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“What?” I squeal, shaking my head. “No—” I can feel my chest heating again. “It’s not Patrick. He would never do something like that.” I stand there, stunned and stupid. “Wait—you’re not mad?”
“Hell yes, I’m mad,” she says. “I’m fucking furious.” She sits on the edge of my bed and sighs. “I’m furious for you, Cari. Not at you. Do you know who released it? Ex-boyfriend?”
A breath I didn’t even know I was holding whooshed out of my lungs. “How’d you guess?”
“It’s always an ex-boyfriend,” she says like everything is settled.
“You’re not going to fire me?”
“For what?” she says. “For being a human being?”
“Keeping me around could ruin you.” I shake my head. “I won’t stay if it means trouble for you.”
“This is art, dear-heart—not politics.” Miranda kicks off her heels and curls her legs underneath her. “I wouldn’t be surprised if this whole thing doesn’t triple my business... now, are you going to show me these paintings Chase has been mooning over or not?”
I unstack the canvases carefully, arranging them in chronological order. The first one is the painting Chase saw—the one I painted of Patrick the night he drove me home. The last is half-finished and still on my easel. I turn it around so she can see it.
I leave her to look while I go into the kitchen to root around in the fridge. Patrick is right. All we have to eat is blueberry yogurt and ketchup. I think about the grocery list we made together in the shower this morning. Suddenly, I’m not hungry anymore.
Through the doorway, I can see Miranda. She’s not sitting anymore. She’s wandering along the line of canvases, propped along the wall, stopping to hunker down every once in a while, her face close, fingertips hovering a breath above the paint, tracing the air above each brush stroke. Steeling myself, I slip back inside and sit on the edge of my bed. I want to ask her what she thinks. If I’m any good. But I don’t. I tell myself it’s because I don’t care but that’s not why.
I don’t ask because I do.
Finally, she stands. “I was married once,” she says, talking without looking at me. “We were kids. Barely twenty—too young, really but he was an artist,” she said as if that explained everything. “Gorgeous. Talented. We met at a small art school in Maine. He was there on a scholarship. I got in because my parents were rich and not above throwing their money around.” Miranda laughs, but the sound is short and bitter. “All the girls wanted him… he was perfect. And he wanted me. Loved me and I loved him back. So much I thought I’d die from it.” She moves down the line, stopping in front of the painting I did of Patrick a few months ago. He’s at his drafting table, head bent slightly. Pencil between his teeth, another one behind his ear. He has CAD machines and computers in the office he shares with Declan, but at home, he still works with a pencil. “We were married for eight hundred twenty days. And I spent every single one of them wondering why he chose me.”
“What happened?” I ask her because I suddenly want to know. I want to know how someone else screwed up because maybe someone else’s suffering will salve the gaping wound in my chest.
“I couldn’t stop wondering,” she says, still wandering down the row of paintings. “I couldn’t accept that someone so perfect could really love someone like me.” She stops in front of the painting I did yesterday morning. The one of Patrick sleeping in the sun. “It bothered me.” She shrugs before hunkering down to study the canvas in front of her. “Confused me. The more I worried it, the more confused I became. Insecure. Angry. Resentful.”
“What was wrong with you?” I say, half to myself. “Why wouldn’t he want you?”
“I could paint, but he was miles ahead of me. I was technically good but lacked the passion it takes to be exceptional.” She stands slowly and moves down the line. “The girls we went to school with were so much… better suited for him than I was. I was boring. Too reserved to be considered fun. Too severe to be considered pretty. Soon it became common knowledge in our social circle that the only reason he married me was because my parents were wealthy.” Her lips twist again, into a rueful smile. “Every starving artist needs a benefactor.”
“He left you.” It wasn’t a question, it was a prediction of the way things would end between Patrick and me. He said he loved me, but he didn’t really. Couldn’t possibly. Someday, he’d realize that, and he’d leave.
“No.” Miranda stopped walking and looked at me. “I went to my father and told him I made a mistake. That I didn’t love him anymore and I wanted to make him go away.” She shakes her head, a small humorless smile patched to her face. “He was relieved, of course. Cut me a check on the spot… even he thought Everett married me for my money.”
Everett. Everett Chase. Chase was the artist Miranda had been married to.
Before I can say anything, she continues. “I gave him the check from my father and told him he was free. He didn’t have to pretend to love me anymore. That I knew. Understood.”
“What did you understand?” I hear myself ask, even though I know.
“That someone as perfect as him could never love someone like me,” she says with a soft, sad laugh. “That he could do better. Deserved better. Was better.” She closes the space between us and sits next to me, perching herself on the edge of the bed. “You know what he did? He tore the check up and threw it in my face. He told me he loved me but couldn’t spend forever convincing me of a truth I’d never let myself believe.” Her lips twitch a quick, sad smile. “And then he left me.”
“Did it hurt,” I say quietly, gaze fixed on the painting of Patrick sleeping in the sun. “Did it hurt when he left you?”
“It still hurts,” she tells me, face aimed at the bank of windows overlooking the harbor. “I was stupid. I let other people and my own insecurities push us apart. I couldn’t believe in him. In us. I didn’t trust him to know what he wanted because what he wanted was me and I wasn’t enough. I never was.”
“But you’re friends now,” I say hopefully. “You were able to get past it.”
“We did. We are,” Miranda says, a small smile touching her lips. “Chase and I will always be friends. But we should’ve been more.”
“Maybe there’s still time.” Desperation curdles my belly. “Maybe if you—”
Miranda turns, cutting me off with a look. “Does Patrick love you?” She doesn’t ask if I love him. She doesn’t have to. The evidence of it is everywhere I look.
No.