Page 12 of Neglected By Her CEO Husband

I turned it over.

Photos ran well. Big day. Caterer needs final head count for Thursday's investor dinner by noon, can you confirm? D.

No mention of Emily. No mention of our conversation last night, if it could be called that.

I shouldn't have been surprised, and I wasn't. Disappointed? Not really. After eight years, I knew better.

The question was, what was that feeling sitting in the pit of my stomach like a rock?

I should have put the phone down. Instead I did the thing I knew I shouldn't, and thumbed past his message into the news.

It led everything. Sterling Bets on Transparency, said the business pages. Pharma Heir Opens the Books. But it was the photo every one of them had chosen that stopped my thumb, the same frame surfacing over and over as I scrolled.

Damon on the platform in his charcoal suit. Emily a step ahead of him in midnight blue, her chin tilted up toward his, both of them caught mid-laugh in the gold light I had ordered hung. Behind them, soft and out of focus, the trailing amaranth I'd chosen the week before. My flowers. My light. My rooftop.

And no me. I'd been standing a half-step behind him when that shutter fired. I was certain of it. The frame had simply trimmed me off the edge, the way a frame always knows what the story is and removes the parts that don't serve it.

The caption under the largest one read: Sterling Pharmaceuticals CEO Damon Sterling with newly appointed Head of R&D Dr. Emily Cavendash, whom Sterling describes as someone he has "known a very long time." Old flame?

I set the phone back down, face to the duvet.

I didn't confirm the head count.

That was the first thing I noticed about myself that morning, still in last night's mascara with the city going about its business beyond the glass. Not that I refused, exactly. I simply didn't, and the not-doing sat there alongside that unnamed emotion in my gut like a coal I'd swallowed by accident and found I didn't entirely want to put out.

The house was its usual cathedral of quiet. I came down the stairs and went the wrong way along the east hall, past the linen closet, past the small room where I kept the family's calendars, to a door at the end with a handle gone faintly dull from a year of nobody touching it.

The studio.

Damon had it built our first year. A wedding gift, he'd called it, back before I understood that most of his gifts were investments wearing bows, and this one had purchased him a wife who stopped asking where the rest of her had gone. North light, he'd told the architect, the way you'd specify a feature on a car. She needs north light. He'd known that much about me, once. The walls were still the clean white I'd chosen. The light still came in cool and level and forgiving, the best light in the whole house, spent now on a room I passed on my way to count napkins.

The air in it had gone stale and close. I crossed and forced the window up on its old runners, and the cool of the morning came in over the sill and lifted the dust, and the room exhaled like it had been holding its breath as long as I had.

My brushes stood in their jar where I'd left them. I lifted one and the bristles had dried stiff and splayed, set hard in a shape by paint I'd never washed out, who knew how many seasons ago. On the easel was the canvas I'd primed one afternoon last autumn, before Curtis's birthday, with an idea I could no longer find anywhere in myself.

I stood in front of the blank canvas and waited to feel something I could use.

Nothing came. No image, no itch under the fingernails, none of the old current. Just a woman holding a ruined brush like a relic of a faith she'd stopped practicing.

I went to put it back and stopped instead at the low shelf under the window, where a stack of sketchbooks leaned in a film of dust, and pulled the top one free. The spine cracked when I opened it, stiff from disuse. The first pages were strangers. People on the train, a man asleep with his chin on his chest, a girl chewing the cap of a pen. Ellie laughing with her head thrown back, charcoal laid down in quick strokes that were more her than any photograph I owned. A study of my own hand. A dozen windows, always windows, always the light coming through.

And then, near the middle, a man in a lecture hall with his jaw on his fist, drawn by someone who plainly thought he hung the stars. Dark hair. A hard, clean line to the mouth. I'd done it the year I met Damon, when wanting him had still felt like something I'd chosen instead of something I'd been handed. I'd sat three rows back in a hall I had no business being in and drawn him instead of listening, and gone home sure that one day he'd look at me the way I was looking at him on the page.

I turned past it, fast, the way you turn past a photograph of someone at a funeral.

But I'd noticed everything, that girl. The light, the strangers, the curve of a sleeping man's neck, the boy she was foolish about. She'd walked through the world with her eyes open and her hands always reaching for a pencil, and somewhere along the way I'd packed her down with all the rest of it.

I laid the sketchbook open on the tray beside the ruined brush. I didn't put either of them away.

Then I found my phone and called Ellie before the part of me that managed everyone's feelings but my own could talk me out of it.

She picked up on the fourth ring, wary. "Maddie."

"You were right," I said. "About the list."

A beat of silence. "Okay. Who is this, and what have you done with my best friend?"

"I mean it. I know it's too late for the show, but I want to see the space. And I want to have lunch with you. A real one, where I don't cancel at the door."