Revenge16 min read
The Sea She Painted
ButterPicks13 views
I still remember the taste of the soup my mother shoved into my cold hands the day everything shifted.
"You eat," she said, voice thick with a joy that felt borrowed from someone else's life. "You can't starve yourself."
"I won't," I lied, clutching the bowl like a thin shield.
We had guests that evening—people polite enough to lower their voices, people who smelled of new suits and older secrets. They left in a hurry; their footsteps skimmed the floor like discarded pages. When the apartment quieted, it was only me and Greyson Collins in the wide living room.
"I thought your aunt wanted to meet me," I said, tapping the rim of the bowl with a fingernail. "Why did she bring me to meet your friend instead?"
Greyson blinked, surprised. "Isn't that normal?"
"We are dating, right?" he asked.
"Are we?" I looked up.
"Aren't we?"
I stood to leave. He reached out and took my hand.
"Don't go."
It sounds like some movie line, but his fingers were warm. He led me across the room, sometimes glancing back at me. I walked in a daze.
We reached the atrium. A spiral staircase curled upward, and a glossy piano sat beneath a chandelier. I had no idea Greyson could play.
"Wait here," he said, and sat at the piano like it was the most natural thing in the world. His hands slid over the keys, gentle and sure, and a flow of notes rose like water.
He played Debussy. Moonlight. The room filled with the slow swell of something that made my chest ache.
I clapped when he finished. "You're better than a hobbyist."
"I haven't played in years," he said, smiling with one corner of his mouth. "I wanted to, once. I thought about making music a life."
"Why didn't you?"
"Talent is rare. Hard work is common." He stood slowly, his eyes fixed on me. His height felt like a presence closing around me. "So when I see someone waste a gift, when they let it die—do you understand how that looks to me?"
I did not. He spoke as if he wore disappointment like a tailored coat.
"Ten years ago I saw her once," he continued. "She had a presence—like the moon. A kind of genius confidence."
"Who?" My voice was a small thing.
He named the initials. "Z. H."
My body froze. He took my shoulder. "You can't say nothing? Say something."
"Art is not always highbrow and life not always low," I snapped, veiled anger shielding me. "Must beauty always be noble and crowds always crude?"
He let go and stared. Then—lighter—he lifted a long cigarette pipe, then, in a sudden, intimate motion, drew me into his lap and anchored me there. He was close and dangerous and soft.
"Tell me why you stopped," he rasped. "Why you gave up your sea."
My breath hitched. I remembered that signature. I remembered the comic that sold out. I remembered the missing fifth volume locked away like a secret.
"It is both yes and no," I muttered. "Call it ambiguous."
"You were the protagonist of that book, right?" he asked softly.
I closed my eyes. "Some of it. The hero's name? They called it 'The Little Monster's Sea' in the imprint. People loved it." I pressed my palms to my temples. "But it ended there."
"Why did you stop?"
I told him, and my voice was a river I had dammed for years.
"When I was young, my father stole the rights. He took my work, sold it, and used the money like a man who buys the ocean and thinks he owns the tide. He lied about loans. People came to our door. We—" I shut my eyes. "We lost everything. I lost my chance to go to the art school. I took whatever work I could. I worked and repaid debt. I painted and kept painting in secret."
"You gave me the fourth issue as a present," Greyson said quietly. "It starts with the Little Monster tempted by treasure. He forgets his voyage. He becomes human and loses himself."
"That's what happened to me," I said. "I watched my own story turn to a cautionary tale. The villain wasn't some dragon. The dragon was the life I allowed to swallow me."
He let me go and walked to the stairwell. He brought down several editions of the comic, laying them on my lap. "I have all of these—cheap editions, collector editions. Why is the last volume missing?"
"Because it was never finished," I admitted. "My father kept the originals. He made money off what I drew and then kept me from finishing it by making my life a crisis."
He sighed, then smiled in a way that softened the room. "You look like you want me to hold you."
I scooted in and let him. His hands were careful against my jaw. "You told me once you painted me a sea."
"I gave you the sea because you were someone who never saw it," I said. "You had that all along in your chest, Greyson. But you covered it."
"I did." He thought of music and the piano and the path he had not taken. "I gave up on music and became something safe."
"Why did you give up?" I asked.
"Because I'm ordinary," he said, and I laughed at him for saying it.
"Ordinary men make ordinary lives," I told him. "But they do not always let others drown."
