“I’m giving you the short version. I mean, I still had food and clothing and got to go to school. I wasn’t living on the streets.I wasn’t getting beat up—much. Lots of kids had it way worse.” That used to be Sierra’s mantra. That she was lucky. That sheat least had her art.
“Don’t diminish how far you’ve come. How you managed to bloom into an amazing woman out of a dung heap of a beginning.”
“I’d hold off on giving me too much credit until I finish.”
Flynn leaned against the post to the railing and pulled her back against him. “Go on.”
“I got a scholarship to art college. A full ride, but money was still tight.”
“I’ll bet a scholarship doesn’t cover clothing and Q-tips.”
“Nope. So I worked two jobs, too. The thing is, an undergrad degree from an art college doesn’t give you many options aftergraduation. It was supposed to be my ticket to freedom. But with nobody to fall back on, it wasn’t enough.”
“What was your major?”
“Painting and art ed.” It felt so good to answer a normal question, without any hesitation.
“Someone should’ve warned you there is no guaranteed weekly paycheck with benefits if you major in that.”
No kidding. “In retrospect, I agree with you. Not sure I would’ve listened, though. I loved painting, and this college wasliterally paying me to show up every day and learn how to do that better. What was your major in college?”
After a weirdly long pause, Flynn said, “Business.”
Smart guy. Although now they were both working in the same bar, so what did it truly matter? “Well, a teacher with only abachelor’s can’t get hired. I earned a scholarship to grad school. Got my own room in the dorm as an RA and still worked ata diner, too. It was enough to live on. It wasn’t enough to sock money away for the down payment on an apartment, for after graduation.”
“Even if you got hired as a teacher right away, school wouldn’t start for three months. You’d have to save up a ton to coverthat gap.”
Exactly what had kept her awake and worried the whole summer before starting grad school. It kept her working double shiftswhenever she could grab them, too. “Out of the blue, one of my regulars at the diner asked me if I’d paint a birthday presentfor his mom. A replica of a Maxfield Parrish landscape that was her favorite. We’d gotten friendly. I’d told him how I taughtmyself to paint by copying famous works, over and over again.”
“That’s the trick? I spent at least a month when I was ten trying to draw the frog on the Honey Smacks box. How come I couldnever get it down?”
Sierra loved that Flynn kept trying to lighten the mood. It showed that he realized how hard this was for her. Even thoughhe had no idea what was coming. “Copying isn’t a magic shortcut. It was just the path that worked for me. I’ve got a knackfor it. Better than doing my own original stuff.”
“Did you make a replica?”
“Yes. Rick paid me a hundred dollars, plus supplies. He paid me a lot of compliments, too, and we started going out. Thenhe said his grandma was jealous of his mom’s present, and wanted one of her own. Of course I whipped out another.”
“I feel like we can skip ahead to where obviously Rick is the biggest schmuck in the universe. He’s gotta be, to not moveheaven and earth to make you happy and keep you next to him.”
Sierra clasped her hands so tightly that her fingers turned chalk-white. “Rick conned me into doing a lot of replicas. Notjust the Parrish landscape, but others, too. I was desperate for the cash. Desperate to please him. Then I discovered thathe actually sold them to a man who ran a huge counterfeiting ring. Wayne Kornieck.”
“Wait. Hang on. What?” Flynn’s body went absolutely rigid behind her.
This is the part where Sierra felt utterly stupid. Stupid that she’d ever believed Rick liked her. Stupid that she hadn’twondered what he was doing with all the paintings.
So her words came out in a rush. “He took me along to meet a business associate. I was thrilled, because Rick never talkedabout his work. All he said was that he was in acquisitions. That it was business that’d be over my head. It’d bore me. Finallyincluding me felt special. Instead, it turned out he was just tired of pretending to be my boyfriend.”
“God damn, Sierra. I can’t believe it.” Flynn’s voice held shock, but not judgment.
Not yet, anyway.
“It gets worse.” She turned her cheek to press against the rock-solid warmth of his shoulder. His strength would help herget through this. “The meeting was so that Wayne could lay out exactly what he expected me to do going forward. I refused,of course. I was horrified when I found out that Rick and Wayne had been selling my knockoffs as the real thing.”
“Did you tell anyone? Try to get help?”
“Wayne said that if I told anyone, he’d tip off the police that I was selling counterfeits. That he’d put the blame on me.Since it truly was my work, that’d be easy to prove. They’d send me to jail for something I both did and didn’t do.”
“Not the worst threat ever. Impossible to prove, though. I think if the police looked at the head of a counterfeit ring andyou, they’d figure out pretty quick who to believe.” Flynn stroked his hands up and down her arms. “But that’s hindsight.Makes sense that at the time, his threat threw you for a loop.”
At the time? How about every time nightmares woke her up in the middle of the night? “I drove myself crazy trying to figureout the next step. I didn’t have the money to hire a lawyer. If I got arrested, my life would be over. No way out. For a solidweek, I skipped classes and tried to come up with a solution.”
“You’re here now, so you must’ve come up with something.”
Sierra
