I feel sorry for him.”
I took the coat.
It was soft and expensive. It smelled like perfume, rain, and betrayal.
“What does Adrian say his wife does?” I asked.
Celeste laughed lightly. “Something dull with warehouses. Shipping, maybe? He said she inherited a small family business and acts like she built an empire.”
I let that sit between us.
There was no inheritance. There was no family business. I started Northline Distribution when Adrian was still renting a windowless room above a frame shop and calling himself an undiscovered curator. I started with two used delivery trucks, one folding desk, and a baby monitor beside my keyboard because our son, Leo, was six months old and Adrian was always at one more important dinner.
Fourteen years later, Northline had four hundred employees, government contracts, medical supply routes, and a scholarship partnership with Westbridge Academy.
Westbridge Academy, where Celeste’s mother worked as assistant head of admissions.
Celeste did not know that.
People rarely know the structure holding up the floor they dance on.
She wandered into the living room and touched the back of my grandmother’s piano. Her nails were pale pink, perfect half-moons tapping against the polished wood.
“Adrian hates this thing,” she said. “We’ll probably sell it.”
“No,” I said.
She turned, surprised.
“No?”
“I mean, I wouldn’t move that without asking the owner.”
“The owner is Adrian.”
I looked at the staircase. At the framed photographs on the wall. Adrian and me in our twenties, thin and hopeful outside the courthouse. Adrian holding Leo at the beach. Adrian at his first gallery opening, smiling beside a ribbon he had cut with scissors I steadied because his hands were trembling from too much champagne.
“Is he?” I asked.
Celeste’s eyes narrowed. It was the first time she seemed to notice that I was not behaving like staff.
Then arrogance returned and rescued her from thinking too deeply.
“Could you bring me sparkling water?” she asked. “Lime if you have it. Adrian said the staff here were discreet.”
I went to the kitchen.
The moment I was alone, I braced both hands against the counter. My reflection stared back from the dark oven door: thirty-nine years old, hair twisted into a loose knot, dirt on one cheek, eyes too calm for what was happening.
I was not crying.
That surprised me.
Maybe grief needs room, and anger had filled all of it.
I took out my phone and opened Adrian’s messages. Our last exchange was from that morning. He had written that he was meeting an investor from Milan at the gallery and might be late.
I typed: Come home. The investor from Milan is here.
His reply came in eight seconds.
What? At the house?
I wrote: She says it cannot wait.
He answered: Keep her there. I’m close.
I stared at those words until they rearranged themselves into something colder.
He was close.
Not at the gallery. Not with an investor. Close enough to rush home because he believed a wealthy buyer had arrived unexpectedly.
I poured tap water into a crystal glass, added three melting ice cubes, and did not look for lime.
When I returned, Celeste was standing at the mantel, holding our wedding photo.
“Is this the wife?” she asked.
“Yes.”
She studied the
