All Chapters of Chasing His Divorced Wife: Chapter 61 - Chapter 68

ELARA'S POVRobert Chen brought seventeen photographs on a Thursday afternoon in late July.He spread them on the large table in my office above the gallery, careful with each one, the way you handle things that belong to someone who is gone. His father's name was Henry Chen and he painted in Vancouver from the 1960s until his death in 1997, working in a tradition that sat between abstract expressionism and something more personal and harder to categorize.The photographs showed work that stopped me.Not immediately. I looked through the first five with professional interest and then the sixth one made me go still. A large canvas, blues and greys with something underneath that pulled the eye inward. The kind of work that asked you to stay rather than move on."How large is this one?" I asked."Six feet by four. It's in storage with the others.""How many like this?""Eight or nine of that scale. The rest are smaller studies."I looked through the remaining photographs carefully."Robe

ELARA'S POVI flew in on a Tuesday, without Damien, who had board meetings running through the week. This was my trip. Richard visits, the apartment, the art. I'd been clear about that and he'd been clear about respecting it.Richard's apartment was on the Upper East Side, different from the Cross family penthouse where Damien and I had lived during the marriage. That building had been sold two years ago. This was Richard's own space, smaller, chosen by him rather than inherited.Gerald the nurse let me in. Richard was in the sitting room in a chair by the window with a chess board set up on the table beside him, mid-game against himself or against a problem he'd been given. He stood when I came in, slowly but completely, the physical therapy evident in how deliberate and successful the movement was."Elara." He gestured to the chair across from him.I sat. Gerald brought coffee without being asked and disappeared.The apartment was what I'd expected. Expensive furniture chosen for st

ELARA'S POVMy mother had stopped asking if we were coming and started asking what time we were arriving, which was the distinction that mattered. We were expecting. That was new in the best way.Damien brought the chess set again and a bottle of wine and a book my father had mentioned in passing three months ago that Thomas had completely forgotten mentioning but received with the recognition of someone who'd been thinking about it without realizing it."You wrote it down," my father said."Notes app," Damien said. "I keep one for everyone."My father looked at him for a moment. "Smart system.""Elara taught me. She's been doing it for years."Thomas looked at me. I shrugged. He went back to examining the book and I caught Damien's eye across the room and he looked away before either of us smiled.Christmas dinner was the usual production, my mother's cooking filling the house with the smell of something that required two days of preparation and disappeared in forty minutes. We sat a

ELARA'S POVMarch arrived and with it the news that Marcus Webb had started a new company.Damien read about it in the financial press on a Tuesday morning over coffee and mentioned it the way you mention something that has become genuinely irrelevant."Consulting firm," he said. "Focused on distressed assets.""Appropriate.""My thought exactly."He put his phone down and finished his coffee and that was the entirety of the Marcus Webb conversation. Two years ago that name would have required management, strategy, contingency planning. Now it was two sentences over breakfast.That was its own kind of progress.I booked Croatia the same week. Thirteen days in May, starting on the fifteenth. The islands south of Split that we hadn't reached last time, smaller and less visited, the kind of places that required ferries and some tolerance for uncertainty.Damien looked at the itinerary I sent him and said nothing about the ferry portions.Progress there too.The Henry Chen catalogue had i