Reborn at Eighteen The Billionaire's Second Chance novel Chapter 60

Elara

After we hung up, I sat in the quiet kitchen for a long time, staring at my hands.

Someone believed in me. Someone who wasn’t family, wasn’t paid to

care, wasn’t tangled up in the Vane family web.

Someone just… believed.

I stood up, suddenly energized despite my exhaustion. Moved to my

tiny room–barely big enough for a twin bed and a dresser–and

opened my art supply box.

Fresh canvas. Brushes. Oils.

I set up my workspace by the window: a rickety folding table someone

had left in the hallway, a desk lamp I’d bought at a thrift store.

This time, I won’t leave my work at school. I’ll keep it here, in my

room, until the day of the exhibition.

And I’ll create something so unique, so undeniably mine, that no one

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can replicate it.

Let’s see how Sloane handles that. Let’s see how the “contemporary

Picasso” performs when she has nothing to steal.

I picked up a pencil and began sketching on the canvas. Rough

outlines. A figure–ambiguous, abstract. Half in light, half in shadow.

Reaching toward something. Or pulling away from it.

Hours passed. Maria went to bed, her worried glances through my

doorway eventually fading as exhaustion claimed her. The sounds of

the street gradually quieted–the rumble of traffic, the shouts of kids

playing, the thump of bass from someone’s car stereo.

But I kept working.

The figure began to take shape. A woman. Wings–but broken,

fragmented, falling away. One hand clutching at empty air. The other

pressed against her chest, where her heart should be.

It was me,

It was Lily.

It was every woman who’d ever had her voice stolen, her work claimed

by someone else, her pain dismissed as hysteria.

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Around two in the morning, I finally stepped back, squinting at the

rough composition through bleary eyes.

My fingers were covered in charcoal and paint. My back ached. But for

the first time in days–maybe weeks–I felt something like clarity.

I glanced at my phone, sitting silent on the dresser.

No calls from Julian. No texts from Blackwood.

Just silence.

I picked up my brush, dipped it in burnt umber, and added another

shadow to the figure’s face.

“Sloane,” I whispered to the empty room, “I can’t wait to see your

panicked face when you realize you have nothing to present. The

‘genius‘ without her ghost painter… what will you be then?”

The canvas seemed to glow in the lamplight, raw and unfinished but

already powerful.

I worked until the sky outside began to lighten, until exhaustion

finally forced my hand to still.

Then I collapsed onto my bed, fully clothed, and fell into a dreamless

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sleep.

I slept less than four hours.

Mamá woke me at six, her worried face hovering over my bed like a

ghost. “Elara, you need to eat something before school.”

I dragged myself up, every muscle aching from hunching over the

canvas until two in the morning. The abstract self–portrait sat

propped against the wall, still drying—a fractured figure reaching

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