“Ellie…” He started after her again, but a hand on his arm stopped him.
It was Larry.
“Let her go,” the lawyer said. “Don’t fall for the tears.”
Garek glared at him. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“The tears.” Larry shook his head. “Men fall for it every time. I fell for it four times myself. Leave her alone—she’ll sign the prenup and she’ll forget about it, believe me. Until the divorce. Um, if there’s a divorce,” he added hastily.
“Get the hell out of here,” Garek snarled.
Larry beat a hasty retreat.
For the next several hours, Garek tried to concentrate on his work. He had plans to make now that the Lachland buyout had taken place.
He could easily spend the next six months working out all the details. This was an exciting, challenging time for Wisnewski Industries. He should have had no trouble focusing on his work.
But then, he’d never been in as ituation like this before.
He pushed away the profit-and-loss statements he was studying and leaned back in his chair. He wanted to marry Ellie. He’d made the decision impulsively, but he’d thought it was the right one. Only now he wasn’t so sure.
Ever since Larry had brought up the subject of the prenuptial agreement, needles of doubt had poked at him. This whole marriage thing was more difficult than he’d thought it would be. He didn’t like having demands put on him. And in her own way, he realized suddenly, Ellie was more demanding than Doreen and Amber combined.
He almost wished she did want money—that would have been easy to give. But Ellie wanted something more complicated than that.
He wished he’d just slept with her.
Only somehow, that wasn’t enough. He wanted more, also. He wanted…what exactly? He didn’t know. What the hell was the matter with him?
He frowned at the painting on the wall across from him.
Woman in Blue.
He’d disliked it at first. He’d thought it was silly and stupid and pointless. But somehow, over the last few months, it had begun to grow on him. It brightened up his office, made the room seem less dull, less enclosed. It was like having a window into an alternate reality.
As he looked at it now, he saw how the colors moved in sinuous tendrils and rhythmic scalloped patterns and how the blue became more and more intense as it moved toward the center of the painting. There was no one spot where you could see a change in hue, but the blue slowly, gradually, became brighter and brighter until in the very center it was an intense, bright sapphire…
And suddenly he understood.
Garek tried all afternoon and all evening to reach Ellie, but she seemed to have disappeared from the city of Chicago. Her phone had been disconnected and when he went to her apartment, the windows were dark and no one answered the door. He went to the gallery, but the idiot girl there said Ellie was on vacation. He even went to her aunt and uncle’s house, but they only looked at him coolly and said they had no idea where she was.
The coolness made him think they were lying, that they knew something. He parked at the end of the street and lurked there for several hours, but there was no sign of Ellie.
He drove back over to her apartment and waited…and waited. Finally, at 3:00 a.m., he pounded on the door of the downstairs flat where Ellie’s landlord lived, and convinced the man to unlock her door in case she was hurt. Squinting in the glare from the kitchen lights, Garek looked at the bare walls, the packed suitcases.
“She said you two were getting married tomorrow,” the landlord said. “You think she’s changed her mind?”
Garek’s gut twisted, squeezing the air out of his lungs and making it difficult to breathe. “No,” he said more sharply than he’d intended.
“Uh-huh.” The landlord looked pityingly at him.
Garek felt a sudden, strange sense of disorientation. The cramped, dark apartment faded from his consciousness, replaced by a memory of a different place—a brightly lit place with stark white walls. He’d been standing outside the hospital emergency room where the surgeons were operating on his father, waiting for someone to come out and tell him what was going on. The minutes had ticked by, turning with agonizing slowness into hours. He’d alternated between trying to calm his mother’s and sister’s hysterical crying, assuring them over and over again that the hospital had the city’s finest doctors, that everything would turn out all right. They’d both finally fallen asleep on the couches in the waiting room. So he’d been the only one to see the expression in the doctor’s eyes when he’d come in to talk to them—an expression very similar to the one in Ellie’s landlord’s eyes.
“No,” Garek said again.
But this time his voice emerged a harsh, cracked whisper.
“I always thought he was a jerk,” Robbie growled. “You should have let me smash his face that first time—”