I couldn’t face the idea of sitting on it in a Snuggie without her, though.
I turned and walked into my bedroom. A moth floated in the glass on my bedside table, wings sticking to the surface. I tipped the glass slightly, but it was already dead.
You decide. Foreveryone.
That wasn’t fair. Context matters. Intent matters.
I’d even told her my reasons for buying Novexia, and she’d said she understood.
But maybe she didn’t—how could she? Unless you’d held someone in your arms while they werebleeding—
No. Nothing was more important than that. This was the right thing to do.
I sat on the bed and pulled off my shirt, then my shoes and socks.
She hadn’t even let me stay and sort it out.
I’d had no idea she was harboring so much resentment about the cuts, no idea this was coming.
Why the fuck hadn’t she told me? If we didn’t talk about things that mattered, how could we ever expect to go thedistance?
Would she message me? Say she was sorry, ask to talk? I checked my phone, but there weren’t any texts from her, not one.
Should I just drive back over there, right now? Force her to talk to me, explain it to her again?That this was important, what I was doing with Novexia. Perhaps if I just—
No.
No point, until I knew what had really happened with the painting. That was what had triggered all this, and somehow upended everything that I’d stupidly thought was so perfect between us.
Bonnie would know the deal with the Roth Holdings payment. I scrolled to her name. She’d explain it in five words and make the whole thing slot back into order.
But I didn’t want to talk to Bonnie.
I locked the screen and walked across the room, the stone cold under my feet.
Out on the terrace, the city stretched below me, lights scattered across the dark, traffic threading through it. This was how effective systems worked. Not flawlessly, but predictably.
Whatever helps you live withyourself.
I rested my hands on the balcony and watched it. Eventually, I went back inside and turned the lights off one by one. Then I lay on my bed and stared at the ceiling, waiting for the right move to present itself.
It didn’t.
There wasn’t a lever for this.
*
“Here it is. Seventeen K.” Bonnie’s finger underlined the number on the screen. “It’s on the Ashfern Art Advisory invoice. Everything goes through on one monthly statement.”
“This is Andrea’s piece?”
“Yes,” she said. “Alexandrea L. Jones. Lot thirty-eight. Logged as a Montclair acquisition. Buyer of record is Roth Holdings. Delivery to Dennis Parker.”
“Dex?”
“It’s recorded as a corporate gift.”
“A seventeen-thousand-poundgift? ForDex?”
