Chapter 3 #2
"I said I have ideas. I didn't say I'd act on them without permission." Another pause, longer this time. "Iris, listen. I need to ask you something and I need you to answer honestly. Are you safe? Not just physically. Emotionally. Are you somewhere that feels like yours?"
Iris looked up at the houseboat's cedar shingles, silvered by decades of lake weather. Through the open door lay the galley, the books she'd pulled off shelves this morning, Constance's ceramic canister still on the counter.
"Yeah," she said. "I'm somewhere that feels like mine."
#
She found the blind item at four-thirty, scrolling through her phone on the daybed upstairs in the studio.
She hadn't come up here to look at her phone — she'd come up to open the windows and air the place out, to do something useful with the restless energy the wine and the conversations had left behind.
But her phone was in her hand and the newsletter was in her inbox and the headline caught her eye before she could stop it.
BLIND ITEM: Which Seattle tech titan recently made a quiet "staffing change" in his marketing department — and insiders say the departure had less to do with performance reviews and more to do with a suite at a waterfront hotel? The wife, we hear, is Not Amused.
It was a second-tier gossip outlet — not something most people read, but exactly the kind of thing that circulated in tech circles, forwarded in Slack channels and group texts with raised-eyebrow emojis.
Iris stared at it. Her face felt hot. The words the wife sat on the screen like an accusation, reducing her to a role in someone else's scandal.
She closed the app and set the phone on the drafting table.
Her hands were trembling again, but this time it wasn't anger.
It was exposure — the sick, lurching feeling of being seen when you didn't choose to be visible.
People would read that and know. Not who, not yet, but soon.
These things didn't stay blind for long, not when the tech press in Seattle was a small ecosystem and Gavin's face was on the cover of Puget Sound Business Journal twice a year.
Her phone buzzed. A notification from her banking app.
She picked it up and watched the screen populate: a wire transfer, completed, into her personal checking account. Two million dollars. From an account she recognized as one of Gavin's personal holdings — not a joint account, not a business account. His money.
The memo line read: Whatever you need.
Iris sat with it for thirty seconds. She let herself feel the full weight of what he was doing — the instinct to fix, to provide, to write a check large enough to cover the distance between them.
Two million dollars. Not because she needed it, but because spending was the language he spoke most fluently, and he was reaching for the only vocabulary he trusted.
She opened her banking app, initiated a return transfer for the full amount, and typed in the memo line: I don't need your money. I need you to have not done this.
She sent it. Watched the confirmation screen. Set the phone facedown on the drafting table and pressed her fingers to her eyelids until the pressure made colors bloom in the darkness.
#
The art supplies were in a storage bin under the daybed.
Iris hadn't opened it since moving the last of Constance's things after the funeral two years ago, and the plastic lid stuck when she tried to pry it off.
She worked it loose with her fingernails and lifted it to find everything exactly as she'd packed it — tubes of oil paint, most of them half-used, a jar of turpentine with the cap crusted shut, a roll of canvas, brushes in a zippered case.
Her brushes, not Constance's. She'd brought them here after the wedding, when the Eastside house had a dedicated room for a studio that somehow became Gavin's home office within the first year.
She unrolled the canvas on the floor and cut a piece to fit the easel that still stood in the corner by the north-facing window.
Constance's easel — a battered wooden H-frame with paint splatters so old they'd become part of the grain.
Iris stretched the canvas over a frame she found leaning against the wall, tacking it with the small hammer and tacks from Constance's supply drawer.
The work was mechanical and absorbing. Her hands remembered the sequence even though her mind had let it go.
She set the stretched canvas on the easel and stepped back.
The studio was quiet. Late afternoon light came through the north window at a low angle, turning the air gold.
Above her, Constance's glow-in-the-dark constellations were invisible in the daylight — faint circles of paint on the ceiling, waiting for dark to become something.
The room smelled of cedar and turpentine and the particular mineral scent of the lake coming through the open windows.
Iris stood in front of the blank canvas and did not pick up a brush.
She didn't know what she wanted to paint.
She didn't know if she could still paint at all — four years was a long time to leave a muscle unused, and the doubt was louder than she'd expected.
But she stood there anyway, arms at her sides, and let herself look at the white surface without demanding anything from it.
She'd spent the last five days demanding things from herself — composure, clarity, strategy.
Standing here, she demanded nothing. She just looked.
The light shifted. The gold deepened toward amber.
Shadows moved across the canvas in slow, predictable patterns — the mast of a neighboring sailboat, the angle of the window frame.
She watched the shadows travel and thought about all the blank surfaces in her life.
The marriage that was now a legal filing.
The career she'd put in a storage bin. The version of herself she'd folded up and packed away to make room for a man who hadn't made room for her.
She stood there until the light was gone, and in the dark, the constellations above her glowed.