Chapter 3

For the next few days, Ethan didn't come back.

My life fell back into its ordinary shape.

I opened the shop. I helped customers. I kept moving.

Only the burn on my right hand kept reminding me that something had changed permanently.

Then, one afternoon, a package arrived.

I opened it.

An invitation card for an art exhibition.

Stella Sutton: New Works — A Solo Exhibition.

The venue was the most prestigious gallery in the city.

The name on the invitation line: Ethan Blake.

My chest tightened like a fist closing around my ribs.

Stella studied art. Ethan had said that looking at her hands made him feel alive.

What was he doing?

Was he showing off?

Showing me he had found a perfect replacement — a woman who could give him everything he'd ever wanted?

I crumpled the invitation and threw it in the trash.

Then I went anyway.

I had no invitation, so security stopped me at the door. I stood on the other side of the glass wall and watched the crowd move inside.

Stella stood in the spotlight in a designer gown, radiant, receiving compliment after compliment.

Ethan stood beside her in a tailored suit.

The way he looked at her — it was a softness I had never once seen him aim at me. A pride I had never once earned.

In that moment I felt like exactly what I was: a person who had shown up somewhere she wasn't wanted, pressing her face against the glass at someone else's happiness.

I turned to leave.

And then I saw it. The largest piece in the center of the gallery.

The title card read: Shattered.

A girl curled in a corner. Fragments of shattered stars scattered around her like broken glass.

The composition. The line weight. The color choices.

I felt the world tilt.

That was my painting.

The last sketch I had ever made — drawn in the weeks after my hand was broken, when I was at the bottom of the worst pain and despair I had ever known.

My hand shook so badly I could only finish the pencil outline before I couldn't hold a pen anymore.

I had kept that sketch locked in my studio.

Only one other person knew the code.

Ethan Blake.

He had stolen my painting.

He had taken the most painful memory I owned and handed it to his new lover to build her career on.

The blood rushed to my head. The room spun.

I shoved past the security guard at the entrance and pushed through the door.

"Ethan!"

My voice came out like a scream.

Every head in the gallery turned.

Ethan and Stella both looked up.

Ethan's brow collapsed. He strode toward me, fury in every step, his voice dropping low and vicious. "What are you doing? Have you lost your mind?"

I pointed at the painting. My hand was shaking. "That painting. Why is it here?"

Ethan glanced in the direction I was pointing. His face didn't change at all.

"That's Stella's work."

"Her work?" A broken laugh tore out of me. "You're going to stand there and tell me you've never seen that sketch before?"

His pupils contracted.

"Ethan Blake, you are disgusting!" I screamed.

"Rena—" He grabbed my arm. "This is a public event. Stop making a scene."

"I'm making a scene?" I looked at him, and the tears finally broke through.

"You stole my painting. You stole my dream. You gave it to her. And I'm the one making a scene?"

More people had gathered now, watching.

Stella walked over and took Ethan's arm, her face a portrait of confusion and distress.

"Rena, I think there's been a misunderstanding. This piece is entirely my own. Ethan just — gave me some inspiration."

"Inspiration?" I laughed coldly. "Taking my pencil sketch and painting over it — that's what you're calling inspiration?"

"I don't know what sketch you mean..." Stella let her tears fall. "Ethan, I'm scared—"

Ethan pulled her protectively behind him and looked at me the way you look at someone beyond reasoning with.

"Enough. One more word and I'm calling security."

Security again.

In his world, I was always the disturbance that needed to be removed.

"Fine," I said. I wiped my face. "Remember today, Ethan."

I held his gaze for one long moment, then turned and walked out, each step heavier than the last.

Behind me, voices:

"Who is that woman? She's unhinged."

"I heard she's his ex. Her hand is disabled. She's apparently not quite right mentally either."

"No wonder he moved on. Who could put up with that?"

Each word landed like something sharp and small.

So that's what I was to them. A disabled, unstable ex. A burden he'd finally managed to shed.

And Ethan was the one to be pitied.

---

I went back to the flower shop and locked myself in the storage room.

It was full of old art supplies, untouched, layered in dust.

From the bottom of a cardboard box I pulled out an old sketchbook.

Every page was something I had poured myself into.

Portraits of Ethan. Landscapes we had seen together. Everything I had once imagined for our future.

The last page was the pencil sketch of *Shattered.*

Only a few lines. But those lines were the deepest scream my soul had ever made.

Now they were someone else's staircase to success.

I curled up in the corner of that small dark room, clutching the sketchbook, just like the girl in the drawing.

Only this time, no one was coming to find me.