He kissed my forehead. "Are you angry with me?"
"No. I am angry that you saw me as treasure to be kept rather than a sea to be shared."
He looked crushed, then resolute. "I will not keep you. I want to be part of your voyage."
"Don't say that like it's a promise," I murmured. "You might be another storm."
He brushed my hair from my face. "If I am a storm, let me be the kind that redraws the coastline."
A laugh escaped me. He had a way of making wild things sound gentle. He also had a way of knowing the exact moment to look at me that made my heart pull like tidewater.
Weeks later, the life I thought was private started to leak into public.
Giles Cowan, CEO of a tech company called IBOX, called. "Adriana Espinoza? This is Giles. Your art is exactly what we need for our game design."
Greyson had shown him my pages. Or maybe he hadn't. The first thing Giles said at our interview was blunt and a little ridiculous. "We will pay you well. We will give you shares. We will give you a car."
"A car?" I blinked.
"Take it," he said. He slid a key across the tabletop like a prize. "It's a 718. Feature the game and the car is yours."
"You're joking."
"It's mine," he said stubbornly, then shoved the key back with exaggerated seriousness. "Go take it."
I laughed until my chest hurt at his theatrical impatience. He was serious about art and about the business of turning stories into money. He even missed the point sometimes, treating my work like a product rather than a life.
But I needed money. I needed to pay the last of my family's debts. I took the job.
Greyson's interest in me was not the only one stirring. My father—Maximiliano Garcia—had a style of success tied to other people's ruins. He had once been a salesman of prestige. He had used my work not only to paw wealth but to build a false shrine to his own name.
"That man," I said to Greyson in the car one day, "took my work and turned it into cash. My fifth installment is in his chest like a heart that refuses to beat."
Greyson slid his hand into mine. "We will get it back," he said. The promise was gentle like a promise should be.
I wanted to believe him more than I'd ever wanted to believe anything. I wanted to feel the warm wash of someone standing on the shore beside me, not dragging me back into the undertow.
At IBOX, the hackles of office politics rose like smoke. Paola Cantrell was my new manager. She smiled like a political cartoon.
"Sit." Her desk was a fortress. "You can't leave now. You are doing well."
"I don't want to be here half a year," I told her, flat. "I'm a freelancer first."
"You are not." She tapped my file with sharp cheekbones. "You are our artist, and we have plans for you."
The bank I once worked at was a place of small cruelties. Everett Ford, a man who used to be my boss, had been promoted in a scandal that I would later see with my own eyes as a convenient arrangement. Kadence Galli, the colleague fired because of a private camera, still packed her desk in tears. "My mom has cancer. My brother is in school."
"That's not our department." Paola said. "We have rules."
"Rules are made for losers," I said to Paola under my breath.
"Whose side are you on?" she asked, fake amusement curling like steam.
"My own," I said.
And it kept being my own. I took a car Giles had offered me for a little while, then I returned it because the idea of owning anything given as a favor felt like debt in a new currency. I refused to be the kind of woman who accepts a car as if it is the price one must pay for recognition.
"You're returning it?" Giles asked, genuinely surprised. "Why?"
"Because it isn't mine," I said. "Why keep something that will start to define me to others?"
He frowned in a way that made him look older. "You are the kind of person who wants to give people the chance to be better. That is a rarity."
We worked on the game. My art filled screens. People liked the retro-sad dreamscapes I drew. Then the feeds came alive.
Someone posted a video. Allison Caruso, a woman who had once walked in his life as a bright, urgent flame, appeared on my feed one morning. She wore a mask but her voice shook like a drumskin. She said things that sounded like knives. She said she had records: bank transfers, photos, medical documents. She said my father had not only stolen from me but had wronged many women, and the truth was a lit match.
There was a moment when the world tipped. My phone buzzed and buzzed. "He's being arrested," someone texted. I didn't cry. I felt strange and hollow as if someone had taken a stone from my chest.
It was public. It had to be public. And for the men who do terrible things, I understood there was a ritual that had to happen: the reveal.
They arranged for a press conference in the plaza outside our old bank building. We gathered like wolves and witnesses.
"Adriana Espinoza?" a reporter asked. "Are you the Z. H. behind the comics?"
"Yes," I said, and the microphones leaned toward me. "I am."
