Epilogue
A little more than a year later
Stella was right about a lot of things, but wrong about plenty of others.
I think about all of it now as I sip tea from her old teacup that Matthew rescued from the Paris penthouse and watch the ten young women we’ve funded scholarships for work on their various projects on the hillside outside the cottage on the island.
There are painters, sculptors, dancers, and one woman who does absolutely everything.
She’s a miniature Lucie. There will be more of them next year, so many more.
We own this house, the one Stella first brought us to here, and a few others on the island, or rather the Fleas Trust does. It’s fairly flush with cash these days.
Our scholarship recipients study in Paris during the year just like the three of us have been doing at the école des Beaux-Arts.
They come to the island to create in the summer.
We show their work in our very own gallery in the third arrondissement.
Lucie’s latest exhibition is there now. She’s sewn gorgeous dresses with pieces of fabric she’s secretly cut from the clothes of every client who’s ever paid her for her services.
Next spring, Colette is publishing her first book as an academic, a collection of letters between Jo van Gogh and Claire Donadieu.
It’s a tribute both to their lifelong friendship and to the work they did together to secure Vincent’s legacy.
Her mission is to make sure Jo’s name is uttered as often as Vincent’s, that people finally understand who made him famous and how much labor it took to turn him into a household name.
Caroline swears it will be a bestseller. I don’t doubt it.
Meanwhile, Louis Swanson was found guilty on all seventeen counts.
The twins turned on him almost instantly.
It’s hard to feel sorry for them, but it’s easy to see how they’d been manipulated by their dad since birth, much like Caroline and Matthew were.
They didn’t even try to deny their role in helping their father defraud dozens of revered institutions.
Instead, they laid out the accounting in cold detail and confirmed something Caroline and Stella had long suspected.
One night in a high-end brothel in the heart of Monaco, eager to prove he could outmaneuver any of the family members, Louis bragged that he had tampered with Maxwell’s will.
The company had in fact been left to Stella.
In his father’s final days, Louis slipped in a new draft and had Maxwell initial the pages under the guise of having him sign routine estate documents.
By the time Maxwell died, the language had shifted just enough to cut Stella out entirely, even though she was always meant to inherit everything.
The twins had profited from the scheme at the time, but they had also been raised by a mother who taught them to trust no one, not even family.
They recorded their father and eventually handed the tapes to law enforcement.
That little insurance policy, along with copies of the bills of sale of the original masterpieces that Louis sold to warlords around the world, bought them just three years in a cushy minimum-security prison in Alsace, where apparently the labor programs require grape picking for the local wines.
Louis wasn’t so lucky. He got fifty years and is still locked away in La Santé, the modern-day Bastille.
Since his web of contacts in countries without extradition makes him too slippery to trust anywhere else, he won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.
From his cell, he’s been writing a book of his own, proclaiming his innocence and railing against Caroline and Stella as the villains in his story.
They’ll be arriving soon by helicopter, Caroline’s preferred method of transportation.
Matthew recently got his pilot’s license, and he finds that he enjoys flying even more than selling art to very famous people.
Although Caroline has given him free rein to develop his virtual reality art installations.
He’s got a meeting with Steve Jobs from Apple next month and plans to pitch him something called Brushstrokes in Motion: The Van Gogh VR Experience.
I can’t imagine it taking off, but who knows what people will pay for.
Matthew’s got a fancy title that means very little, and he seems content with no longer having to strive for anything.
His relief at Stella being alive outweighed his irritation at being left in the dark. In fact, he agreed it was for the best.
“I’m terrible at keeping secrets,” he admitted when Caroline sat him down in the aftermath of the auction and explained everything to him. I apologized over and over for lying to him about Stella and my role in all this, but he would have none of it.
“In my family those kinds of deceptions are the daily cost of doing business,” he said. “You honestly fit right in.” And then he added, “Welcome to the family.”
He’s as amenable and eager as a golden retriever, and we’ve had a few crazy nights together, nothing serious, because I’ve been too busy with work. Lucie and Stella are constantly telling me to keep the door open with him.
“Don’t discount the good men,” Stella said. “It only emboldens the dreadful ones.”
Stella has proven herself an incredibly capable company president.
“I don’t know why Forbes hasn’t put me on their 8 Over 80 list yet,” she jokes.
They have featured her on the cover. She’s the reason the company is thriving despite everything Louis had to pay back and all the fines the company owed.
I think of what she told me one of the first times I visited her in that empty penthouse apartment: “That’s what I wanted for the end of my life. I wanted to be seen.”
She’ll never be invisible again.
She and Caroline have been over in America for a bit while the lost Van Gogh exhibits at the Guggenheim.
They also met with a slew of doctors from MIT who have been cooking up the strangest project with a German conceptual artist. They’re trying to grow one of Vincent van Gogh’s ears in a lab using DNA from a stamp the painter once licked and pair it with living cells from his great-great-grandnephew.
After reading all the letters between Van Gogh and Stella’s grandmother a dozen times, including the newly discovered ones in the back of the Sunflowers canvas, Colette urged Stella to volunteer her own DNA.
“At least to find out if you might be related to the Van Goghs,” she pressed.
“The letters hint that it could have been a possibility, but they don’t come out and actually say it. ”
Stella agreed, if only for the publicity for Colette’s book, and because she loves attention. We’ve been waiting with bated breath for the results until a fax arrived from Boston this morning.
I’ve always known I was an absolute mad genius. Must be in the genes.
Stella was wrong about how terrible it is to be rich.
It’s absolutely fucking wonderful. But the good things about it have nothing to do with expensive jewelry or private jets, chateaus or butlers.
The best thing about having money is finally feeling safe.
When you’ve been a person living on the edge for your entire life, just being comfortable and secure is a massive luxury and I will never, ever forget it.
My feelings about Stella are always going to be complicated.
She’s complicated, but as she wrote, she is indeed a mad genius who will do anything in her power to lift us all up.
I think a lot these days about a letter Vincent van Gogh once wrote to Theo.
What is more real than reality itself, and what has more life than life itself? And we who do our best to live, why don’t we live even more!
We are certainly living now. But I’ve finally figured a couple of things out.
You’ve got to be able to share your life with people you love, the ones who fiercely and unapologetically love you back.
And most importantly, the real value in having money and wealth lies in the ability to paint whatever future we choose for ourselves.
I place my paintbrush between my teeth as I scrutinize the canvas in front of me.
“I need you to try to sit still. I know it’s hard,” I murmur to my mother as I mix up a new pigment of aquamarine.
She frowns at me, though she stops fidgeting.
I’m trying to paint her with the sea as the background.
She lives with me now, along with plenty of help and the best medical treatment that hundreds of thousands of dollars can buy. Every day she improves.
“It’s too beautiful to be in here today,” she says, looking out the window to the sea.
“Come for a swim with me, duckling.” I follow her gaze down the path and see Lucie and Colette arm in arm on the sandy path up from the beach, the wind blowing in their hair, their smiles infectious.
They’re coming up to sit for me in my studio, so I can paint them next.
My new show, a big one, the one I have always dreamed of, will include massive portraits of all the women in my life set in the present day. I’ve already done the sketches. They are bold, brash, beautiful, and confident. This time no one is in danger.