Chapter 3

"You shouldn't have come." Her eyes went everywhere but mine -- the same disease Julian had. "It's better if you just go."

"Cassidy looks out for me. She has, this whole time. While you were--" She swallowed. "You don't know how it was. After. After the accident. After Mom--"

The word landed like a dropped needle.

"After Mom what?" I went very still. "Emma. What accident?"

"I--" She'd gone white. "The accident, back then -- it was never even--"

"Emma." Cassidy's voice cut across the floor like shears through silk. "Come here. Now."

And Emma went. Turning her back, crossing to Cassidy's side. Then the door closed on me from the outside -- with half a sentence still hanging in the air.

That night, the Ashford Pavilion had been dressed like a wedding cake. White orchids down every rail. Champagne towers. Two hundred of the city's richest mouths, all chewing and smiling at once.

I stood at the back in my gray coat -- the one with a single pearl sewn over the heart -- and hunted the crowd for Emma's face.

"Ladies and gentlemen." Julian's voice filled the room, warm, amplified. Glass in one hand, Cassidy's fingers in the other. "Three years ago, this house was nothing. A back room. A dead label. This woman rebuilt it into everything you see."

Applause. My nails found my palm.

"And this spring, Maison joins the Laurent Group." He let the number hang in the gasp. "The largest valuation this city has seen in a decade."

The real vow. Not love -- a sale. The wedding was just wrapping paper on a deal.

At the edge of the light stood Vance. Same charcoal suit. Same closed book. He watched Julian the way he'd watched me in the studio -- pricing, weighing -- his face giving away nothing at all.

"Tonight I get to tell you two things." Julian turned to Cassidy, and the room went soft around them. "She's the founder of Maison. And in the spring -- she's going to be my wife."

The applause broke like a wave.

Then Julian's eyes found me at the back. For the first time in three years, he looked right at me. And he smiled.

He wasn't afraid of me. That was the insult. To him I was a closed file. A settled account. A woman he'd spent and forgotten.

"Some of you," he said, still smiling, still holding my gaze, "may have read about the woman who used to run this label. The one who went to prison for stealing from it. She's here tonight."

Two hundred faces turned.

"Ms. Nora." His voice never lost its warmth -- that was the cruelest part. "I'll say this once, in front of everyone. You're a paroled felon. Come near my fiancée, my house, or my name again, and it isn't a conversation. It's a phone call. And you know exactly where that phone call sends you."

Silence. The kind two hundred people hold their breath through, waiting to watch you break.

Somewhere, a laugh. The jailbird seamstress. Someone said it. Someone repeated it.

I didn't break. I found Emma instead -- at the edge of the light, half behind a pillar, face crumpling. I crossed to her, slow, ignoring every stare, until I was close enough to speak under the noise.

"The accident," I said. "Finish it. Now."

"Nora, please--"

"Mom. You started to say Mom. What happened to Mom while I was inside?"

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