Page 44 of The Wrong Husband

Like Friedrich Nietzsche said, "Hope in reality is the worst of all evils because it prolongs the torments of man."

I had to get back to my real life where I didn't live at the Four Seasons and work at Archer Galleries. Where Marcela Archer hadn't said my work was magical and gave me a low-level job as an art restorer (which I was grateful for). I was glad that I hadn't shut down Dr. Joachim De Jong's offer for me to work on a project on a three-month contract basis. I was going to accept that. And then I was going to quit my job at Archer Galleries.

I was also going to bring my stuff back from the studio there. I hadn't taken much because the studio came with easels, paints, turpentine, and other things artists needed. I had only taken my brushes and the special paints and mediums I used.

That night I got settled into my place and felt enormously better. I put fresh sheets on my bed. Lit some candles to soothe me. And then I set up a blank canvas on the easel. My process wasn't very sophisticated. I sat on the floor and stared at the white space that I wanted to fill—and then let it come to me. Usually, how I felt translated onto the canvas.

But I couldn't see it very well right now because I was crying. I'd waited two weeks for my husband to notice me and now, I was done. I would never put myself out like that again. I didn't care what the gossip sites said or what PR nightmare Damian thought us staying apart would bring. I wasn't going to live in that soulless apartment ever again.

I lay down on the wooden floor of the loft and held myself tight, waiting for grief to translate into inspiration.

Chapter 12

Emilia

Aweek went by, and I didn't hear from Damian. Liza texted to let me know he hadn't been home.

By Friday, I felt like my heartbreak was complete.

I wrote an email to the head of HR at Archer Galleries and my boss, resigning. I wasn't giving them a two-week notice since I'd barely worked there. Also, for how they treated me, they didn't deserve it.

I had enough money to last a couple of months and I had secured a contract job with the museum that would start in a week. All in all, I would be fine. I'd survive this. I would rebuild my savings to pay for my master's in Chicago.

This whole Vegas debacle had taken so much from me. My family. My hope that Damian would ever notice me because if he wouldn’t pay attention to me when I was his wife, you know it was never ever gonna happen. My job was gone…though I wasn't sorry about that. I hated it.

I felt the cold emptiness of the loft envelop me. Loneliness gnawed at me, a constant reminder of my invisibility. I had always prided myself on finding joy and contentment in my art, but now, I felt utterly hollow. The sting of being unwanted, of being ignored by the one person who should have seen me, was almost unbearable.

I turned on the music, letting the haunting strains of Radiohead’s How to Disappear Completely fill the room. The music resonated with my mood, the melancholy chords seeping into my bones.

I picked up a brush and stood in front of the blank canvas, feeling the weight of my emotions pressing down on me. The music and my pain intertwined, fueling my need to create, to pour every ounce of my sorrow and frustration onto the canvas.

With a deep breath, I dipped my brush into the paint and began. The strokes were raw, aggressive, and full of power. I started with a stormy sky, swirling with dark grays and violent purples, the clouds churning. Jagged lightning bolts of electric blue cut through the chaos, illuminating the scene with their stark brilliance.

Beneath the tumultuous sky, I painted a desolate landscape. Twisted trees with bare branches reached out like skeletal hands, their trunks warped and gnarled. A river of blood-red paint snaked through the barren ground, splitting the canvas with its harsh, vibrant contrast.

At the center of the painting, I placed a biologically and anatomically accurate heart—but broken and bleeding. Its jagged edges were pulled apart, revealing the raw, exposed tissue within. Dark, suffocating shadows crept around it, threatening to engulf it completely. From the heart, roots of deep crimson spread out like veins, anchoring it to the bleak landscape.

I painted distorted faces emerging from the shadows, their expressions twisted with anguish and despair. Some had hollow eyes, empty and void, while others had tears streaming down their contorted cheeks. Each face represented a piece of my soul, fragments of the hurt and loneliness that had consumed me.

In the foreground, I added a figure of a woman—her body elongated and warped, a reflection of my own fractured self. She stood with her arms outstretched, reaching for something just out of grasp, her fingers clawing at the air. Her face was a mixture of hope and despair, caught in the eternal struggle between light and darkness.

As I painted, tears blurred my vision, but I didn’t stop. I couldn't stop. The pain, the loneliness, the feeling of being unwanted—it all poured out of me, transforming into a powerful, visceral piece of art.

When I finally stepped back, exhausted, and emotionally drained, I looked at the painting through tear-filled eyes. It was raw, it was chaotic, and it was beautiful in its agony. It was everything I felt, laid bare for the world to see.

I spent the entire weekend painting, lost in the whirlwind of emotions surging through me. I didn't eat, and I barely slept. Each brushstroke felt like a purge, a desperate attempt to expel the pain that had built up inside me for so long. The hours had blurred together as I poured my soul onto the canvas, the music looping in the background. By the time I finally stopped, I was physically and emotionally drained. My body ached with exhaustion. I collapsed onto the floor, feeling empty and lighter, as if I had shed a heavy burden. My stomach growled, and my eyes burned with fatigue, but I felt a strange sense of peace. As always, my art was a way to channel my hurt, to transform my pain into something tangible, to bring it outside of me.

I closed my eyes and slid into comfortable darkness.

Chapter 13

Damian

"You want to explain this to me?" Pablo Duke, our head of human resources, dropped a printed page on the desk.

I picked it up and felt something cold run inside me. Emilia had resigned.

"Marcela hires her without checking with anyone and everyone on the team fucking hates her because they know she got the job because she married you…and you know the talk around that. And now she resigns without any warning, no notice, nothing."