In the photograph for the local news site, Lana stood beside a bucket of blue paint. Her partner Vedran stood in front of the completed mural with his hands on his hips. The headline called him the artist who had awakened the neighborhood. Lana enlarged the picture and saw a white smear on her cheek. She had finished the last bird that morning before going to her job at the print shop.
The mural had grown from sketches she drew during long bus journeys. Vedran submitted the project because he had a registered studio and experience with competitions. They agreed that both would be credited. Now only his name appeared on the wall, carefully sprayed in black beneath a window where someone's towel was drying.
"The plaque will come later," he said when she asked. Yet the invitation to the formal opening described Lana as a technical assistant. The organizer thanked her for her patience and asked her to arrange water for the speakers. For the first time she did not overlook a small insult to keep the evening comfortable. She said she wanted to see the application describing how their work had been divided.
Vedran did not send the document until after midnight. Beside his biography were her sentences about birds carrying traces of vanished houses. He had entered himself as the author. In the morning Lana went to the studio, collected her notebooks, and photographed them alongside dated messages. She published nothing before sending a request to the association that had funded the work.
At the meeting Vedran argued that an idea belonged to everyone who worked on it. Lana asked him to name at least one change he had proposed himself. He remembered the color of the border. She acknowledged that contribution. Then she showed the first drawings, the agreed fee, and the message promising her equal credit. The association's chair withdrew the invitation and scheduled a new presentation.
Some comments accused Lana of turning a private breakup into a cultural scandal. There had not yet been a breakup. It came when Vedran told her at home that she had destroyed their future over a single plaque. She packed her notebooks into the same bag she used to take them to the studio. "I didn't ask for your name to disappear," she said. "I asked for mine to exist."
The new plaque carried both names, with a clear description of their contributions. Lana did not attend the new photo session. She came on Sunday with her nephew, who wanted to find the bird from her notebook. The boy pointed to one beside the gutter. Lana corrected him, then changed her mind. Each bird already belonged to the people passing underneath. Only her work no longer belonged to somebody else's biography.