Maximiliano Garcia was escorted into the square in cuffs, a man in a suit that had been expensive enough to hide some sins but not all. His face went through a change like a film strip played in slow motion: confidence, surprise, denial, desperation.
"You have been accused of fraud and of misappropriation," the prosecutor read. "You are charged with embezzlement and forging copyright assignments."
The crowd murmured. Phones came up. Someone shouted, "How could you?"
He shook his head at first. "No—no—this is mistake," he said, voice thin as glass.
"You allowed a child's creation to become your commodity," Greyson said from beside me. His voice was steady. "You took a life and turned it into a ledger."
"That is not true!" he cried. "I raised her. I fed her!"
"By stealing?" I asked, and people leaned in. "By sending collectors to our door? By taking money and leaving us with debt?"
His hands trembled. His face had become pale as that of someone who had been cut loose from a familiar rope.
"Who helped you launder those funds?" a reporter demanded.
"I—" He began to speak of false partners and loans and "bad investments." At first he laughed as if laughter could turn the tide, then he looked around at the sea of faces and dissolved.
Allison had prepared more than her video. She had witnesses. She had bank statements. She had names. And so the story built in live increments: timestamps, transfers, recorded phone calls.
The crowd shifted from curiosity to scorn. A woman near me began to cry and clap at the same time.
"Do you regret it?" I asked him suddenly, because I wanted his voice to answer the part that no paper could touch.
"I regret that things were complicated—" he tried.
"Regret?" someone in the crowd scoffed. "You took a child's dream."
His expression cracked, like a mask trodden underfoot. "I thought I was protecting the family," he said in a small voice. "I didn't mean—"
He was interrupted by a chorus of private messages and a live camera that threw his face up ten meters high. A man in the crowd took out a sign: "For the children he stole from."
Someone started filming, and the sound of a thousand phones clicking was like rain.
Maximiliano tried to fight back. "It's all lies! She only wants money! She wants to embarrass me!"
"Where is the fifth volume?" someone shouted.
"I don't—" He reached for something—an explanation, a crutch—and found it bare.
The prosecutor unfolded a list of names—artists, students, women—and the square filled with the music of indictment. The police read the charges, and with each article the man's face grew older.
He went through the stages: first arrogance, then confusion, then anger, then pleading, then collapse. At one point he lunged towards the table where his documents were displayed and ripped them up like a disappointed child. The security men pulled him away gently but firmly. Around us, the crowd's voice rose — not to break him, but to make sure his actions were seen for what they had been.
"Shame!" a woman cried. "Shame on you!"
He sank into a bench for a second and laughed, a dry sound. "They don't understand business," he told himself, louder than he had to. "They don't understand leverage."
Allison walked up to him and held her phone where the camera could see. "You forced me to terminate a pregnancy," she said plainly. "You promised to marry me and lied. You robbed my trust."
His face changed then. That particular combination — sex, secrecy, broken promises — had been part of his winding pattern. The crowd gasped, then grew quiet, then erupted.
Phones were out. Reporters asked questions about the legal documentation. A man in a flat cap raised the issue of art forgery. "You forged signatures?" another asked.
He clutched at the air. "No, no," he repeated. "I did what I had to do—"
"Because you were greedy," I said. "And greedy men always think they are clever."
Beside me, Greyson's hand tightened on mine. "You did the right thing," he whispered.
He did not smile then. Later, someone would accuse me of parading my father's guilt for attention. I thought of that, and of how the square had filled with witnesses. The punishment wasn't just in cuffs or in the indictment. Punishment is often an unglamorous trail: the empty office, the canceled invites, the calls that don't come.
He pleaded and begged. He tried to call me his daughter again, but the word had no power left. At one point his eyes were frantic.
"You sold my work! You sold my life," I said loud enough for him to hear and for the microphones to carry. "This is how you fed your greed—on art."
He slumped as though someone had cut his strings. The cameras recorded his collapse into a heap of old lies.
Surrounding him, the crowd's reaction moved like weather. Some people whispered, some shook their heads, some took loud selfies of themselves with him in the background. A group of art students started chanting my comic's refrain. "Free the Little Monster!" they sang, as if a child's voice could scold the world and put it right.
"Look at him!" someone shouted. "A wolf in a suit."
He tried to speak one final time, and his voice split. "I didn't mean to," he kept saying. "I only wanted—"
"To own other people," Allison said, with a calmness that cut me like a clean blade. "You wanted to own us."
