Then the mask slides back into place.
“She told the press she was my muse. I didn’t correct her.
That was my mistake, and I own it.” I pause.
“But here’s what she didn’t tell you: months ago, the week my wife left me, I canceled my entire gallery tour.
Every show, every appearance. I told Odette the day I pulled the plug.
She hid that cancellation for months, trading on shows that weren’t happening, interviews that weren’t scheduled.
She used my name to build her profile while I was already gone. ”
“That’s not-” Odette starts, but I keep talking, and my voice carries over hers like a wave swallowing a stone.
“The affair story she sold you is fabricated. Every date, every dinner, every weekend trip - I can document where I actually was. My lawyers already have.” I finally turn my head, just enough to catch her in my peripheral vision.
“The confrontation where my wife supposedly threw a vase? That was the night of the Hartley opening. I was on a stage in front of a packed gallery, giving a talk that’s on video with a timestamp.
Gracie was home, across the city. Neither of us has ever owned a vase. ”
Odette’s breathing has gone shallow. I can see it in the way her shoulders rise and fall, the tiny tremor at the corner of her mouth.
“Malcolm.” Her voice is harder now, the wounded softness cracking at the edges. “You’re going to regret this, you’re nothing without the gallery world, you’re nothing without-”
“This woman isn’t my muse.” I say it to the cameras, not to her. “She’s a client I did one painting for, who begged me to help make her famous.” I let the silence stretch for half a breath. “Consider this the last favor: now you all know exactly who she is.”
The mask shatters.
Odette’s face twists, and the sound that comes out of her isn’t the practiced sob of a wounded artist, it’s a shriek, raw and ugly and real.
“You were NOTHING before me-”
She lunges.
I don’t move or flinch. I just stand there, and a photographer catches her by the arm before she can reach me, and then sirens cut through the morning air.
The sheriff’s cruiser rolls up the county road, followed by a deputy’s truck and, God bless this town, two tow trucks. Pete climbs out, surveys the chaos with the tired patience of a man who’s seen worse, and starts issuing tickets.
“Vehicles need to clear this road in the next five minutes or they’re getting hauled. Drone operator, you’re first - come with Deputy Ramirez. Ma’am-” He turns to Odette, who’s still trying to arrange her face into sympathy. “You’re on private property.”
“I was invited,” Odette says. “Malcolm and I were-”
“Ma’am, this is the Koch property. Mrs. Koch called in a trespass complaint about ten minutes ago. You want to dispute that, you can do it at the station.”
Deputy Holt takes her by the elbow. Not rough, but firm. And then he starts walking her down the drive, past the scrambling photographers, past the tow trucks hooking up to rental cars, toward the porch.
Where Gracie is waiting.
She’s leaning against the rail, lemonade in hand, five months round with our children and calm as a church on Sunday. The morning light turns her eyes to honey.
Odette’s chin comes up as they pass. “You think this is over? You think you’ve won? He’ll get bored with you, he always-”
“Careful with her, deputy,” Gracie says, her voice sweet as pie and carrying clear across the yard to every camera still rolling. “She bruises easy. That’s the most famous she’s ever going to be, and she got there exactly the way she wanted: on my husband’s property, being removed.”
A photographer laughs. Someone’s phone flashes.
I fall in love with her again. Four more times, at least, standing there in the dust watching my wife demolish a woman with seven words and a glass of lemonade.
Odette’s mouth opens, closes, and opens again.
“You’ll hear from my lawyers,” I say over my shoulder, mild as milk. “You wanted to be famous.”
I walk up the drive. I don’t look back at her once.
Behind me, a tow truck beeps as it backs up to an illegally parked SUV. The deputy’s radio crackles. Someone’s asking about the drone.
I don’t care about any of it.
Gracie’s still at the rail when I reach the porch steps. Her eyes track my face like she’s looking for damage, for cracks, for the performance underneath.
She won’t find one.
“Hey,” I say.
She takes a sip of her lemonade before she answers. “Nice speech.”
“Nice phone call.”
The corner of her mouth twitches. “Pete owed me a favor. I saved his daughter’s horse last spring.”
Down at the gate, Odette is being helped into the back of the deputy’s truck. Not arrested, just removed. Escorted off the property like the trespasser she is, in front of every camera she invited.
I climb the porch steps. Gracie watches me come, and when I stop in front of her, close enough to see the freckle at the corner of her eye, she reaches up and touches the chain at my neck.
Her ring, warm from my skin.
“You told them about the titles,” she says.
“They’re yours.”
“You told them you missed my father’s death.”
“I did.”
Her hand flattens against my chest, over my heart. “That’s the first time you’ve ever said that out loud.”
“I know.” My voice is rough. “I should have said it years ago, along with a lot of other things.”
The last tow truck rumbles past. The gate stands empty, dust settling in the morning light.
Gracie looks up at me, and her eyes are wet, and her jaw is set, and she’s the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.
“Get inside,” she says. “We need to talk.”
She takes my hand and pulls me toward the door.