Harper
I don’t remember the taxi ride. I must have paid the driver, because I am suddenly standing in the marble entryway of the penthouse, the heavy door clicking shut behind me. The sound echoes in the cavernous silence. Damian is not here. Of course he isn’t. He is with Isla, probably celebrating the successful completion of our ‘business arrangement’.
The air is cold, sterile. It always is. The place feels more like a modern art museum than a home, all white walls, polished chrome, and glass. A space designed to be looked at, not lived in. My burgundy velvet dress feels garish and loud in the monochrome silence. I slip off my heels, the soft leather making no sound on the imported Italian stone.
My reflection stares back at me from a floor to ceiling mirror. A woman in a party dress with smudged mascara and hollow eyes. A decorative object. Decommissioned.
A switch flips in my brain. The shock recedes, leaving behind a humming, electric rage. I walk to the master bedroom, my bare feet cold on the floor. His closet is a wall of dark suits, all identical. My side is a curated collection of jewel toned gowns and demure cocktail dresses. The uniform of Mrs. Vance. I ignore it all. In the back, tucked away, are two cardboard boxes. My things. The things that were mine before him.
I pull them out. The movers can have the rest. They can have the designer clothes, the shoes, the handbags. They are not mine. They were part of the compensation package. I find a single suitcase, one I brought into this marriage, and I start to fill it.
My worn copy of Vasari’s ‘Lives of the Artists’. My collection of monographs on Renaissance painters. My research notes from my master’s program, the ones I told myself I would get back to someday. A small, tarnished silver locket from my grandmother. That’s it. That’s all of me that exists in this place.
The rest of my life is packed in boxes in a storage unit, relegated there because Damian found my old art books and research papers ‘clutter’.
I change out of the velvet dress, letting it fall in a crumpled heap on the white carpet. I pull on a pair of old jeans and a sweater from one of the boxes. They feel like a second skin. They feel like me.
An hour later, I am standing in the doorway of a small apartment on the other side of the city. The key felt foreign in my hand, but it turned. The address was in the divorce papers, under ‘Arranged Temporary Residence’. The air inside smells of dust and old wood and lavender air freshener. There is a sagging sofa, a mismatched armchair, and a bed in a small alcove. The walls are exposed brick, and a large, multi paned window looks out onto a tangle of fire escapes. It is small. It is imperfect. It is the most beautiful place I have ever seen.
My suitcase and two boxes sit on the floorboards, looking ridiculously small in the empty space. I don’t know what to do next. Do I unpack? Do I cry? Do I scream?
The buzzer shrieks, a jarring, angry sound that makes me jump. I press the talk button, my hand trembling.
“Who is it?”
“It’s the wrath of God, here to smite a bastard and deliver wine. Let me up before I kick the door down.”
Maya.
A laugh, thin and watery, escapes my lips. I buzz her in. A few moments later, my door bursts open and she storms in, a force of nature in a leather jacket. Her dark hair is a chaotic halo, and her eyes are blazing. She has two bottles of red wine in one hand and a corkscrew in the other.
“I called his office. His personal line. I left a message that would make a sailor blush,” she says without preamble. She slams the door shut with her foot. “Then I called your tracker.”
“My what?”
“The tracker I put on your phone after he ‘lost’ you in Paris that one time. Now, where are the glasses? Or are we drinking from the bottle? I’m fine with the bottle.”
“I don’t have any glasses, Maya.”
“Of course you don’t.” She scans the empty room, her gaze softening for a fraction of a second when it lands on me. “Right. Bottles it is.”
She twists the corkscrew into one of the bottles with practiced efficiency and yanks the cork out. She hands the bottle to me. “Drink.”
I take it. The neck is cool against my palm. I take a long swallow of the dark red wine. It’s cheap and burns a little on the way down, a welcome, grounding pain.
Maya opens the second bottle for herself and takes a drink, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. We stand there in the middle of the empty room, drinking from our respective bottles.
“I want to kill him,” she says, her voice quiet but vibrating with fury.
“It was a business arrangement,” I hear myself say, the words sounding absurd in this dusty room. “The contract concluded.”
Maya lets out a string of curses that are both creative and anatomically impossible. “A business arrangement? You gave up everything for that man. You were the most promising art historian to come out of that program in a decade, Harper. You had a fellowship to the Uffizi lined up.”
“He needed me here,” I whisper, the old excuse tasting like lies on my tongue.
“He needed a prop,” she spits. “A beautiful, intelligent prop he could show off at his boring dinners. He didn’t want a partner. He wanted an accessory. And God forbid his accessory have a brain or a passion of her own.”
I sink down to the floor, my back against the brick wall. The floor is gritty beneath my jeans. Maya sits down opposite me, crossing her legs.
“Do you remember that paper you wrote?” she asks, taking another swig of wine. “On the underdrawings of the Venetian School? Professor Albright said it was doctoral level work. He said you had ‘the eye’. That you could feel a forgery.”
“Damian said it was a hobby.” I look down into the dark wine in my bottle. “He said it was decorative. A waste of his money.”
“His money?” Maya’s voice is dangerously soft. “The money you helped him make by charming the pants off every crusty old board member and their snobbish wives? The money you secured for him when you spotted that fake Renoir at the Henderson gala before he dropped ten million on it? Did he forget that part of your ‘useless’ education?”
I had forgotten. I had buried it. Damian had been ecstatic that night, in private. He praised my sharp eye. The next day, he told me it was best not to mention it to anyone. It would look ‘unseemly’ for his wife to be involved in the technical aspects of his acquisitions.
“He said it was a lucky guess,” I murmur.
“A lucky guess,” Maya repeats, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “Right. And the Mona Lisa is just a decent sketch. He didn’t just divorce you, Harper. He spent five years methodically dismantling you. He took your passion and called it a hobby. He took your talent and called it luck. He took your future and locked it in a storage unit.”
Her words are brutal, sharp edged stones, but they don’t hurt. They lance the wound. They let the poison out.
“Why did I let him?” I ask the room, the wine, the crumbling brick. “Why did I just… agree? Why didn’t I fight?”
“Because you were in love,” Maya says, and for the first time, her voice is gentle. “And you thought he was too. Because he sold you a beautiful lie and you were a willing buyer. There’s no shame in that. The shame is all his.”
We drink in silence for a while. The city hums outside the big window. Sirens wail in the distance. This small room feels like a sanctuary. A raft in the middle of a storm.
“That little blonde intern,” I say, the image of Isla’s triumphant face flashing in my mind. “Isla. She was wearing my life before I had even vacated it.”
“She’s an idiot,” Maya says flatly. “A vapid, social climbing parasite. She’ll bore him in six months. A year, tops. Men like Damian don’t want a partner. They just want a newer model of the same accessory.”
I take another long drink from the bottle. The wine is making my head fuzzy, but my thoughts are becoming clearer. The rage is still there, a hot coal in my stomach, but something else is stirring beside it. A cold, quiet clarity.
“He decommissioned me,” I say. “Like an asset that was no longer required.”
“Then you need to revalue yourself.” Maya leans forward, her dark eyes intense. “You are not some stock he can just dump when the market turns, Harper. You’re a goddamn masterpiece, locked in a vault for five years. It’s time to take yourself back to auction.”
I look at her, at the fierce, unwavering loyalty in her face. I look at the two cardboard boxes that hold the last surviving remnants of the woman I used to be.
He thought my knowledge was useless. A waste of money. He thought I was just something decorative.
I lift the wine bottle. “To bad investments,” I say, my voice raw.
Maya touches her bottle to mine, the glass making a dull clink in the quiet room. “To making him pay for every single cent.”
