Chapter 1
Breezy
If betrayal had a sound, it would be the rip of packing tape—a life redirected, a stage cut short, an eviction notice from best-laid plans.
If it were something new, I’d let myself be surprised.
But in my family, duplicity isn’t just common; it’s practically an art form. Cheating, arson, divorces, scandals—the Bishops could fill a museum with our disasters and still have leftovers for the archives.
The tape screeches sharply across cardboard and echoes in the newly hollow space of my Chelsea office like a taunt. Go on, Breezy. Pretend this isn’t gutting you. Pretend you’re not dismantling your whole damn life, one box at a time.
I catch my reflection in the big window behind my desk, and a humorless laugh bubbles up.
It’s giving The Walking Dead: Manhattan Socialite Edition.
My makeup is three days old and half sloughed off, my black bob is in wavy disarray, and the same gray dress slacks and white silk shirt I’ve pulled from the dry cleaner’s plastic three too many times tell the tale of a once-successful woman cast aside to the underworld of lost motivation and deep emotional wounds.
I look like shit, I feel like shit, and the lipstick I found rolling around in the bottom of my Birkin bag is the only thing giving the illusion I tried.
Vogue won’t be calling me for a feature spread anytime soon, not that they ever have before—but I looked the part, at least. Right now, I don’t know what the hell role I’m supposed to be playing.
Outside my glass office wall, the gallery hums with life.
Staff members in sleek black outfits flit from one end to the other, adjusting track lighting and arguing over placement for an incoming installation.
Phones ring off the hook at the front desk, and somewhere in the lobby, a patron raises their voice over a billing error.
The symphony of chaos plays on, even as I pack my exit into cardboard boxes in the room that still has my name on the door.
This office—my office for nearly the past two decades of my life inside the most popular and successful branch of Bishop Galleries—has been a place of comfort and confidence since I was eighteen, working part time as a lowly receptionist fielding calls.
I built my career on sweat and fumes until I was the sole person running all the Bishop Gallery locations in the domestic and international markets, and if it weren’t for my blood and tears tinting every facet of operations, there’d be a different damn color on the walls.
And look what good all that sacrifice did you…
My throat tightens reflexively around thickening moisture, but I snort to clear it, swipe my hand down my face, and grab the next stack of newspapers. Tears are not allowed. Sarcasm is my armor, and I’m keeping it on.
My phone lights up on the desk, and I briefly glance at it to see three text message notifications populate.
Logan: Breezy, please. Just pick up.
Logan: We need to talk.
Logan: Where are you?
I have two younger brothers, and for the vast majority of my life, managing them has been my second job.
Logan, the youngest of the three of us, is thirty-two but still plays the baby like it’s his full-time job. Though, I suppose, his actual career as a famous Hollywood actor fits his dramatic, self-serving MO perfectly.
Bennett, on the other hand, is thirty-six and hasn’t been on speaking terms with Logan since an arson-scandal-turned-cheating-scandal blew everything up.
As the art prodigy of the family, Bennett achieved world-renowned success as a barely legal adult, and our father pushed and pushed him until he hit rock bottom and cut off everyone in the family but me.
He escaped to a small town in Vermont called Red Bridge with a medically fragile newborn daughter in tow—a long, painful, bitter story involving an ex who wanted nothing to do with a sick child and just enough pent-up rebellion to turn him into a full-blown recluse.
He’s doing better now, despite a literal ton of heartbreak and loss that robbed us all of my sweet niece Summer over two years ago.
Our mother, on the other hand, wanted us as babies but traded in any pretense of maternal responsibility for flings half her age after our parents divorced decades ago.
Basically, Colleen Bishop is busy sending me tropical selfies with her twenty-eight-year-old surfer boyfriend—whose name I can never remember—while my whole life is going up in flames. Lovely symmetry, really.
And our father, Henry Bishop, is dead.
A month ago, he had a massive heart attack on a European vacation with his twenty-seven-year-old wife Serena, died, and as I’ve come to find out, made one of his most personally vindictive moves to date by leaving all of Bishop Galleries to Logan in his will.
Logan, who couldn’t tell a Basquiat from a Banksy if his life depended on it.
Logan, who’s probably Googling “how to run an art gallery,” in between firing off texts to me.
I ignore my phone, packing away the evidence of my life wasted until the boxes form a sad little cityscape around me. One more box, I tell myself. One more sharp turn toward a dark road I’ve never driven before.
