Page 65 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8

CHAPTER FOUR

Six Months Later…

T HE PHONE PULSED in Sebastian’s back pocket.

He wiped his hands on his thighs, the Technicolor of paints spreading into hued streaks of black against the dark material.

He withdrew the phone and sighed. He considered ending the call, but it would only ring again, until there was a knock on the front door instead. And if he didn’t answer that, she’d climb through an open window or an unlocked door.

He placed the phone to his ear. ‘Esther.’

‘Have you looked at it yet?’ his agent asked. ‘I know it was delivered this morning.’

His lips lifted. No small talk. No softening of her irritated tone. Always straight to the point.

‘No.’

She huffed, and he imagined her in her glass office in London, the skyscrapers behind her as she sat at her desk, small and formidable, in the largest and tallest art gallery the world had seen.

He’d only been there once, but he remembered the determined line of her mouth, daring those who entered to defy her.

Sabastian had dared to enter—and refuse her.

What felt like a lifetime ago, in his fingerless gloves and woolly hat, he’d walked up to her desk and returned the cheque she’d handed him.

He’d slid it, smudged from his dirty fingers, across her antique oak desk with embossed green leather, and walked away.

‘Have you looked at any of them?’ she asked, pulling him back into the present.

He didn’t answer. He glanced at the small pile of newspapers stacked in the corner of his studio. Each was paper-clipped with a note from Esther, demanding that he call her once he’d looked at them.

He hadn’t looked, and he hadn’t called.

His gaze travelled over the walls of his studio. It had seemed the ideal place to work when he’d purchased the castle. The outer wall had crumbled, so he’d restored it, replacing the wall with glass, and now it looked as if nothing stood between him and the Scottish Highlands.

So much light flooded into the dark space. And it taunted him. A light he could never quite catch in the right position to tempt his artist’s eye.

Easels sat in every available space, unfinished. The studio was chaos. Every medium he’d tried. Clay, spray foam, paint. He’d even gone out into the moors, walked knee-deep into the lowlands, collected heather and mud to build a sculpture.

Nothing was working.

Nothing had worked.

Until he’d gone back to the cheap spray-paint he’d started with, the kind that was so readily available from anywhere.

And even then, the work felt old. Something he’d done before.

A different picture with the same old media and the same canvas.

The same street wall where he’d let himself first be what and who he was.

An artist.

Was he still one when he couldn’t work? Couldn’t come up with anything new, fresh?

He swallowed thickly. ‘I haven’t.’

‘I know it’s you.’

‘And if it is?’ he asked, walking over to the newspaper on top of the pile and picking it up.

‘They’ve set up specialist teams to track them—to track you down,’ she added, ignoring his question, and he snarled. His privacy was his own. They had no right.

‘If any more pop up, without me knowing… They will take them before they hit the newspapers,’ she continued. ‘They will take them before the local councils can tape them off and keep them safe. And even then—’ She sighed heavily.

Anger fizzed under his skin. It was for them. The public. The ordinary. The unseen. His work was not for the eyes of the rich.

‘What have you done to stop this?’ he asked.

‘Nothing!’ she hissed. ‘I can’t do anything if you don’t tell me where they are.’

He unfolded the newspaper. The clip and Esther’s note slid free and tinkled to the bare floorboards.

The front page, and there was his name. Sebastian Shard or Copycat?

And there was a map of the United Kingdom on the front cover beneath his name, with every place he’d visited over the last six months circled in bold red. As if he were a criminal.

He guessed he was. Defacing public property was a crime. But he knew first hand that when the poor didn’t have an outlet—a canvas to release the worry—they found a way. As he had. Even though he wasn’t poor anymore, even though he was richer than he’d ever dreamed he could be.

Are you worried?

He was not. He hadn’t compromised her. He had not put her at risk. He had not been too late. He’d pulled himself free in time.

His body pulsed.

This was not about her .

He’d only wished to return to something familiar. To find a way back to what had always come naturally to him. His art. But it had been lost to him. Since that night. Since her.

She’d thrown him into hell. Since he’d put his hands on her, used them in ways he never had before, shouldn’t have used them at all, his hands didn’t work anymore. Now he was broken.

He’d had no choice but to go back to the streets and do what he hadn’t for so long, without a plan or protection for the pieces he’d left behind.

