Page 33 of Neglected By Her CEO Husband

DAMON

Curtis let himself in on a Sunday. He didn't call first. He stood in the doorway of the kitchen and took in the cereal bowl in the sink and the unopened mail and the radio talking to no one, and his face did something I'd never seen it do at me, which was pity.

"Sit down," he said. "I'm only going to say this once, and you're going to let me, because I'm the only person in this world who both loves and hates you enough to be honest."

I sat down.

"Maddie is the best thing that ever happened to this family and to you," Curtis said. "Mom knows it. Quin knows it. Even Dad knows it, even if it's only by the numbers. I've known it for eight years, and I watched you treat her like the thermostat, something that kept the house comfortable and you never thought about unless it broke. We all watched. We all said nothing, because that's what this family does, we let the man with the most leverage have his way and we call it respect. So this is partly on me too. But it's mostly on you."

"I know I—" I started.

"I'm not finished." He didn't raise his voice but his words were enough. "The thing at the investor event. It's made the rounds. Taylor was there. Half the board was there. You stood in a room and let your researcher humiliate your wife and then you walked off with the researcher to make a phone call. But that's the sanitized version, isn't it? Because Emily isn't just your head of Research and Development, she's your ex."

I grimaced, because when he said it like that, it sounded… like exactly what it was. What I'd been pretending it wasn't. And the worst part was, I'd expected—demanded—my wife to do the same.

"People saw it, Damon. And here's the part you need to hear with your whole chest, because you've spent your life not hearing things that didn't flatter you. Nobody is on your side. Not Mom. Not Quin. Not me. Dad might understand, but if I were you, I'd take that as a wakeup call rather than reassurance. We are all, every one of us, on Maddie's side, because Maddie is the one who's earned it."

I didn't say anything. There was nothing to say.

"You want to fix it," he went on. "I can see you wanting to fix it, you've got that look you get before a deal but there's no deal here. This isn't a thing you fix with a trip or a necklace or a good month while you wait for the next crisis to turn you back into who you actually are. And like it or not, what you're becoming is our father. Some things you break stay broken. You may have broken this all the way. You have to make your peace with the real chance that the answer is no, forever, and that it will be the correct answer, and that you'll have earned it."

"Then what do I do." My voice came out hoarse and broken because he was right about that, too. About all of it. Me becoming my father. The very real possibility that I had ruined the best thing in my life and she was never going to walk through that door again. "If I can't fix it, what do I even do?"

Curtis looked at me for a long moment, and the pity turned into something harder and more useful.

"You become a man worth her forgiveness," he said. "Quietly. With no audience and no expectation. You do the work whether or not it ever buys you a single thing, because it's the right work and you're eight years overdue on it. And then, if you ever get the chance, you tell her the truth, and you hand her every bit of the leverage, and you let her decide. No pressure. No closing argument. You let it be the one thing in your life you don't control. That's it. That's the whole of what's left to you. I'm sorry. You did this, but I'm still sorry."

He stood. He didn't hug me. We're not built for it. He squeezed my shoulder once, hard, and let himself out, and I sat at the island in the quiet she used to fill and finally, fully, with nothing left to bargain with, understood what I'd done.

25

MADDIE

I'd stopped moving.

The fortnight Sylvie offered me in her studio had turned into something longer, and we never put a date on it, because she liked another pair of hands at the brushes and I liked a reason to stay still.

The town was small and white and stacked above a harbor, and the light came off the water like nowhere else on earth, which was why painters had been coming down here for a hundred years to lose their minds over it.

I got up over a bakery's croissants and espresso every morning and walked the same three streets to the studio and painted windows. More windows, the same plain sills and the same hard grudging light, and no two of them came out the same. That was the discovery I'd crossed an ocean to make.

I'd spent eight years certain I had one good painting in me and that it was behind me. I had a hundred in front of me. They'd been waiting for me to stop running a house long enough to let them out.

No one in that town needed a single thing from me, and that took the longest to get used to. For eight years I'd walked into every room already reading it, who hadn't been greeted, whose glass had gone empty, which conversation was tilting toward trouble and where to stand to catch it. I did it without deciding to. Here there was no room to read. There was a wall and a brush and Sylvie humming something tuneless across the studio and my own work drying in a row, and it took me weeks to stop scanning for whatever needed me, and longer to believe the answer was nothing.

The baker downstairs called me the painter and never asked for more than that. I bought the same bread every morning and he never once needed me to be charming about it.

Sylvie watched me work the way one painter watches another, which is to say she left me alone and only spoke when it mattered. One morning she stopped behind me at the window I'd been fighting for three days, the harbor going flat and silver under bad weather, and she said, in her careful English, that I painted like a woman apologizing, and that I should stop. I asked her what she meant.

She said I kept softening the ugly corner, tucking the gray back under, making the picture easier to live with. It was similar enough to what Kellan had told me that I believed her.

I had spent eight years tucking the gray back into every room I walked into. It turned out I'd been doing it to my own work too, and no one had ever told me, because no one had ever looked at it long enough to notice. Until Ellie and Kellan and Sylvie, I had never let anyone look.

Other than Damon. I had given him the same access to my paintings he had to the rest of me, but he'd never really looked at them.

A dealer came in one afternoon during somebody else's open day. He'd driven down from Paris for an opening two doors along and had an hour before his train. He walked the studio without once looking at me, which is its own kind of manners, and stopped in front of the meanest window I'd hung, the one where the light goes gray and stingy along the bottom edge. He stood there a long while saying nothing. Then he asked Sylvie, in French, who had made it, and she tipped her chin at me.

My French was getting good enough to listen, but speaking was still iffy.