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“Oh, um, I just . . .” She stumbles over her words. “This isn’t like you. Are you sure everything’s okay?”
“You’ll be the first to know if it isn’t. Now get to work. The sooner you finish, the sooner you can go home for the day.”
“Y-yes. Okay. Thank you,” she says.
I end the call and meet Antonio’s gaze in the rearview again.
“You going to tell me what’s going on, kid?” he asks when we stop at a red light.
“I feel like painting today.” I utter words I haven’t spoken in years. Three years to be exact. “Take me to the studio.”
His grip loosens on the steering wheel. “Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about.”
With rush hour traffic, it’ll be a while before we get downtown. But if I close my eyes, I can almost feel the wooden handle of a paintbrush in my palm and the resistance of bristles against a freshly primed canvas. I can see the painting materializing in my mind’s eye—an image so vivid it woke me from a dead sleep at five o’clock this morning, and I haven’t been able to get it out of my head since.
After my wife died, I never thought I’d paint again.
Hell, I never wanted to paint again.
My biggest fan, my muse . . . was gone forever, never to return.
I don’t know much about death or dying, and I try not to think about the afterlife in any sort of detail because it tends to give me an existential crisis. I’ve never been one to give much credence to signs or “messages from beyond,” but if I did . . . I’d have half a mind to wonder if Emma had a hand at putting Margaux in my path.
She always had a knack for knowing what I needed, even when I was too bullheaded to realize I needed it in the first place.
Never in a million years would I have thought that sleeping with a new woman would breathe life into my inner artist again.
Not only was the moment intense—and beyond satisfying after a three-year hiatus—it was truly life changing. It was a closing of one chapter and the start of a new one. Same book, of course. Same story line.
If life is an unreliable narrator, Margaux Sheridan is my plot twist.
The key chain, the apartment, the reigniting spark of artistic creation . . . it’s too specific, too perfect to be coincidental.
It’s Emma.
It has to be.
Emma did this for me.
An hour later, Radiohead’s OK Computer album is blasting from the Bluetooth speaker in the corner of my studio, I’ve stripped down and slipped into my paint-stained coveralls, and the newest Halcyon piece is coming to life in real time.
I won’t lie—it feels pretty damn good to be back.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
SLOANE
“So, uh . . . care to tell me what this is?” Margaux hands me a small envelope the second she gets home from work Monday evening. “Roman sent flowers. To my office. The arrangement was so enormous I couldn’t even carry it home, so now I have to look at that floral monstrosity every day until those petals wilt. I mean, it’s gorgeous. But still.”
“Did you take a picture?” I ask as I slide the card from the envelope. Roman has impeccable taste. I highly doubt the flowers were a hideous monstrosity.
The inscription reads, I CAN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT SATURDAY NIGHT. I FEEL LIKE A DO-OVER IS IN ORDER . . . ROMAN
“What the hell does he mean, a do-over?” Margaux’s brows are angled and angry. These days it’s hard to tell if it’s pregnancy hormones or just Margaux being Margaux. Either way, she’s none too pleased about this. Kicking off her shoes and placing her bag and keys on the foyer table, she asks, “Did you sleep with him?”
I don’t answer out loud. I don’t need to. The look on my face tells her everything.
“Oh my god.” She lets her hands fall loose against her sides before gripping fistfuls of air. “I thought you guys just baked a cake? You didn’t tell me you went all the way . . . Why? Why would you do that? And when were you going to tell me?”
I planned to tell her the first chance I got, but after Roman left, I was too spent to wait for Margaux to get home. I went to bed, and by the time I woke up in the morning, she’d already come and gone. Far be it from her to miss her standing brunch reservation with seven of her closest friends. Sometime around noon, she texted me saying Ethan’s mom was taking her on an impromptu baby-shopping spree at Bergdorf’s. By the time she got home that night, I woke just enough to hear her stumble to her room and collapse on her bed in a heap of exhaustion. This morning, she was already out the door for work by the time I got out of the shower.