He’d painted a series of creatures. Mythical creatures, like her, throughout the United Kingdom on walls as tall as the castle he lived in, and floors as cracked as the broken stone path she had run down on bare feet. Ran away from him.

You sent her away.

He didn’t want to remember her, but every time he closed his eyes, there she was. His siren. Her big brown eyes hurt and confused.

Shame gripped him by the throat and squeezed. He’d been cruel. Unnecessarily so. She was an innocent, and he’d taken that away from her. Used her and discarded her.

‘Are you looking at them now?’ Esther guessed. ‘Look at today’s. Page ten. It’s a whole spread.’

He flipped to the pages she was referring to.

‘Sebastian, your work is worth millions,’ she said. ‘And everyone knows it.’

His eyes scanned the corner of the newspaper. Page ten. He held it high in front of him. His stomach dropped. They had found it already and cut the brick from the wall itself from the side of a local convenience store, in the poorest estate he could find.

They’d taken it.

Left a hole in the community where beauty should have shone. He knew how his work made people feel. Knew it made them feel what he couldn’t. Hope.

‘You should have come to me,’ she said. ‘I could have protected it, protected them all. We could have made it into a spectacle. A treasure hunt for the public. But you didn’t come to me. I didn’t know where they’d show up. You haven’t claimed them as yours, and without your name—’

‘They are not mine,’ he growled. ‘They belong to them, to the people.’

‘I know,’ she said, and he heard the dip in her voice. A softness he didn’t deserve.

He knew she loved him. In a maternal type of way, because she had found him. Discovered him.

Esther had seen him create a sculpture on a street behind the theatre she had been attending one evening. She’d watched him create art from soft spray foam, sculpting it into a face with a penknife.

The only face he’d drawn or made back then. Amelia’s. Through his art, she had lived. Survived.

Esther had taken it and sold it. And then she had found him under the bridge, climbed into his tent, forever fearless, given him a cheque and her business card, and left.

He’d returned her cheque the next day and told her he had no use for a slip of paper with numbers on it, however obscene the figure was.

He didn’t have a bank account. He didn’t have ID to cash it.

He had little use for her, a woman who thought it her right to take his work.

He had not made it for her, or people like her. Then he’d walked away.

The day after, she had come back with a bag full of cash. Real money.

He had refused it, but she had left it anyway. It was his. Payment for his work. And he had stared at it for days.

Of course, he needed the money. But that bag…

His chest tightened at the memory. It had been everything he didn’t want. Didn’t deserve. But desperately needed.

Esther had come back again a week later. This time with food. She had intrigued him, and so he had let her stay. He’d watched her as she’d placed a meal in front of him. A cheap white takeaway bag filled with hot foil tins. She’d eaten hers beside him, silently, and left.

She did that every day, even though he never ate with her. He simply watched her eat with her little white plastic fork, sitting comfortably inside his tent. And he wouldn’t have admitted it then, probably not even now, but he had come to crave her company.

On the tenth day, she asked him a question. Several . Why hadn’t he touched the money? Why hadn’t he used it to move into a hotel or a hostel? But he hadn’t answered her questions, any of them. It was not for her to know that he deserved his concrete bed. Except her final question.

She’d asked him who he painted for, if not for people like her. If not for the money.

Sebastian had told her the truth.

He painted for those who needed to see hope—to feel it. He made art for the people who felt invisible.

She’d promised, if he worked with her, she’d help him to bring his art, and the proceeds, to those who needed it.

And so they had begun.

Esther Mahoti, renowned agent, had plucked a homeless nobody from the streets, and he had risen to heights unseen before by any modern-day artist.

‘If you’re planning to do any more,’ she said now, ‘I’ll protect them.’

And he knew she would. Esther kept her promises. She had every day for fifteen years.

He did not love her. He loved nothing anymore. But he liked her. Respected her.

‘I will stop,’ he said, and closed the paper.

‘Sebastian…’

He heard nothing else.

His gaze locked on the small article on the left-hand side of the front page of the newspaper.

He scanned the blurred photo. Noted the way the beige collar of the woman’s coat was turned up. The way her hair was in a high bun, wisps of black having broken free and kissing her cheeks. One hand was raised to tuck them away, her lips thinned, as her eyes stared at the photographer.