If you want to save your mother's studio, you have to hand over the key to Darius Kincaid tonight, my lifelong friend Julian told me, pushing me toward the dark, roaring glass furnace where the t...
The letter Julian showed me felt like a betrayal. Darius, the man who had recognized me, who had mourned my birth mother, was now painted as a mercenary who had sold her secrets. My head throbbed with the conflicting stories.
Lily, however, saw through Julian’s calm demeanor. She’d watched my face at the diner, seen the flicker of doubt in my eyes. She knew something was wrong.
That night, while I tossed and turned, wrestling with Julian’s letter, Lily was hunched over her laptop in her room. The glow of the screen illuminated her determined face. She couldn’t shake the feeling that Julian was hiding something.
She started her digital detective work, typing keywords into a search engine. “Valery Kincaid,” “Hudson Valley glass art,” “2007 scandal.” She wasn’t just looking for articles; she was looking for ghosts in the machine.
Her fingers flew across the keyboard. She used the Wayback Machine, an internet archive tool she’d learned about in her tech club. She set the date range to 2007. She wanted to see the internet as it was then.
Hours passed. The room grew cold.
Then, she found it. A cached version of an old, defunct regional artisan message board: CraftsmenArchive.net. It was clunky, pixelated, a relic of a different internet era. But it was still alive in the archives.
She dug through threads from seventeen years ago, her heart pounding. Discussions about local artists, upcoming showcases, critiques of new techniques. And then, the threads about Valery Kincaid.
They started innocently enough, admiring her work. But then, a subtle shift. Comments questioning her methods, her temperament. Then, outright slander.
Lily’s eyes widened as she scrolled. One username, “HollowayGlassFan,” caught her attention. It was active, verbose, consistently posting in the negative threads about Valery.
She cross-referenced the username with old local forums and cached social media profiles from 2007. Julian’s old, forgotten email address popped up, linked to “HollowayGlassFan.” He’d been seventeen then, just as Darius had said.
Her fingers clicked, opening the posts one by one.
“Valery Kincaid’s work is becoming erratic,” one post read. “Her ‘genius’ is really just recklessness. I saw her nearly shatter a piece right in front of a client.”
Another, even more cutting: “Heard she’s unstable. Maybe the pressure of the furnace is getting to her head. Not fit for serious commissions.”
Lily gasped, a sharp intake of breath in the quiet room. These weren’t just rumors. These were active, malicious attacks, designed to undermine Valery’s credibility and mental stability. Posted by Julian. My Julian.
He hadn’t just remained silent while his father ruined Valery; he had actively participated. He had used the anonymity of the internet to spread lies, adding fuel to the fire that consumed my birth mother’s career. The carefully manufactured doubt he had tried to sow in me with Darius’s forged letter vanished, replaced by a cold, hard certainty. Julian was a liar, and he had been lying for seventeen years.
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