Chapter 7: Lipstick

Hutch didn't touch the envelope.

He looked at it.

"No," he said.

"You haven't opened it."

"I don't need to know how much. It's no."

Cate smiled with all her red lipstick.

"Graydon said you'd say that. He says it's sentimental. You bought it the year you ran away from home."

"Get out of my bar, Cate."

"It goes to eight hundred next week. Then it stops being an offer."

She finally turned and looked at me.

She took in my blue hands, my Moonlite T-shirt, the pencil in my hair.

"Neve," she said. "Look at you. You've gone back to your roots."

"You've got lipstick on your teeth," I said.

She didn't, but she checked.

The purple satin team laughed out loud.

Cate's face went still and tight.

She left the check on the bar.

Hutch picked it up and tucked it into the pocket of her coat as she passed him, without a word.

She walked out with it.

I couldn't sleep that night.

I kept seeing her sitting on Graydon's desk with her dress pushed up, laughing at a scar on my hip.

In the morning I put on the one good coat I'd taken from the attic and drove to the Near North Side.

Cate's gallery was on a quiet street of brownstones near Oak Street.

White walls. Concrete floor. Six paintings with no prices.

There was a private viewing going on.

A dozen people with wine in their hands, the kind of people who buy for their lake houses.

I knew three of them from the club.

They knew me too.

I watched them recognize me and decide to look somewhere else.

Cate was in the middle of the room in black cashmere, talking about a canvas of gray squares.

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