That evening, Oliver used his cane to navigate down to the basement vault, a place he hadn’t visited since his vision completely faded. He felt his way to the hidden floorboards where he used to keep his private journals and unsigned canvases from his peak years. His hands touched empty space; the heavy canvas bags were gone, replaced by cheap, blank wooden frames to fool his touch. Oliver called his niece, a sharp forensic art appraiser based in New York, and asked her to secretly inspect Simon’s upcoming solo gallery exhibition. She used advanced infrared scanning on the canvases and found Oliver’s original graphite signatures hidden beneath thick layers of Simon’s freshly applied oil paint. The documents in Simon’s office revealed a systematic fraud where Simon had been rewriting their art school history, claiming Oliver was just a helper while Simon was the true genius. Simon had pocketed over thirty million pounds from these sales, leaving the blind master with just enough to pay his basic monthly medical bills. The letters between Simon and corrupt auction houses showed they were waiting for Oliver to pass away so they could claim the entire estate without any legal challenge. Oliver sat in his empty studio, surrounded by the smell of turpentine and old wood, feeling the crushing weight of a friendship built entirely on a forty-year lie.