A woman near me started to clap. "This is overdue."
He then made a last attempt: "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. We can fix this," he pleaded, the desperation like a child asking for a toy. The crowd booed, a slow building chorus. His face crumpled, raw with unmasked shame. He sat there and watched as the people he had once used filled the space with whispers, laughter, tears, and photographs.
The police took him away while the crowd watched. Someone snapped a photo of me walking past him as he was led into the car. He looked at me, eyes hollow with the realization that his empire was gone. I didn't look away.
That day, my father's fall looked ugly and human—no cinematic grandeur, only the slow, public inventory of a life misused. He tried to make excuses, tried to appear reasonable. He failed. And the crowd that had once been strangers became witnesses to an unwinding.
After the arrest, things changed quickly. The social feeds exploded. More women came forward with stories. Legal actions piled up. Our little house began to feel like a hard-won country reclaimed.
Greyson never left my side. He was there at my exhibitions with a quiet, steady gravity. He did things that made my chest shake.
"Once," he told me softly one afternoon as we walked under a sky that looked like the inside of a shell, "I thought I'd lose you to life." He stopped and took my jacket off without thinking. "You were cold."
"You could have warmed me with other things," I teased.
He smiled, rare and bright. "I could. I chose this." He draped his jacket over my shoulders. "I think you're brave."
"You tell me that a lot."
"Because it's true." He put a hand against the small of my back and let me lean into him. "You gave me a sea."
He then did something he seldom did in public: he laughed openly at some of my jokes and told me secrets in the half-dark of morning. He was protective without being possessive. He worried about me without being controlling. He had a tenderness that was not cloying.
There were other times—small moments that made my heart flip like a fish out of water.
"You never smile like that at others," Kadence told me once at a gallery. "He looks at you like you are all the colors."
I blushed because it was true. Greyson had this way of tilting his head and looking at me as if he were studying a painting he was unsure he deserved.
Another time, I forgot my scarf at the café. When I came back, Greyson was waiting by the door with my scarf in his hands.
"Here," he said. "You left this."
My fingers brushed his as I took it, and for a second the world narrowed to the space between our skin. The contact was small—two fingers—but the electricity lingered.
"Once I thought radio silence would help," I told him after that. "But silence reveals what you miss."
He knew my silences. He unwrapped them slowly, like a present.
Then came the day when the fifth volume of my comic finally surfaced—because it had to. The original manuscripts were found in a safety deposit box Max had used as part of his shell games. Allison and a few other women had pushed and pried until the truth broke out. Legal hands moved, and with the forensics, signatures were matched, bank transfers traced, and the missing pages—my pages—came home.
We had a reading in a small theatre. I sat onstage, hands trembling as people asked me about the Little Monster. "Why did you make him get lost?" a child asked.
"Because sometimes the hardest villains are the ones that make us feel safe," I said. "Sometimes the hardest things are what we carry inside."
Greyson came up with me, and when the applause died, he did something that no man in my life had ever done: he asked me, plainly and without pageantry, to be his partner—not as a debt, not as a promise, but as an equal.
"Will you come on this journey with me?" he asked.
"Yes," I said, and in that "yes" was the reclaiming of a sea.
There were more public moments. The judge ordered restitution. Max was fined and required to pay back what could be accounted. The court hearings turned into a spectacle. Reporters filled the gallery, and the courtroom buzzed. He tried his old tricks—blame, evasion, bargaining—but each attempt revealed another seam.
At one hearing, he stood and told the court, "I did what was best for my family."
A woman from the crowd, who had once been a classmate, shouted back, "That's what you always said to take the last piece."
His face went from reckless to broken. Lawyers filed the evidence. When the judge read the restitution order, Max began to shiver with fury and shame.
"You broke your own child," the prosecutor said, voice like tempered steel. "You turned art into a ledger and childhood into collateral."
He tried to smile. It looked like a contortion. "I will fix it," he said. "I will make it right."
"Make it right," I repeated, and it sounded like a question that would haunt him.
He was convicted on several counts. He lost the privileges he'd used as shields. Men who treasure appearances above truth found their masks torn.
The punishments were many, and not all of them legal. Some were social—the invitations stopped, the gallery names withdrew his past favors, the people who had once applauded him now clicked "unfollow." Others were practical: he had to sign off on the rights of my comic, return original manuscripts, and fund an exhibition to benefit those he had harmed. Most of all, he had to stand in public while people who had been silenced spoke, and that was a punishment the law catalyzed but the community enforced.
