## Part 2: The Empty Storage Room
I drove home to Taos that night with the windows down, even though the desert air was cold, because I needed to stay awake and I needed to think. My studio sits behind my little adobe house on a dirt road outside town, a converted garage with big north windows and a wood stove that my late husband Thomas installed twenty years ago. I had painted there for most of my adult life. I had also trusted my daughter with a key, because she said she wanted to "help manage" my work while I focused on painting.
When I got home, I did not even go inside the house. I went straight to the studio, unlocked the side door, and turned on the lights. The storage room is at the back, a small room with shelves and a locked metal cabinet. I keep an inventory list taped inside the cabinet door, written in my own handwriting, updated every time a painting leaves or comes back.
The cabinet was not locked. The list was still there, but someone had drawn neat lines through twelve titles, in black pen, with the word SOLD written beside each one in handwriting that was almost like mine — but not quite mine. My S has a little hook at the top. This S was smooth and round. My daughter had practiced my handwriting since she was a child, forging my signature on school permission slips when she was twelve. I had laughed about it then.
"Desert After Rain" was on the list, crossed out. So was "Winter Light on the Rio Grande," a painting I had promised to a collector in Albuquerque who had been waiting a year for it. So was "My Mother's Kitchen," a small, private painting of my mother's hands kneading bread, a painting I had sworn I would never sell at any price because it was the only picture I had left of her hands.
I walked to the shelves. Where there should have been rows of wrapped canvases, leaning against each other like old friends, there were gaps. Big, empty gaps. I counted on my fingers, then counted again, because I did not trust my own eyes. Twelve paintings gone. Twelve.
My phone buzzed. It was a text from Candace: "Don't be dramatic, Mom. We talked about this. Trent is taking your career to the next level. Love you."
We had never talked about it. Not once. I sat down on the cold concrete floor of my studio and cried, not the pretty kind of crying you see in movies, but the ugly kind, with my shoulders shaking and my nose running, because someone had walked into the room where I made my life's work and taken it piece by piece while I was busy painting the next one.
When I could breathe again, I called my best friend Rosa Delgado. Rosa is seventy, a retired schoolteacher who lives two streets over and has known me since our children were in kindergarten together. She came over in her nightgown and a coat, carrying tea in a thermos, and she did not say "calm down" even once. She sat on the floor with me and looked at the crossed-out list.
"June," she said quietly, "this is not family business. This is theft."
I nodded. "I know. But she's my daughter."
"And you are the artist," Rosa said. "Those paintings are yours. Nobody gets to sell your life because they share your last name."
Rosa helped me photograph every page of the inventory list, every gap on the shelves, and the unlocked cabinet. Then she said something that made my stomach drop all over again. "June, when was the last time you checked your bank account? Not the balance on the app — the actual deposits?"
I had not checked it in months. Trent and Candace had told me they would "handle the money side" so I could paint. I opened my banking app with shaking hands, and the number on the screen did not match anything I expected. And then I saw a deposit I did not recognize at all, from a company I had never heard of, for an amount that made no sense — and right below it, a withdrawal for almost the same amount, sent somewhere else.
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