Page 41 of Neglected By Her CEO Husband

He was across the gallery, near the back where the light fell off, alone. No entourage, no photographer, a glass of wine in his hand he plainly hadn't drunk from. From the set of him he'd been there a while, come in quietly during the crush and folded himself out of my sight line on purpose, and he was watching me the way I watched light coming through a window.

I excused myself from the collector mid-sentence. I don't even remember what I said.

"You came," I said, when I reached him.

"An hour ago." He looked guilty about it. "I didn't want to change your night. You were over there being brilliant at people and I didn't want a single one of them turning to look at me instead. So I stood in the cheap seats and watched you have it. I'd have been content to do just that, honestly."

"That would have been a waste of a good suit."

"It's the same suit from the boiler," he said. "It's been through things."

I laughed, and he smiled, and then he reached down and took my hand, the left one, and lifted it, and kissed the bare place where his ring used to sit. He didn't say anything about it. He put my hand back down gently, like returning something borrowed, and the noise of the gallery came back up around us slowly, like a tide.

We walked the wall together after that. He knew the paintings. Not the polite way, the real way, he knew which window was Lisbon and which was the bad-weather harbor from Sylvie's studio, and in front of the meanest one he stood a long time and said nothing at all, which was the right response and the rarest. When I worked, he drifted, found the wine table, talked quietly with Curtis who'd arrived at nine, never once pulled the room's gravity toward himself. A man who'd spent twenty years being the center of every space he entered had found a way to stand in mine like a guest.

By ten the wall was gone. Every painting, every dot.

Damon found me by the desk. "There's a place around the corner that does food this late," he said. "Are you hungry?"

"Starving. But I want to wait a minute. The desk is pulling the tickets, and I want to know who bought the harbor before I let them close out. It sold before the doors opened and it's been bothering me all night."

He chuckled. It started low and he tried to hold it and couldn't, and then he reached into his jacket and took out a folded ticket and handed it to me.

His name. His signature. The harbor, paid in full.

"You," I said.

"Me."

"Why that one?" I looked up at him. "You've seen what I paint now. The windows are the good work, everyone says so, you said so. That one's twelve years old. Why the harbor?"

"Because I've been studying," he said simply. "The better part of a year in your studio, listening to the paintings because I should have been listening to you when you made them. I've looked at everything in that room, every canvas against every wall, and I kept coming back to the harbor. It's you before me, before any of it. The girl who painted that wasn't waiting for anything." He glanced down the long emptied wall, all the little red dots. "I'd have bought all of them. I want you to know the restraint involved. I had the money out, figuratively, the whole wall, and I made myself put it away, because your work deserves to be out in the world and not hoarded in one man's house. I promised myself I was done being selfish with you. Other people should get to live with that light. So I bought the one I couldn't let go of, and I let the world have the rest."

I kissed him.

I didn't decide to. I'd spent months not deciding to, and then I was holding his lapel and kissing him in front of the desk and Ellie and whoever else was left, and his free hand came up and cradled the back of my head like I was made of something that breaks, and he kissed me back the way a man kisses when he's spent half a year not letting himself imagine it.

When I pulled back his eyes stayed closed a second longer, and I watched him come back from somewhere far away.

"Let's go home," I said.

He went very still. "I'll get you a car to the flat."

"Damon." I took the ticket out of his hand, folded it into my clutch, and looked up at my husband. "Take me home."

32

DAMON

She was quiet in the car, her hand in mine on the console, and I drove the whole way home certain that if I said the wrong thing, or possibly anything, she would remember herself and ask me to turn around.

"You're gripping the wheel," she said.

"I'm aware."

"We're just going home, Damon."

"Yeah, and that's a miracle. I'm in a state of shock."