His Mistress Stole My Paintings and My Life

Safety felt foreign. It smelled like Graham’s cedarwood candles and the antiseptic sharpness of the vet’s wrap around Mochi’s splinted leg. For a week, I had existed in the quiet luxury of Graham’s guest suite, a ghost haunting a palace, waiting for the tremors in my hands to stop. They didn’t.

I sat at the borrowed MacBook, the screen glowing white in the dim room. I needed to reclaim my name before I could reclaim my life. I typed in my domain—*SeleneHallArt.com*—and hit enter, my finger hovering over the trackpad like a trigger.

The page didn't load. Instead, the browser blinked and rerouted.

*LylaWoodsStudio.com/Debut*

The air left my lungs in a sharp hiss. There, splashed across the homepage in elegant, minimalist font, was the headline: *"The Next It-Girl of NYC: Lyla Woods and the Blue Period of Grief."*

My stomach churned, a violent twist of nausea. Below the text was a high-resolution scan of *"Fading Sunday"*—the oil painting I had finished the day my mother forgot my name for the first time. I had mixed the blue pigments with my own tears, layering the canvas with the heavy, suffocating weight of Alzheimer’s. It was my soul flayed open. And there was Lyla’s signature, digitally superimposed over mine in the corner.

"You thief," I whispered, the words scraping my throat.

My hands flew across the keyboard, searching the Fernandez Gallery exhibition list. She had taken everything. The charcoal sketches of the subway, the watercolors of Central Park in the rain, and the entire "Grief" collection. She wasn't just stealing my art; she was wearing my trauma like a vintage coat.

I needed ammunition. I scrambled off the plush chair and dug through my rucksack, the only bag I had managed to salvage. At the bottom lay an old, cracked tablet—the one I used to pay our bills because Ares claimed technology gave him migraines.

I powered it on, praying the battery held. 4%. Enough.

I navigated to the shared cloud account. Ares had always been lazy with digital hygiene, assuming I was too busy working double shifts to snoop. I scrolled back to August.

August 12th. I remembered that day. Ares had called me weeping, claiming his spinal injury had flared up so badly he couldn't move his legs. I had picked up an extra shift at the diner, serving burgers until my feet bled, just to pay for his emergency specialist.

I clicked on the date in the cloud backup.

A photo loaded.

It wasn't a dark bedroom. It was bright, blinding sunlight. Ares was shirtless, his muscles glistening with sweat and sea spray, straddling a jet ski in the Hamptons. He was laughing—head thrown back, teeth flashing white, the picture of vitality and arrogance.

I scrolled to September. The week he said he needed money for "experimental nerve therapy." There he was again, dressed in pristine whites, swinging a mallet from the back of a polo pony.

He hadn't been in pain. He had been playing. Every groan, every limp, every tear he shed while I iced his back was a performance. He had watched me scrub grease from my pores, exhausted and desperate, and he had laughed about it on a polo field.

The rage that hit me wasn't hot; it was absolute zero. It clarified everything.

I didn't wait for Graham. I grabbed my coat and stormed out into the biting New York wind.

***

The Victoria Blackwood Gallery was a temple of glass and steel in Chelsea, radiating the kind of exclusionary chill that kept people like me on the sidewalk. Tonight, the windows glowed with the warm hum of a private viewing. Inside, the elite of Manhattan sipped champagne and admired my pain under false pretenses.

I pushed past the doorman, ignoring his startled protest. The gallery smelled of expensive perfume and ozone. And there she was.

Lyla stood in the center of the room, draped in a backless emerald gown, holding court before a massive canvas—*my* canvas. Victoria Blackwood, the legendary curator with her severe bob and sharp glasses, was nodding as Lyla spoke, gesturing to the brushstrokes I had bled over.

"The blue represents the isolation of the modern soul," Lyla was saying, her voice a practiced lilt of sophistication. "I really wanted to capture the fragility of memory."

"You wouldn't know fragility if it shattered in your hands," I announced, my voice cutting through the ambient jazz like a serrated knife.

The room fell silent. Heads turned. Lyla froze, her champagne flute pausing halfway to her lips. When she saw me—hair windblown, wearing jeans and a coat that had seen better days—her eyes widened, not with fear, but with annoyance.

"Selene?" She let out a breathless, pitying laugh. "Oh, honey. You shouldn't be here. You look... unwell."

"That's my painting," I said, stepping into the circle of light, my finger pointing accusingly at the canvas. "You didn't paint that. You stole it from my portfolio while I was locked in a box for your amusement."

A ripple of murmurs went through the crowd. Victoria Blackwood frowned, looking from me to Lyla. "Lyla, do you know this woman?"

"She's my former roommate," Lyla sighed, pressing a hand to her chest. "She's been having... episodes. Mental breaks. I tried to help her, but she became obsessed with my work."

"Obsessed?" I lunged forward, but a heavy hand clamped onto my shoulder.

Ares stepped out from the shadows. He looked immaculate in a tuxedo, his expression bored and dangerous. He didn't look at me; he looked at the security guard approaching from the corner.

"Remove her," Ares commanded softly.

"He was jet-skiing!" I shouted, pulling out the tablet, holding the screen up for anyone to see. "Look! He lied about being disabled! He's a fraud, and she's a thief!"

But the screen was small, and the room was vast. Ares stepped into my space, his cologne suffocating me. He leaned down, his lips brushing my ear, his voice a whisper of velvet and venom.

"Go home, Selene," he murmured. "Look around. Who are they going to believe? The Fernandez heir and the season's debut artist? Or the hysterical waitress with the wet shoes?"

The security guard gripped my arm, his fingers digging into my bicep. "Miss, you need to leave."

"Victoria, look at the signature!" I screamed as they dragged me backward. "Under the varnish! Look at the brushwork!"

Victoria Blackwood adjusted her glasses, her gaze lingering on me for a second too long, curiosity sparking behind the lenses. But then she looked at Ares—at the power of the Fernandez name—and turned her back.

The heavy glass doors slammed shut in my face, muting the world of warmth and light, leaving me shivering on the concrete as the first flakes of snow began to fall.