The slam of my office door is violent and jerks me out of my thoughts with no finesse.
Sunglasses shoved into his hair, his leather jacket unzipped, and his usual Hollywood persona of cool at war with unrest, Logan stands in the wake. He looks irritated, but I’d win a contest in that department today.
Seeing as he lives in LA, the last time my baby brother was in New York was at my father’s will-reading two weeks ago, and I haven’t spoken to him since—not that he hasn’t tried.
He’s called and texted ad nauseam since I stormed out after my father’s lawyer announced that he’d gifted Bishop Galleries to Logan—before the rest of the inheritance bullshit was finished—and since it was just the three of us, my absence put quite the dent in the estate attorney’s captive audience.
I’ve got a feeling he still needs me to dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s, but for some enraged reason, I’m not feeling like making it easy.
“Breezy, what is going on? Are your fingers broken? Why aren’t you answering my calls or my texts?” He takes a step inside my bare office, and startled by its appearance, his eyes dart from box to box. “Wait…are you packing?”
“Yes, I am.” These are the first words I’ve spoken to him in over fourteen days, and to be quite honest, I’m surprised they aren’t more colorful.
“You can consider this my formal notice, boss, though you’d have to hit me over the head with something heavy and blunt to convince me to stay for two weeks.
” I slam the tape gun down onto the desk for dramatic effect, but the only real result is a jarred elbow.
“You quit?” he questions, baffled. “Dad’s been gone a month, Breeze. A month. Why in the hell would you quit? Why in the hell—?”
“Get real, Logan. What did you expect me to be doing? Waiting around to babysit your inheritance?”
His jaw slackens enough to ruin his bad-boy, devil-may-care persona, and I know the waterworks are coming soon. Oh Breezy, you can’t do this to me. How am I supposed to do this and Hollywood? Wah, wah, wah.
“Don’t.” My voice is sharp as cut glass.
“Don’t act like this is some big shock. And definitely don’t act like you’re some kind of fucking victim in this.
Dad left everything to you, Logan. Even though you haven’t done shit for Bishop Galleries, you’re the owner now.
I guess congratulations are in order, huh?
” A harsh laugh contrasts with my burning eyes.
“So happy for you, bro. So fucking happy for you.”
Look at that. I found the color shaded fuck.
This hurts. I want to cry, but I wouldn’t dare.
Not with this audience.
My entire life has been wrapped up in my family’s galleries.
This location—Chelsea—and Brooklyn were mine.
But Chicago, Miami, and Paris were my father’s brilliant ideas, which meant they were half disasters that took a hell of a lot of work to build up and keep thriving, but I did it.
Me. Not Logan, not Bennett, not my father or his much younger girlfriend-turned-wife Serena.
The only other Bishop who ever cared as much was my grandfather Harold, who founded it all. If he’d have been alive to see how cavalier my father was about his brainchild, I’d have found out about the diabolical twist in daddy dearest’s will a long time ago.
For nearly twenty years, I’ve been the pulse that’s kept Bishop Galleries alive, and my father’s way of repaying me was to give the galleries to the man who’s never worked a single exhibition.
“He didn’t leave everything to me, Breeze,” Logan retorts. “Just the galleries.”
Just the galleries. Just the galleries.
“I didn’t want anything but the galleries, Logan,” I toss out. “Dad can take the twenty million dollars he pity-lobbed at Bennett and me and shove it straight up his dead, cold ass.”
I still don’t know why my father didn’t leave the galleries to me after the astounding number of conversations we had assuring me he would, but I shouldn’t be surprised. Henry Bishop was prideful and egotistical, and he used people like pawns in his everlasting game of greed and money.
I witnessed the way he treated his own father when he was on his deathbed—not as a fountain of knowledge or a visionary to be thanked, but as a cash cow headed for slaughter.
And when it came time to divide the Bishop fortune with his brother, he flat-out refused.
He always took full credit for Bishop Galleries’ success instead of acknowledging his daughter’s hard work, but I guess I thought the ego of a man died with him.
I never expected him to slice me open from the grave.
“I get you’re angry. I do, Breeze. But how about we take a breath here before we do anything impulsive,” he says cajolingly. “Because this all feels a little crazy to have you just up and fucking quitting on me on a random Monday.”