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A crash sounds through the speakers, making me jerk backward with a start. When I return my attention to the screen, she’s tearing the studio apart.
“Shit, Emberly,” I mutter under my breath. “What are you doing? Just stop.”
As she kicks over the table containing her supplies, I send a text to the apartment’s superintendent, ordering him to check on her.
“You’re pregnant, baby. You can’t let yourself get hurt.”
Emberly picks up the canvas and smashes it against the wall, just as her doorbell rings. She pauses, looks around her studio, seeming to have broken out of her rage, and turns around to answer the door.
I watch over her from my car until it gets dark. Only when she’s turned off the lights for the night, do I drive home.
* * *
The next morning, I wake up much later than usual. The app usually broadcasts Emberly in the evening so I can fall asleep, but her sobbing woke me around two-thirty in the middle of the night. She cried for over ninety minutes, and I stayed awake, my heart shattering in tempo with her sobs.
I don’t know if the tears were because of her failure to paint, the hormones, my betrayal, or a combination of all three, but I spent the next several hours staring at her in the dark until my eyes couldn’t stay open.
By the time I finally drag myself out of bed and walk to the pool house, the team of builders I hired for the extension are already gone. Only Gil and the foreman, Carl, stand by the edge of the patio sipping coffee.
Gil frowns at my disheveled appearance, but doesn’t comment. The foreman is far too cautious to mention that I’m four hours late.
“Everything’s ready for your final inspection, Mr. Montesano,” Carl says.
I nod at them both before heading inside, where someone has covered Emberly’s canvases with sheets. The area at the back is now twice its former size, with a more spacious dressing room, a bathroom large enough for two, and an adjoining nursery.
Emberly isn’t thriving alone, and her situation will only get worse as the pregnancy progresses. I’ve given her space to process her heartbreak, but she needs to return to where it’s safe to give birth.
I tell myself the renovations aren’t connected to the grief weighing down my heart like an iron ball. They have nothing to do with the mounting dread at how she will react to seeing the man who shattered her soul.
My shoulders sag with the memory of the day I carried Emberly into the pool house, kicking and screaming. But now, all I see is a broken woman, shattered by love and loss. I would give anything to return to the days when she was smashing up the place and raising hell.
“Is everything to your satisfaction, sir?” Carl asks.
The phone rings before I can answer. It’s an unknown number. My heart skips a beat. It could be Emberly.
“Hello?” I say, my voice calm.
“Mr. Montesano, this is American Express. We’re calling because there’s been another million-dollar transaction to the Beaumont City Women’s Aid. Do you want to authorize this charge?”
My breath catches the way it always does whenever she uses her black card, even though I know it’s just a recurring charge she set up the day she left.
“Yes,” I say. “My wife can use the card as she pleases.”
The woman on the other side of the line hesitates. “Sir, this is the seventh charge of this amount.”
I gulp. It’s been exactly six months and one day since she left.
“Mr. Montesano?” she says.
“My wife can do whatever the hell she wants with our money,” I snarl and hang up.
The woman I love is miserable, alone, and unable to paint, and it’s all my fault. She’s had half a year to heal, yet her physical and mental state is deteriorating. Turning on my heel, I stalk out of the extension and back through the studio.
“Pack up all the completed paintings and send them to the MoCa Art Gallery,” I say.
“Boss?” Gil says from the other room. “Where are you going?”
“To get my goddam wife,” I snap.
