Page 3 of Casanova LLC

I straightened and looked behind him, avoiding direct eye contact. “So. It was kind of you to come by. It’s nice to see you again.” He didn’t respond. “How are you?”

“I’m good.”

“Good.”

I waited about three seconds too long for him to reciprocate. “And you?”

“Good.” Then I surprised myself by chuckling. “Well.” I gestured back at the doors.

“Renovating?”

“The new owners are.”

“The new owners?”

“Yes. I had to sell.”

“Of course.”

That was it? Given all that had happened, all that had been lost? Reputation, money, possessions, security, friends. Husband.

I inched away from him, closer to the fireplace. Closer to actual heat. “So, what brings you here? What can I do for you?”

If he had truly come to pay his respects, he was six months late. When he’d texted me out of the blue last week, I’d done a double take. All that existed in my text history with him was from that night five years ago, that picture of the painting he’d been working on then. All he’d written last week was he hoped we might be able to meet. And here we were, face to face, five years later. And I didn’t know why we were here, face to face, five years later. It felt like there was?—

“I want my paintings back.”

I stared at him. That didn’t even make sense. “Which paintings?”

“The ones you took.”

I bristled. “I took nothing. You had some kind of deal with Richard, as I understood it, not with me. Regardless, they were sold?—”

“No, they were never sold.”

His tone was so definitive and I, in turn, was so confused. Granted, everything had been confusing and I’d been running on mental fumes for about a year between diagnosis and illness and death and secrets and implosion, but still. “I’m sorry, but I don’t…I only have one. The one that was my…my wedding gift.”

He shook his head, once. “I don’t want that one. That one was properly purchased. I want the others.”

“I don’t have them.”

“Stop lying!” He shouted it, his stone veneer cracking down the middle. “Christ, you people! Do you ever stop swindling?”

My voice did not rise to meet his. “He sold them.”

“No, you’re lying, they were never sold?—”

“I’m not lying, I’m telling you, they were…” but then I felt it, in my stomach. The feeling I’d grown accustomed to over the past half year. The feeling that things I thought I could say for certain about my husband, I couldn’t. That the things I knew to be true were not true at all. “They weren’t?”

The man in front of me shook his head. His eyes were the same color as the winter sky behind him.

I sat.

Or rather, I dropped to the pavers next to the fireplace. Which seemed to startle him, because he lunged forward, a hand shooting toward my descending elbow. But I wasn’t falling. I’d simply lost the will to stand. I was exhausted. Depleted. As if Richard’s wasting cancer had leached into me by association. Passed from host to host like all his other malignancies.

When would this stop? When would it, finally, be over? Or would it never be over? Would people keep coming forward? Would more and more of me be taken until whatever was left wouldn’t be worth keeping?

“Are you okay?”

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