Page 111 of How to Get Even

* * *

Chase wasn’t quite sure he was happy about Bella and his father going behind his back, but he was really touched that his dad was here. And then because of that, felt ashamed that he hadn’t invited his father himself.

But instead of saying ‘thank you for coming’, Chase said, ‘You didn’t have to come.’

And instead of saying, ‘I wanted to’, his father said, ‘Bella made it hard to say no.’

Chase huffed out a laugh at the thought of Bella and his father having that conversation.

‘I like her,’ his father said, looking at a piece on the wall as if not quite sure why anyone had called it art.

‘I do too,’ Chase admitted, warmth spreading through his chest and limbs as he said it.

‘Daisy would have liked her.’

And Chase nodded, because he knew that too.

They moved from piece to piece and for the first time, Chase didn’t feel the need to ask about the garage, didn’t feel the need to fill the silence between them because it wasn’t uncomfortable. The background noise, so unusual in a gallery, gave them a base colour from which to work and they were picking their paint colours carefully.

His father stopped at one of Sascha’s large canvases and considered it carefully.

‘This reminds me of one of yours.’

Chase waited for the twist, the anxiety, the rush to hide the block that had all but crippled him for the last eighteen months. ‘It’s not.’

‘No, I know,’ his dad said with a conviction that took Chase aback. ‘Yours are different,’ he said, shrugging. ‘I don’t know the fancy way of saying why, but I know it’s notyoursbut it’slikeyours. The’ – he waved his hands in the air, struggling to articulate what he was seeing – ‘stuff is different, but…’ And his father shrugged again, pulling at the neck of the shirt he’d worn to the gallery.

Chase cleared his throat. ‘Itfeelsdifferent.’

His father didn’t argue with the description which was as much as Chase could have hoped for. They circled the far wall of the gallery until they reached a series that made his father say, ‘Oh.’

Interspersed between larger pieces were the drawings by the children from Castledine Elementary, still displayed in their elaborate gilt frames. Bella had pitched it as ‘surprising and whimsical, but also pertinent to the gallery’s ethos’.

‘We have an ethos?’ he’d asked.

‘You have an ethos,’ she’d told him seriously. ‘And it’s admirable and unique and worth holding on to.’

And he hadn’t been able to hide from that in a joke or a kiss and it had sunk into his skin like ink from a tattoo.

‘These are great,’ his father exclaimed with more enthusiasm than when he’d looked at a painting that would probably fetch somewhere in the region of half a million. That was how his father valued things. ‘This she would haveloved,’ he said, looking Chase in the eye and he knew he meant it.

His father might have found it difficult to talk about feelings and emotions, but his reaction to the thing that brought him joy was just as visceral as Bella’s had been to the paintings in the gallery warehouse nearly a month and a half ago. And that was why Chase had wanted to include the piece here. Art should be accessible in whatever form, wherever it comes from, for whoever views it.

And Bella had seen that. Seen that that was how he felt.

He caught Maurice’s eye and nodded him over. He needed to find her. He wanted… well, he didn’t quite know what he wanted but he wanted to go to her.

Maurice cut through the gallery and Chase introduced him to his father. Two more opposite men you could probably struggle to find, but they immediately fell into a good-natured conversation about the children’s pictures as Maurice gestured towards the front of the gallery where Bella was standing with her back to him.

* * *

‘Oh my God, what are you guys doing here?’ Bella asked as she took in Sienna, Paige and Astrid – wearing the most ridiculous hat she’d ever seen.

And then, shockingly, she felt herself tearing up as she looked at the gorgeous faces of the women she’d missed as if they’d been scattered pieces of her heart.

‘We came to surprise you!’ Sienna exclaimed until she saw the tears welling up in Bella’s eyes. ‘Or not…?’ She trailed off with a concern. ‘Oh hun, are you okay?’

Bella nodded like a hula girl on a dashboard driving over the Brooklyn Bridge, which only seemed to make the girls more concerned.

---