Reborn at Eighteen The Billionaire's Second Chance novel Chapter 76

Chapter 76

Elara

The apartment was quiet when I returned. Too quiet.

I collapsed onto the narrow bed, my phone trembling in my hand. The

search bar stared back at me: “Elena Castellano artist Bronx“.

The results made my stomach turn.

“So–called ‘Mrs. Castellano‘ debunked as internet hoax”

“No official records confirm existence of alleged artist”

“Kennedy family proves E.C. pseudonym with documentation”

I scrolled faster, desperately. The Bronx community forum posts-

where neighbors had shared memories of Elena’s studio, her

kindness, her quiet death–were gone. Marked as “False Information”

or simply deleted.

They weren’t just controlling the present. They were erasing the past.

My hands moved on autopilot, reaching for the storage box under the

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bed. Inside: Elena’s gold–rimmed reading glasses, scratched from

years of use. Her yellowed sketchbook, the cover inscribed in fading

ink: “Elena Castellano, Arte è vita.” Art is life.

I opened it carefully. Page after page of careful studies–hands, faces,

light falling across fabric. Her handwriting in the margins, switching

between Italian and broken English: “Ricorda–shadows are not black.

They breathe.”

At the bottom of the box, three photographs:

A young Elena standing before the Florence Academy of Fine Arts,

eyes bright with ambition.

Elena and Jake on their wedding day, his saxophone case visible in

the background, both of them laughing.

Elena in her Bronx studio–much older, hair white, paint–stained

apron, standing before an easel in a converted garage that looked

disturbingly like my current apartment.

I pressed the wedding photo to my chest.

She existed. She was real. She taught me everything.

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I was five when we first met. Mamá had just taken the cleaning job at

Blackwood Estate. She’d saved for weeks to afford Elena’s beginner

painting class, hoping to keep me occupied while she worked.

Elena’s studio was a converted auto garage on 138th Street. The smell

of motor oil never quite left the concrete floor. Paint tubes crowded

every surface. Classical music played from a paint–splattered radio.

“Chiamami Elena, bambina.” Call me Elena. Her Italian accent made

every word musical. “We are friends, not teacher and student.”

She didn’t teach me to paint like the photographs in books. She

taught me to see.

“Art is not about making pretty pictures for rich people’s walls,” she’d

said, kneeling to my eye level. “It’s about making your soul breathe.

Respira, bambina. Breathe.”

She’d come to New York in 2005, following Jake and his jazz dreams.

He’d died five years later–heart attack, no insurance, medical bills

that ate everything. Elena kept painting through the grief, through

the poverty, through the gallery rejections.

“Fifty galleries,” she told me once, her voice matter–of–fact. “Fifty

times they said ‘too European,‘ ‘too classical, not contemporary

enough.” She’d smiled, sad and knowing. “In America, immigrant art

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is only valued when immigrants are dead.”

I was fifteen when she painted The Lonely Supper. Jake’s fifth death

anniversary. She’d wept silently as she worked, surrounded by

reference photos–his wine glass, his worn copy of Dante’s Inferno,

the evening light he’d loved.

“This is my last painting, Elara,” she’d whispered. “When it’s finished,

I can rest.”

She died three months later. The landlord cleared her studio within a

week. Everything sold to secondhand dealers for pennies.

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