One afternoon I stood outside the courthouse after all the legal steps had been taken. People gathered around in little knots, whispering. A table was set up where they'd displayed the original pages. Children pointed. A grandmother pressed her hand over her heart and said, "Thank you for telling the truth."
I found Greyson and he took my cold fingers. "You did something incredible," he said. "You did not let them bury your work."
"But we did use the tide," I told him. "We rode the wave."
"No," he answered, turning my hand so his thumb brushed my palm. "We are learning to steer the boat."
We walked through the square that had once become the stage for his fall. The public, the cameras, the parade of accusations—over time, it turned into a slow, healing rumor: a girl reclaimed her pages; a man took responsibility; a community watched; justice, imperfect as it is, moved.
There were even sweeter moments. Greyson sang me a fragment of music one night in his kitchen, his fingers tracing the rim of a coffee cup like it was a piano. He had an old cassette of Debussy he had once told me about. "I never went to Moscow," he said, "but I went somewhere else. I went to be brave."
"Where?" I asked.
"Here," he said, and he kissed me—just a light press—and it tasted like salt and paint.
I finished the fifth volume of the comic. I redrew endings and added honesty. The Little Monster did reach the sea again. He stood at the shoreline and understood that dragons sometimes live in us. He did not slay them by force. He simply began to reclaim what he had let go. The art was mine again.
IBOX launched the game with our partnership. Reviews called it "a haunting float between dream and fact." Giles and Giles's cohorts celebrated. The company reached its B round. Shares were distributed, and I had a modest slice. I bought my mother an apartment, but I made sure it had my name on the lease.
There were nights when the past still woke me in cold sweats. I had scars on my wrist that would not vanish. I would trace them and remember the blade's metallic sting. Greyson would find me and hold me until the storm abated. He would not try to fix the past. He would only be present.
And then the world shifted again.
A new article surfaced—corrections and apologies about my father's cases. A few people had second thoughts. A tabloid tried to whisper that maybe I'd used the story to my benefit. I laughed then, a sharp little sound.
"It is not about vengeance," Greyson said, holding my face. "It's about truth."
"Is that supposed to make me noble?"
He leaned in close, his forehead to mine. "It's supposed to make you alive."
He helped me see that the real treasure was not the money we would now own or the fame that followed. It was the autonomy of my life. When my father's final accounting closed, there was a small sum set aside as recompense for the people he'd hurt. I used it to fund scholarships for young artists from poor backgrounds.
One night, weeks after everything had settled into a new pattern, Greyson surprised me with a tiny, battered piece of parchment.
"I found this in the deposit box," he said. "A sketch. It has no signature."
It was a small seaside, blue and uncertain, a child's horizon. I put my palm on the page and felt the ridges left by pencil.
"That's our sea," I said.
He smiled. "Now it's ours to paint again."
We went to the coast that summer—not the faraway world of oceans beyond borders, just the salt-water lake with its inland sea. He joked that it was the truest sea he could afford us. We sat on a beach of small pebbles while the wind smelled of stone and algae.
"Do you know why I kept your name secret?" he asked as the light slid long.
"No."
"Because people can be mean to gifts," he said. "Gifts are delicate. But I want the world to see you—not as someone's daughter, but as Adriana, who paints seas."
"I still sign things Z. H. sometimes," I said.
"Because some initials are stronger than names," he said. "Because the little monster belongs to everyone."
We watched the water and both felt the same small miracle: the tide comes in and goes out. You cannot stop it, but you can stand in it and learn to breathe with it.
"Are you still holding on to the fifth volume's last page?" he asked.
"I finished it," I said. "It ends with the little monster finding himself and failing and beginning again."
He nodded. "Sounds honest."
"It is," I said. "And honest is sweeter than any prize."
Greyson kissed me then, a soft, certain thing. "So stay with me on the map," he said. "Let's mark our coastlines together."
"I will," I promised.
When I look back now, I don't see a clean victory. I see a crowded shore—some people helping, some people photographing, some people fighting. I see a father who chose greed and paid a hard reckoning. I see a community that behaved imperfectly and yet, in the end, stitched the wound into something that can teach.
And I see the sea I painted, which was never for sale.
The End
— Thank you for reading —