Page 23 of Neglected By Her CEO Husband

"Nope," I said with a sigh. "Nothing."

"Nothing as in he dropped the ball and didn't do much, or nothing as in he didn't even know it happened?"

"Nothing as in he doesn't know it happened." I loaded the brush. "There's no secretary to remind him this year. So I didn't remind him either. I wanted to see what he would do."

"Maddie."

"I'm not even angry anymore. That's the part that should scare me." I cut a darker line along the sill. "Now I'm just keeping track. It's been a week. I want to see how long it takes him to work it out on his own. If he ever does."

Ellie was quiet a second, which never happens.

"That's not you being curious," she said. "That's you keeping score. People only keep score when they've already started counting their way out the door."

I didn't answer. She was right. I just hadn't said it out loud yet, even to myself.

Kellan looked over from his easel. He'd heard the whole thing and had the sense to stay out of it until now.

"Put that one in the spring exhibition," he said, nodding at the window.

"Maybe," I murmured. "If I ever finish."

"Stop saying that. Done is just where a person got tired." He went back to his canvas. "It's the best thing on either of these easels. Put it in."

I looked at the hard, honest light on the sill. I thought about the white room off the main floor, my name penciled on the spring wall in Ellie's head for weeks now.

"Alright," I said. "The wall. I'll take it."

Ellie didn't squeal or hug me. She dug the marker out of the drawer and wrote my name on the gallery calendar, where she'd have to cross it out instead of erase it. Then she went back to her invoices.

"You should call that woman back when it's done," Kellan said, not looking up from his diner. "The one who left the card."

"You were eavesdropping."

"Constantly. It's how I learn things." He loaded his brush. "She was right not to let you off with not finished, by the way. You hide behind that. Not finished is just a thing scared people say so nobody can decide they're done."

"That belongs on a mug too."

"Everything good does."

I went back to the painting, smiling.

The question came back to me on the drive home. A week. He'd had a week. I'd stopped checking my phone for him. For the first time in eight years I hadn't built the evening around what he might or might not do. I had paint on my hands and the radio up and a show of my own in the spring, and the marriage rode in the back seat where I could see it and didn't have to look.

The house was dark when I got back. It usually was now. I didn't mind it anymore. I made tea and carried it down the hall to the studio and worked the window another hour with my coat still on. Damon's side of the closet was untouched, his car gone, and I'd stopped keeping track of where he was. For eight years I'd known his location every hour of the day. I'd quit, and the world hadn't ended.

14

DAMON

For the first time in a month, we had something to swing back with.

Emily and her team took apart the study Brighton's people had used to knock our trial off course, and the flaws in it were real. Whoever ran it never corrected for time of day on the cardiac draws, exactly like she'd called it in the first week.

On its own it didn't clear us. It put the doubt back on the study, and after a month of taking the hits, doubt was the best thing anyone had handed me. We briefed it quietly to a few reporters who knew the science, and inside a couple of days the coverage stopped reading like a verdict.

The story turned into a question, and the question was the independent trial, the one nobody had results for yet. People stopped writing our obituary and started saying wait and see. The stock clawed back a third of what it had lost. We weren't out of the woods. We were just no longer the easy story to write.

My father called, which he did a few times a month, and told me I'd bought us a fighting chance. From him that was practically a parade. He said Emily had been worth every dollar. I took the call standing at my window. It was the most he'd given me in years, and it had her name in it.