I set the portfolio down on her desk. Diane finally looked up, smirking, expecting tears. “Smart girl. I’ll have HR walk you out.”
“Before I sign anything,” I said, “you should probably take that call.”
Right on cue, her phone buzzed. Then buzzed again. Then it didn’t stop. She glanced down, and the color drained from her face like someone had pulled a plug.
It was Harold Bennett. The donor. The one whose six-million-dollar wing kept her lights on.
See, Harold had emailed me two weeks ago asking who really curated the Hudson Series. He’d noticed the handwritten notes in the catalog margins, the ones Diane forgot to scrub. My handwriting. My research on a forgotten Bronx painter named Elena Reyes. I’d answered him honestly. I’d also attached every dated draft, every email thread where Diane told me to “keep my name off the proposal because the board prefers a familiar face,” and the signed agreement from Elena herself, naming me, not the gallery, as her exclusive representative.
Diane’s hand was shaking. “What did you do.”
“I told the truth. Elena’s pulling her collection. Harold’s pulling his endowment. And the four artists I onboarded last year? They signed with me this morning.” I slid a business card across the marble. Reyes & Vega Contemporary. My own gallery. Funded by Harold himself, who apparently doesn’t like being lied to over chardonnay.
“You can’t,” she whispered. “You’re nobody.”
“I was nobody,” I said. “You just kept forgetting to sign your name on my work.”
I picked up the resignation letter, tore it neatly in half, and let the pieces flutter onto her espresso. The board meeting started in twenty minutes. I wasn’t invited. But Harold was. And he’d brought my portfolio.
I walked out past the receptionist, past the wall where Elena’s paintings used to hang, and into an elevator that, for the first time in three years, felt like it was going up.
