Julia and Oliver exchange a glance that sends another electric tingle down Sana’s spine. Something’s off here. The two of them look shifty as hell. Were they in on it too? Was Marshall working together with his wife and twin brother to steal art from starry-eyed college students? The thought sits in Sana’s stomach like a lump of burning coal.
Julia gestures at them to take a seat, probably to buy herself some time to consider her answer. She takes a deep breath and sighs. “Honestly, I don’t know—I didn’t know anything about the artwork until . . .” She checks her watch. “About an hour ago, when Oliver brought them over.”
“I found them in an apartment he was renting downtown,” Oliver says.
“Marshall hid the artwork from you?” Sana says. She has no idea what to make of this. As much as she hates to admit it, she likes Julia. Something about the woman feels sad. Even the way Julia stands is somehow sad, like a flower that’s drooping gently. Sana doesn’t want to suspect Julia, and yet. And yet, how could Julia possibly not know all the shady shit Marshall had been up to? At best, maybe she had an inkling that he’d been up to no good and had decided to turn a blind eye to it.
Julia shakes her head. “I know it sounds pathetic.” Her voice wobbles. “But I’m just a stay-at-home mom. My world revolves around cooking and cleaning and looking after Emma.”
There is so much apology in Julia’s voice that Sana almost reaches out to hold her hand. Focus, she scolds herself. “So . . . you guys probably don’t know what Marshall was doing with the artwork?” Where’s the money? her mind screams. The money from all the stolen art, where the fuck is it?
Again, that shifty look between Julia and Oliver. What are they hiding? They know something, Sana is sure of it.
“I have no idea,” Oliver says.
Julia nods. “Yeah, I’m the same. I had no idea he was even venturing into art. Marshall was . . . he was always having one bright idea after another. He was into apps for a while, you know, back when apps just started being a thing, then he went into crypto . . . he never quite caught the trends in time to make it big, but he made enough for us to get by.” Again, her voice wobbles, almost breaking this time. “Sorry, I just—I have no idea how I’m going to make the mortgage payments now that he’s gone.”
Oliver reaches out and pats Julia’s shoulder. “What about your parents?” he says gently.
Julia sniffles, shakes her head. “I haven’t talked to them in years. Marshall never got along with them, and over time it just became easier not to deal with all that stuff . . .”
Red flags aren’t just going up in Sana’s mind, they’re waving and flapping madly, her gut churning at every little detail that Julia is revealing. She knows firsthand what a manipulative person Marshall was, and now she’s imagining all too easily Marshall slowly, subtly isolating Julia from her family, making sure that at the end of the day, she only had Marshall to lean on.
It. Does. Not. Matter.
Right. It’s not her business. She’s not here to fix Julia’s problems. She can’t even fix her own. She’s here for closure.
But what would it take to bring her closure? Well, first of all, she would like her paintings back. But she knows that isn’t enough, because having the physical paintings themselves is only one part of the equation. She needs their digital rights back too. Well, or something similar. Sana’s not quite sure how the whole thing works, but she knows that owning the physical object doesn’t necessarily mean she owns the virtual part of it. Which sounds so freaking ridiculous it’s hard for her to wrap her head around the whole concept. That she, the artist, might not even own the rights to her own work. If it had been an IP project, that would’ve made some sense, at least, and is the sole reason why Sana’s mother had always advised her against doing IP work.
IP work is only ever worth it if they are going to pay you oodles of money, my darling, her mom would say. Money up front. Because you don’t own the IP, so always demand money up front. Know your worth.
It’s her own fault. She’d been so eager to make a name for herself. This is the problem with creative people; their self-image is divided into two parts—one thinks that they’re a genius who will one day create a masterpiece of such breathtaking brilliance that it will still be discussed with reverence hundreds of years later; the other part thinks they are trash raccoons rooting around in the dark and coming up with nothing but more trash. There is no in-between. It’s either “super genius” or “trash raccoon,” and somehow these parts coexist within the head of one very tortured artist.
So when Marshall approached her and told her that her art would make the perfect NFTs, Sana had been both wildly grateful and also smug. She’d thought: Yes, someone is finally recognizing my talent and is about to make me rich! Simultaneously, she’d also thought: I’d better agree real fast before he finds out I’m a talentless hack! And of course she’d jumped at the chance without really researching what the hell NFTs even are, and how she should protect her own work. Although, to be honest, even if someone had sat Sana down and told her how to protect her work, Sana would’ve cringed and refused to take the steps to protect herself, because it would’ve made her feel ridiculous and arrogant when she should just be grateful that Marshall had picked her out of all the other hopeful artists in her year.
Okay, focus. Sana knows she needs to set aside every distraction—god, there are so many of them—and concentrate on why she came here. “It’s funny that you mentioned crypto, because—” Lord, is she making any sense? Does she sound casual enough? “—I recently read about this stuff called NFTs?”
Julia and Oliver stare at Sana, confused.
“It stands for non-fungible tokens, and it’s basically like . . . something you can own and trade online?” She really needs to stop ending everything with a question mark. “I wonder if maybe . . .” Tread carefully. “Maybe that was what Marshall was doing with the artwork? Selling them as NFTs online.”
“How does that work?” Julia says. “So it’s like online rights? But what about the actual physical art? Does that matter?”
“Yes and no,” Sana says. “The physical art itself could come with it, or it could be a separate entity, but there is virtual ownership as well. NFTs can sell for up to hundreds of millions of dollars.”
“Wow,” Oliver says. “I’m kind of having a difficult time wrapping my head around it, but . . . it does sound like the kind of thing Marshall would’ve been into, yeah.”
“Yes,” Julia agrees. “Like I said, he was always into these kinds of things.”
The tip of Sana’s tongue darts out and licks her dry lips. “If he was doing that, then he’d probably have all the information on his computer, maybe on a cloud, or in a physical drive, or . . .”