I Gave It All Back to My Sister, Even My Husband novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Not a Single Spoon

Miriam has the staff search her bags, and Gavin finds three years of sketches of his own hands.

I went back to the Aldercott house that night to pack.

It was the last place on earth I wanted to be, and I had nowhere else to keep my brushes.

Miriam had beaten me there.

She stood in the front hall in her pearls, with the head housekeeper on one side and two staff members on the other.

The suitcase I had left on the bed upstairs was already on the marble floor, open.

"Don't touch it," Miriam told me.

I stopped in the doorway with my wet coat still on.

"That's my suitcase," I said.

"It's in my house."

"It's full of my clothes."

"We'll see," Miriam said. "A woman who blackmails her way into a family can't be trusted to take only what is hers."

She nodded at the housekeeper.

The housekeeper looked at the floor, and then she knelt and began to lift out my sweaters one at a time.

I could have fought it.

A year ago I would have, with my chin up and my voice shaking.

Tonight I had less than three months and no strength to spend on a suitcase.

"Go ahead," I said.

The housekeeper shook out each shirt.

She opened my toiletry bag and set it on the marble.

One of the staff members went through my coat pockets and found a receipt and a lip balm.

"Anything missing?" Miriam asked.

"Nothing, madam," the housekeeper said.

Miriam held out her palm to me.

"The ring."

I looked down at my left hand.

The diamond was huge, and I had never once picked it myself.

I twisted it off and dropped it into her hand.

It left a pale band on my finger, and it was the lightest I had felt in three years.

"The pearls too," Miriam said.

"You gave those to Willa at the wedding."

Miriam's mouth went thin.

"Then the bag," she said. "Whatever you carry out of here, I want to see it."

I had one tote.

I opened it and held it out.

Eleven brushes in a roll of canvas. A tin of palette knives. My grandmother's old wooden paint box.

At the bottom lay a black sketchbook with a cracked spine.

Miriam plucked it out before I could stop her.

"What's this?"

"Mine," I said. "Give it back."

"Evidence of what, I wonder."

She opened it.

I watched her expression change from suspicion to confusion.

Every page was a pencil drawing of a man's hand.

A hand holding a pen over a contract. A hand pinching the bridge of a nose at midnight. A hand loosening a tie.

A hand on a steering wheel.

Miriam turned the pages faster.

"These are all Gavin's," she said.

I said nothing.

"Three years of this?" She snapped the book shut. "You hated him. You told the whole family you hated him."

"I never said that."

"You didn't have to."

The front door opened behind me.

I didn't need to turn around.

My body knew he was home before my mind did.

"What's going on?" Gavin said.

His voice was flat and tired.

He had come straight from the hospital. His jacket was wet at the shoulders, and my signed papers were still inside it.

"Your wife is leaving," Miriam said. "We were making sure she doesn't leave with anything she didn't pay for."

"She's not my wife tonight," I said. "Ask him. He signed."

Gavin's eyes went from me to the open suitcase to the housekeeper kneeling on the marble.

"Get up," he told her quietly. "Nobody searches anything in this house."

The housekeeper rose at once.

Miriam held the sketchbook out to him.

"Look what she was hiding. She's been drawing you."

He took it.

I should have grabbed it. I should have said something sharp and walked out.

I stood there with my hands empty and let him open it.

He turned the first page, and the second. His face gave away nothing.

He stopped on a drawing of his own hand resting on a hospital blanket, thumb turned out, the pale hook-shaped scar clear in the pencil.

"When did you draw this?" he asked.

"It doesn't matter."

"Cassandra."

"The week your father died," I said. "You sat in that chair for nine hours. You didn't know I was in the doorway."

Nobody in the hall said a word.

Gavin kept turning pages.

Hands signing. Hands gripping a rail on a ship's deck. Hands around a coffee cup at four in the morning, when he thought no one was awake.

He reached the last page.

His thumb stopped.

It was not a hand.

It was Gavin himself, asleep on our couch with one arm thrown over his eyes, drawn so gently that Miriam leaned in to see and then looked away.

He stared at it for a long moment.

Then he looked up at me, and for the first time in three years, he did not look angry.

"I didn't know you drew me," Gavin said.

"You never asked what I drew," I said, and I took my sketchbook out of his hand.

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