Page 61 of Love Finds Home

“You had a what?” Nolan stands up, an angry moose ready to charge.

“I had a stalker. Someone was following me. Taking pictures and sending them to me, letting me know they were watching. Things started going missing out of my dorm room. Clothes, art supplies, things like that.”

“Wait,” Ginny speaks up from the back of the room. “You haveanotherstalker?”

“What do you mean, another stalker?” Tiny explodes, joining Nolan, both of them looking ready for battle.

“It’s why she’s in Boulder Canyon. Because she was dating some creep here and he was basically stalking her,” Ginny tells them.

“And he’s followed her to Boulder Canyon,” Ranger oh so helpfully supplies.

“Wait. Wait!” Mom yells, silencing everyone throwing out question after question. “Let the girl talk. In her own timeline. I’m sure she’ll get to why she left town and what’s going on now.”

The look she gives me all but tells me that better be included.

“To answer some of the questions,” I look at everyone, “yes, I went to campus security. There wasn’t much they could do. I asked about security cameras and they laughed that there wasn’t a budget for those, and that’s when I moved out. I thought it would be over when I wasn’t easily accessed on campus anymore, but it didn’t stop.”

I pause, taking a breath. The memory of what happened still haunts me.

“What happened, sweetheart?” I’m not sure when my mom was declared leader here, but I’m glad she was.

“Finals my sophomore year happened. Bash was there for this, which is why he knows. We had to create a work in our choice of medium of a real-life person. Bash was my model.”

“That’s the one we have hanging in our living room?” Mom asks.

“That’s the one. Anyway, we had presented to our individual classes already and had received our grade, but they put together a small show for local galleries and art buyers to come see the works of ‘tomorrow’s best artists’ or some bullshit like that. I thought it’d be great if Bash was there next to his canvas so people could compare the two, see how close I was to recreating the real thing.”

“It was so cool.” Bash smiles at me. “Everyone would stop and stare at me before looking at Elle’s work and everyone made a comment about how lifelike it was and how she was going places.”

“Someone there wasn’t very happy with the attention others were getting. Half way through the show the fire alarms went off, and we were all rushed out.”

“How were you able to save the canvas?” Joker asks. I’ve noticed him on the fringes of the crowd, hanging onto every word and also texting someone since we converged in this studio.

“The fire suppressant in the room. It saved all but like four pieces that were lost from where the fire started.”

“Oh, no,” Trish gasps, understanding what it means to lose work and how painful that is.

“A week later, a letter showed up at my apartment. Inside was a plain sheet of paper with the words ‘it should have been you’and the charred remains of someone’s artwork.”

“I was there when she received the letter,” Bash admits to everyone. “So I started digging into everyone at that school who was in that show. There wasn’t anything. They were all squeaky-clean kids.”

“And when the next year started and nothing happened, I put it behind me. I never received pictures again or had things go missing. Until I started dating Stefon.”

I tell them about Stefon showing up places he shouldn’t know I’d be, and standing outside the studio. About confronting him at the benefit. All of it.

“Was he here tonight?” Mom finally asks, her hackles up.

“Very briefly,” Ranger speaks.

I snap my eyes to him questioningly. I never saw him.

“He, uh, didn’t make it too far past the front room.” He bites his bottom lip, his ears turning red.

“What did you do?” I demand.

“Had a chat with the man, that’s all. He decided to leave on his own, swear.”

“He did,” Joker and Jorge confirm at the same time.

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