Page 74 of How to Get Even

‘PTA?’

‘Oh absolutely. And making sure that our children are at after-school activities and our husbands are…’

Bella trailed off, filling the gallery with a heavy silence.

‘Playing golf,’ he offered to fill the space. He hadn’t meant to touch on her past but in some ways, they’d been skirting around it all for a while now.

‘Golf in the Hamptons,’ she added, picking up the threads of the story they were weaving for her fictional life of privilege, before he could apologise. But as the details rose in his mind, they all felt strangely wrong for the Bella standing before him.

‘And what about you?’ she asked and he smiled. A hand at the back of his neck.

‘Me? The classic, tortured artist,’ he said with a little bitterness that surprised him. ‘I pour everything I have into my art, while raging against the system,’ he said, blurring the line between fiction and fact. ‘So much so,’ he said, swallowing, ‘that my wife becomes resentful and cheats on me with my best friend.’

Bella stared at him with those glowing grey eyes.

He didn’t know if she already knew, and right now he couldn’t tell from that unfathomable stormy gaze. But whatever was or was not happening between them, he’d wanted her, needed her, to know that about him.

‘It’s such a fucking cliché,’ he admitted. He’d hoped for humorous, but instead it had sounded helpless. He clamped his teeth together to stop any more words from escaping. It went against a lifetime of habit, ofthe Miller way, but something about Bella made him want to break the mould his father had given him. He braced himself for her sympathy. But she just waited. As if knowing that now the dam was breached, it would all come pouring out with only her to stem the flood.

‘She was an artist too. A ceramicist. A good one,’ he acknowledged, ‘but not agreatone,’ he replied truthfully. ‘And ceramics are harder than painting already so…’ He shrugged. ‘We should never have got married,’ he admitted now to himself and to Bella. ‘I was…’

Get married soon and give me grandbabies.

Another way he’d failed his mother’s dreams for him.

‘Rushing headlong into things I shouldn’t have,’ he said, picking up the threads of the conversation he’d started. ‘And after the success of that first show, things just snowballed for me. I loved it. Pouring everything I had into my pieces, not realising just how much Annalise hated it. Resented it.

‘She had this image in her head of us, struggling together. Of being passionate artists, living off our creativity and whatever crazy indulgence we could find,’ he said, finally looking back and seeing how difficult it must have been for her. That he hadn’t been what she’d thought she was getting. And with each success he’d had, she had drifted further and further away. And he hadn’t noticed. He hadn’t noticed how much that had hurt her. And he should have. Dan had.

Chase swallowed.

‘I’m sorry that she couldn’t be happy for you and what you’d achieved,’ Bella said and deep down something caved in on itself, her words soothing a hurt he’d not allowed himself to acknowledge, let alone speak of.

‘Do you miss her?’ Bella asked.

‘No,’ Chase replied truthfully. ‘I should. But I don’t. I feel… relieved.’ The word emerged on a heavy sigh, guilt and hurt and loss and… relief, all knocking him for six. Yes, they had betrayed his trust, and trust was still something that he found difficult to contemplate. But he wasn’t blind to the way his own actions had helped form the problems in their relationship.

It takes two people to ruin a marriage.

That was what Annalise had said to him the day she’d found him in the hotel room with Astrid and she wasn’t talking about her and Dan. She’d meant that Chase had ruined things forher. That he’d ruined her plans, her life, her future, the thingsshe’dwanted. And that was what she’d wanted to do to him. With Dan, with Astrid.

And Chase would never put himself back in that kind of situation again.

‘Relieved and thankful. Marriage is not for me. Not again,’ he said firmly.

He knew what prompted him to say that.

He knew he wanted Bella to know that.

Bella was the kind of woman that still wanted marriage, children, the Hamptons.

He wanted her to think, to know, that he wasn’t what she needed. Wasn’t what she wanted when she looked at him with those unreadable eyes of hers.

She opened her mouth to speak, but then the sound of her phone ringing from her bag stopped her.

With an apologetic smile, she checked the screen and frowned.

‘I’m sorry, I have to?—’

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