Page 125 of Modern Romance September 2025 5-8
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 abouther.
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.
