Page 15 of Neglected By Her CEO Husband

"I bet on last month's version of you. Happy to lose it." She held me at arm's length and looked at my face. "You look tired."

"I'm fine."

"You said that too fast for it to be true." She tugged me by the wrist. "Come on. Let me show you the bones of it before someone drops a Rothko knockoff on my foot."

It was a group show, eight artists, going up over two days. Half the walls were hung and half stood bare with pencil marks where the frames would go. There were crates everywhere and bubble wrap on the floor and a man on a ladder having an argument with a level.

Ellie walked me past what was already up and stopped me in front of a row of small kitchen scenes. A sink full of dishes. An open fridge at night, throwing its light across a linoleum floor.

"First-timer," she said. "Twenty-three. Paints her own apartment like it's a cathedral."

I leaned in. The fridge light was doing something I couldn't have managed at that age. "It's good."

"I know. I have an eye, it's my whole job." She glanced at me. "You used to have one too."

"I still have it. I just point it at seating charts now."

"Tragic waste if you ask me." She kept moving.

She took me down the line. A wall of big loose florals that looked like they'd been painted angry. A row of photographs of empty swimming pools. One huge canvas, nearly black, that you had to stand in front of a while before it gave anything up. A figure first, then a doorway, then someone standing half out of the frame. I stood there longer than I'd stood anywhere in months, and Ellie watched me do it and let me.

I couldn't keep holding a coffee while she worked. "Put me to work. I mean it."

"God, yes." She pushed a stack of little placards and a roll of mounting putty into my hands. "Labels. Eye level, left of the piece, dead straight. If they're crooked I'll see it, and then I'll see it at three in the morning, and then you'll hear about it."

We worked down the wall together. She hung, I labeled. For a while it was the level and the tap of the hammer and the green-haired girl somewhere behind us swearing at a roll of tape.

"So how's the house of Sterling," Ellie said, not looking at me, pressing a frame flush.

"Quiet. He's at the office past midnight most nights now. More than ever, and it was already a lot."

"Since Emily?"

"Since Emily."

I pressed a label and smoothed it straight. "There are stories now. Two of them. One of the business sites ran a piece about the two of them in college, with a photo I'd never seen. The comments are full of strangers making timelines between their relationship and mine."

She grimaced. "You're reading comments."

"I'm trying not to. It's harder than it sounds. You promise yourself you won't, and then it's midnight and you're four hundred replies deep into people you'll never meet deciding what your marriage is."

"Did he say anything? About not telling you she was coming?"

"He called it a personnel decision. He said there was nothing to tell."

Ellie set the hammer down. "A personnel decision."

"His words."

"Okay. I'm going to say something, and you can slap me after if you want, but I have to say it. I have never understood why you stay with him. Not since her. Before her. Years before."

I got the next label straight before I answered. "There was no before Emily."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning she was always involved on some level. She had already rejected Damon when we got together, but he was still holding out hope. She's the reason I was the 'sensible' choice to begin with." I peeled the backing off a placard. "She left for her program, and both families looked at what was left of him and saw a gap, and I was the right size to fill it. The girl who'd be a good Sterling and not ask for much. I knew that signing up."

Ellie was quiet a second. "So that explains back then. Why put up with eight years of it?"