## Part 4: The Forged Papers
On Monday morning, I went to the Delacroix Gallery in Santa Fe as Trent had told me to, and I asked, politely and in writing, for every consignment agreement bearing my name. Trent kept me waiting forty minutes in a white waiting room with no magazines, only a pitcher of water and a painting on the wall that was not mine. When he finally came out, he handed me a thin folder with five sheets of paper in it. Five. Not twelve. Not fourteen months of sales. Five.
I read them at the little table, with Rosa beside me taking notes. The signatures at the bottom looked like mine at first glance — the same looping J, the same long tail on the y. But when I held them next to my real signature on my driver's license, the differences jumped out. My real signature leans to the right because I write fast. These signatures stood straight up, careful and slow, the way someone signs when they are copying. The ink was the same black gel pen on all five sheets, even though the dates on them were months apart. And on two of them, the date was wrong in a way only I would notice: one was dated on a Sunday when the gallery was closed, and another was dated during the week I had been in Colorado visiting my sister, with plane tickets to prove it.
"These are forged," I said, and my voice did not shake this time. "I did not sign these."
Trent did not even blink. "June, you signed them in this office. I watched you."
"You watched me sign papers on dates when I was in another state?" I asked. "That's an interesting trick, Trent."
Candace appeared from the back office, as if she had been listening at the door. "Mom, you are embarrassing yourself," she said loudly, so the gallery assistant could hear. "You are getting confused. Maybe you should see a doctor. Memory problems run in our family, you know."
That was the cruelest part, because it was almost true. My mother had dementia in her last years. Candace knew that. She was using my mother's illness like a weapon, planting the idea that I was confused, that I could not be trusted about my own work, my own money, my own signature.
I stood up, gathered the five sheets, and put them in my bag. "I am keeping copies of these," I said. "And I am getting my own expert to look at them."
Trent's smile finally slipped. "Those are gallery property, June."
"They have my name on them," I said. "That makes them mine."
On the way home, Rosa and I stopped at a copy shop and made three sets of copies of everything: the forged sheets, the bank statements, the HELOC paper, the inventory photos. Rosa kept one set in her safe. I kept one set in my studio, hidden inside an old paint box. The third set I mailed to myself, so it would arrive with a postmark, a trick my late husband taught me years ago when he said, "June, if something matters, make sure the post office dates it for you."
That night, I could not sleep. I walked through my studio and looked at the paintings that were left — twenty-one of them, leaning against the walls, some finished, some still wet. Each one had taken me weeks, sometimes months. Each one held a piece of my life: the desert after rain, my mother's kitchen, the light on the Rio Grande in winter. Someone had decided those pieces were theirs to sell.
Around midnight, my phone buzzed again. It was not Candace this time. It was a number I did not know, with a text that said: "Mrs. Calloway, I bought one of your paintings from Delacroix Gallery. I think something is wrong with the paperwork. Can we talk?" The name at the bottom of the message was Harold Finch, a collector from Albuquerque. And below his message, he had sent a photograph of a certificate of authenticity — with my signature on it, in that same careful, straight-up handwriting that was not mine at all.
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