Lahat ng Kabanata ng SHE WAS NEVER HIS MISTRESS : Kabanata 21 - Kabanata 30

ARIA'S POVThe first painting sold at 7:23 PM, fifty-three minutes after we opened the doors.I know the exact time because I was standing near the back watching the room when Vincent found me with that specific walk of his, the one that meant something worth saying had happened. He leaned close so I could hear him over the crowd. "Elena's large piece, The Henderson’s are asking full price."I nodded like I was calm about it. I was not calm about it.This show had been mine from the beginning. Every artist, every placement, every conversation with collectors about what the work meant and why it mattered. Three months ago I was sleeping on an air mattress in an empty apartment wondering if I still knew how to be a person. Tonight I was standing in a room I had built and it was working.I let myself have thirty seconds of that. Then I went back to work.By eight the room was full. The particular energy of a good opening is different from a polite one. People stay longer. They go back t

ARIA'S POVI didn't know what day it was until joe told me.Not the date. I knew the date. I mean I had stopped tracking how many days since I walked out of my house with one suitcase, which I only realized when I sat down in the coffee shop and couldn't remember the number. Somewhere in the last two weeks it had just stopped mattering.That felt like the most progress I'd made yet.Dominic was already there at the same table, he had the same coffee, his laptop open. He looked up when I came in, and something easy moved across his face. An expression of being happy to see someone.I noticed that I was happy to see him too.Then I noticed that I noticed. Which meant I was cataloging my own feelings about a man I'd met in a coffee shop, which meant things had shifted somewhere without asking my permission.I sat down. Joe brought my flat white without being asked and Dominic closed his laptop.We both looked at the closed laptop for a second."We're not actually working today, are we,"

ARIA'S POVI knew his handwriting before I fully registered what I was looking at.The envelope was sitting in my mailbox between a utility bill and a gallery newsletter, nothing remarkable about it except the way my stomach dropped the moment I saw it. Flynn's handwriting. Small and slightly slanted, the F always bigger than it needed to be.I carried it upstairs without opening it. Set it on the kitchen counter and looked at it for ten seconds. Then I made dinner.Pasta. Simple enough to make without thinking. I stood at the stove, stirred my pasta and didn't look at the counter. I ate at the kitchen table with my back to it and watched half a movie on my laptop that I couldn't have described ten minutes after it ended.I brushed my teeth, turned off the lights and got into bed.Lay there for forty minutes staring at the ceiling.At midnight I got up, walked to the kitchen in the dark, and opened it.I didn't turn the light on. Just stood at the counter with the letter and the thin

FLYNN'S POVThe client dinner ran two hours longer than scheduled because Gerald Mack liked to talk and I'd remembered how to listen.That was the thing about business. It didn't care what your personal life looked like. You showed up, you focused and you made the other person feel like the most important conversation you'd had all week. I'd been good at it once without trying. Tonight I had to try. But I did it, and by the time Gerald was satisfied and the check was handled and we were shaking hands on the sidewalk I'd moved two things forward that had been stalled for months.Harrison would be pleased. I'd tell him tomorrow.I walked back to my car alone. Pearl District on a Friday evening had its particular energy, restaurants full, the kind of foot traffic that meant the city was doing what cities did, people choosing to be out in it, choosing each other.I wasn't paying attention to anything specific.Then I was.The restaurant had big windows, the kind that made the inside visib

FLYNN'S POVHer three sentences arrived on a Tuesday.I was at the mailbox when I opened it, standing in the driveway in the rain because I hadn't bothered with an umbrella. Three sentences on a notecard in her handwriting. I read them twice, water hitting the paper, the ink not running because she'd used a ballpoint, which was exactly the kind of thing Aria would think about without thinking about it.*I understand. I'm not ready to talk. Please don't contact me again.*I stood there until the notecard was damp at the edges. Then I went inside.The Scotch was on the counter where it had been living for two months. I poured two fingers and drank it standing at the kitchen sink looking at nothing in particular. The divorce finalized in thirty days and this was her answer to everything I'd sent her, which was fair exactly what I deserved, and which sat in my chest like a coal that had been there so long I'd stopped noticing the heat.The bottle lasted a week now instead of a month. I'd