Page 2 of The Right Kind of Wrong

And when Monroe was at her side, she belonged, too.

Yes, Monroe, a fresh-faced eighteen-year-old from a small town in Texas, had been captivated, to put it mildly. Where Sylvia was sleek and small, Monroe was tall and broad, even as she’d spent her life trying to shrink herself. The only way she’d ever wanted to be seen was through her art. Where Monroe was quiet and reserved, Sylvia commanded attention with a single look.

It had taken years for Monroe to understand that for all the things Sylvia could buy—and she could buy a lot—the one thing she couldn’t beg, borrow, or steal was raw talent. So Sylvia aligned herself with those who possessed the one thing that eluded her.

Monroe had been Sylvia’s fixation for over half a decade, buoyed by the ongoing success that Monroe continued to achieve in the art world.

They were finally coming to an impasse, though, and Monroe didn’t know how exactly it was going to play out. If there was one thing that Sylvia didn’t like being told, it was no.

“What are you doing? It sounds like you’re trying to renovate the second floor,” Sylvia said from behind her, even as Monroe didn’t stop pulling the dusty suitcase through the melee of her closet and into the open space of the bedroom.

Much to Sylvia’s chagrin, Monroe refused to allow the house staff into her room. It had become her only private oasis from an increasingly cloistering existence, and she relished the solitude whenever she could find it.

Monroe unzipped the suitcase. “What does it look like I’m doing?”

“Something foolish,” Sylvia parried quickly, a decisiveness in her voice that awed Monroe as much as it annoyed her. “Your show is in less than six months. This is not the time for distractions.”

Distractions. What an interesting word to use for the death of her mother and the essentially orphaning of her niece.

But truly, in Sylvia’s world, that’s probably how she saw it.

Their relationship hadn’t started until Monroe had been twenty-two, but that was only because Sylvia had cared about the optics. And Monroe had learned, over time, that this was a process that had been repeated over the years, whenever Sylvia found a young ingénue she could mold into the next big sensation on the art scene.

So she’d taken Monroe out to celebrate the night of her graduation—Monroe’s mom or brother couldn’t have afforded to fly in to be with her anyway—and she’d made her intentions toward Monroe clear.

The two of them, as a team. Sylvia’s extensive wealth would be at Monroe’s disposal so that she could focus on creating art, and Sylvia’s connections in the art world would open doors that would have otherwise stayed firmly closed.

Especially for someone like Monroe, who had no pedigree, financial backing, or connections, this was a not insignificant boon.

It’s not like art school had gone exactly the way that Monroe had hoped. She’d had a misguided notion that she’d meet people from all backgrounds, who loved creating as much as she did. But the reality was that unless you got one of the few, coveted scholarships—which she had—art school was filled with mainly affluent kids, much like Sylvia herself, who lived in a world so vastly different from her own that she sometimes looked at Monroe like she was from another planet.

It was in college that Monroe had learned that some kids were raised with a driver, two nannies, a team of tutors, and had been privately instructed by art masters once they’d decided that art was their chosen path.

The thing that no one had told her, even though she’d known it whenever she’d scraped together enough change to buy new supplies, was that creating art was expensive.

Especially doing it professionally.

So when Sylvia had interlaced their fingers at the graduation dinner that had cost more than Monroe would have made all summer working at the local ice cream parlor, running her thumb over Monroe’s knuckles and giving her a look and a promise to let her create and grow and flourish, she’d been putty in Sylvia’s soft, uncallused hands.

Except somewhere along the way, like it usually did, the veneer had worn off.

This made it much easier for Monroe to scurry around the bedroom, grabbing a random assortment of clothing from the closet and her wardrobe that would undoubtedly look out of place in the Texas summer heat.

She tried to get back to Cypress Falls for Christmas every year, but that hadn’t been working out recently. Her shows always seemed to line up with the winter. It had been the last-minute Los Angeles trip that had stopped her from going home this past year.

And now, it was too late.

Even just a year ago, Monroe would have never deigned to ignore Sylvia as she stood in the doorway, growing agitated at being treated like one of the many statues that littered the hallways.

And she took no satisfaction in the increasingly drawn brow on Sylvia’s forehead, signaling her displeasure.

Mostly.

Sure, Monroe had made her own choices, but she’d been helped along by the woman shooting daggers at her back, who Monroe was pretty sure would vote for the indentured servitude of artists if it was on a ballot.

Finally, Sylvia couldn’t contain her frustration when Monroe pulled carelessly at the nineteenth-century Art Nouveau dresser where she kept her underwear. “That’s an original,” she muttered needlessly, taking a step into the room.

“Hand-carved. Handles forged in bronze. Whiplash curves. Marquetry that would make a carpenter weep,” Monroe intonated, mimicking the way Sylvia’s voice had sounded the dozens of times that she’d said those exact words.