AllFreeNovel
Share Us
ChapterFive
Asher Tarkin had been a featured artist at the Paris gallery space “Et tu?” at least twelve times over the past fifteen years. Et tu? was located in the perpetually trendy third arrondissement, mere blocks from the world-famous Centre Pompidou and the Musée Picasso. The first time he’d been an Et Tu? featured artist, he’d sold every single one of his esteemed paintings, an amount that totaled one point five million dollars. He was one of the Americans that Parisians upheld as “one of their own,” a “Frenchman in his heart and soul.” Alana often prayed that his “French heart” didn’t extend to extramarital affairs. She was probably wrong.
After her return from the heinous audition, Alana scrubbed the experience from her skin in a scalding shower and dressed for the exhibition. Per Asher’s request, she donned the emerald gown with a classic high neckline and a back that surged low, highlighting the slender swoop of her back. In the mirror, she cupped her hands around her waist, making the unfair comparison between this stage of her body and the one she’d had back in her modeling days. Back then, she’d deemed a couple of carrot sticks and a Diet Coke a complete meal. She’d had to get extensions to make up for the loss of her hair. Even still, she’d booked one modeling gig after another— probably all because her cheekbones surged out dangerously and her hipbones were sharp as swords.
You lost your hair. You couldn’t string more than a few sentences together without getting confused. Yet, you had power, a power you’ve now lost.
Alana shook away her dark thoughts. Leaning too heavily on them made her head spin. She set to work on her makeup, giving herself a smoky eye look, along with a nourishing red lip. Her hair became three-dimensionally curly, cascading down her shoulders. When the modeling calls had petered out, and she’d brought food back into her life, her hair had taken the call— thanking her for the nutrients, the sustenance.
But how many times did Asher ask you if you planned to finish your entire plate of food?
And when you asked him about getting pregnant, what was it he’d said?
Again, Alana shook her head violently, tearing the thoughts from her mind. Her smile wrinkled toward her ears as she steadied herself. This night at the exhibition was to be her first night with Asher since she’d abandoned him in Beijing. They’d both made an endless array of mistakes. But the love they’d built between them couldn’t be ignored. This was the night she would prove that it mattered enough to her to try again and again and again.
A text rang through. It was Bianca, one of Alana’s dearest friends in Paris, an ex-model herself and therefore in tune with the heartaches of post-modeling life. Alana was grateful she hadn’t told Bianca about her audition. How embarrassing.
BIANCA: Hi, sweets! You’re back from Nantucket, aren’t you? I’ll see you at Asher’s exhibition tonight.
ALANA: I’m back! Cannot wait to see you. XOXO.
BIANCA: I read online that Asher’s selling a really iconic painting tonight? One of his first?
Alana scraped through the back alleys of her mind, hunting for any information she had about whatever this “iconic painting” was. Ultimately, she had to go along with it, pretending she knew as much about her husband as the rest of the world.
ALANA: Pretty exciting, isn’t it?
Asher’s driver pulled up outside the apartment building at seven-thirty. He was a broad-shouldered ex-boxer with a little handlebar mustache and also understood that Alana wasn’t so keen on talking. Alana slid into the back seat, thanking him for opening and closing her door. Often, she wondered what Greta Copperfield would think of her, allowing someone to open her car door for her, day-in and day-out. “We didn’t raise you to let other people perform such menial tasks for you.”
Now that Julia had discovered clues that pointed to Bernard Copperfield’s innocence, even after twenty-five years of prison, Alana wasn’t entirely sure where to put her family within the confines of her heart. She’d spent the better part of twenty-five years avoiding memories of them like the plague, thinking of The Copperfield House on Nantucket Island as a sort of blackhole that threatened to take her down with it. Asher had never spoken to the public about Bernard Copperfield, the man who’d been one of his first mentors in the art world. After the trial, it was suddenly like Bernard Copperfield had never existed at all.
The limo eased to a halt outside of the gallery twenty-five minutes later. A number of photographers flashed their cameras toward the limo door as Alana snaked her slender leg toward the cobblestones. Her smile was electric and automatic, the curse of her previous modeling career. A reporter down a bit from the photographers spoke to a camera regarding her appearance. “The wife of Asher Tarkin arrives at the gallery space.”
Before Alana reached the door, the iconic artist, Asher Tarkin, stepped into the soft light of the Parisian evening. Alana’s stomach performed a backflip as she took in the perfectly cultivated look of the man she’d fallen in love with twenty-seven years before. Now forty-six years old, he was forced to dye his graying hair jet-black, but it remained wild and long, draping over his blackhole eyes. He remained slender and continued, as ever, to wear his uniform: black pants, a black button-down, Italian-made. Had Alana been a world-famous artist, she’d have already transformed her look a number of times. Men didn’t need to bother with all that.
Oh, but she loved him. Her heart pounded with the density of their shared past: the partying and the making love and the long trips across the world. They’d lived in thirteen different apartments together, eaten together, wept together. When they’d married, she’d been twenty-two, he twenty-three— bright-eyed for the artistic world they’d created. Four magazines that year had called them “the hottest couple of the moment.”
“Alana,” Asher whispered her name. Was it possible he’d missed her the way she’d missed him? There was a hunger in his dark eyes. A desire Alana couldn’t name.
“Oh, Asher.” Alana’s eyelashes fluttered as she lifted her lips toward his, hungry to kiss him with reckless abandon, the way they used to. But before she could, he seamlessly pressed his lips against her cheek.
One corner of her heart cracked open.
Around them, cameras flashed like birds flapping their wings. Alana dropped back from Asher’s useless kiss. “I missed you,” she tried.
“And I, you.” Asher’s eyes lifted toward another approaching limo. “I have to greet more guests. Why don’t you go in and grab yourself a glass of champagne?”
The gallery space swallowed Alana with its chilly shadowed air. It was larger than most galleries in downtown Paris, with multiple hallways that led to strangely shaped rooms. One was an octagon, another a circle. The circular room featured a number of Asher’s more experimental sculptures, taken from when he’d spent six months in Nepal to feel “closer to where we all came from.” Alana had visited him only twice during that time and tried her best to fit in with his newfound schedule of two hours of meditation in the morning and two at night.
Bianca appeared at the champagne table, wrapping her arms around Alana joyously and speaking a smattering of French that Alana couldn’t fully understand.
“You look marvelous, darling,” Bianca continued, switching to English. “The time on the island must have been nourishing?”
“It was definitely something,” Alana returned.
“Your father? He’s out of prison?” Bianca furrowed her brow with confusion. Alana had half-mentioned this tidbit over the phone, which had opened up a wealth of questions from Bianca.
“Yes. But he rarely leaves his upstairs study, now,” Alana whispered, accepting a glass of champagne over the table.
