CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
NORA
Month Six
The Oslo exhibition closes with every print sold or committed to a traveling show.
Rhett stands beside me during the final reception because I ask him to. When reporters approach, he answers hockey questions and redirects art questions to me. When one asks whether our reconciliation proves public pressure can save a marriage, I answer before he can.
"Public pressure helped break ours," I say. "Privacy helped us decide what came next."
Rhett adds, "We are not returning to the old marriage. We are building a relationship that may earn a new one."
May.
The word matters.
On our last night in Oslo, we walk along the harbor where we reunited. My project equipment is packed. The hotel room contains six months reduced to labeled cases.
"Are you afraid to come back?" Rhett asks.
"Yes."
"Of us?"
"Of becoming the version of me who left."
He stops beneath a streetlamp. "Then don't return to her life."
"The studio is the same. The rink is the same. You are in the same penthouse."
"Places don't require patterns."
"Easy to say."
"Then we make structural changes. Your own apartment. Separate work calendars. Couples therapy before any discussion of living together. Foundation decisions documented, not negotiated in bed."
I smile. "You have been thinking."
"Obsessively, but with professional supervision."
"And the penthouse?"
His face tightens. "I love that home because we made it. I also understand it became a place where you waited. If keeping it makes rebuilding harder, I will sell it."
"Do not sell your home to prove you changed."
"Our home."
"Not legally."
"Legality was never the part that made it ours."
I touch his coat. "Keep it for now. Let me decide what it means when I see it again."
He nods.
At the hotel, I remove the wedding ring from its chain and place it in a small velvet pouch.
Rhett watches without speaking.
"I am not discarding it," I say.
"I know."
"I don't want to arrive wearing the old symbol while we are building something new."
He takes his own ring from beneath his shirt and places it beside mine.
"Then they wait together," he says.
Two rings in one pouch.
Not on our hands.
Not hidden.