Day twelve. Merritt’s flagship on Fifth Avenue. Four hundred buyers, editors, cameras, a livestream. Bree walked the finale in a gown stitched from my sketchbook like a stolen flag.
At the end of the runway, the music cut.
Ward Merritt, third generation, walked out of the wings with a microphone and my lawyer.
“Thank you all for coming,” he said. “Before the champagne, one correction. The house of Aster Lane has exactly one designer, and she’s standing beside me.”
I stepped onto the runway in my work shoes, holding the sketchbook. The first page was still there, in my mother’s handwriting: For Lila, who draws what she sees. 2010.
“Every gown you saw tonight was drawn on dated, numbered pages I registered,” I said. “The name Aster Lane has been my trademark since 2019. The building, the patterns, the copyrights—mine. Miss Hollis brought the personality. I built the label.”
Someone in the front row laughed.
Bree rushed me, gripping my sleeve. “She’s my assistant—she sews—that footage is out of context—”
Harriet opened the folder, calm as a librarian. “Trademark certificate. Copyright registrations, page by page. The April security footage, if anyone wants the screens.”
Bree’s mouth worked. Nothing came out.
“Miss Hollis,” Ward said, “per page forty-one of our agreement, the designer named in Exhibit C is no longer attached to this collection. Merritt’s terminates, effective immediately, and recovers the full two-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar advance.”
Backstage, by the coat rack, Bree caught my arm. Her face had gone soft and wet.
“Lila. Fifty-fifty. Sixty-forty, you name it—”
“You took my fiancé in front of everyone I love.”
“I’ll move out tonight. I’ll tell them it was a mistake.” Her voice cracked. “I have nothing without you.”
“You had everything,” I said. “You wanted mine, too.”
The side door opened. Derek came through, pale as paper. “Is it true?” he asked her. “The baby?”
Bree stared at the floor. “There is no baby, Derek. I needed you on my side.”
He stood there like a man who’d bought a house he never saw. Then he turned to me.
“Lila. I’m so—”
“Don’t,” I said. “You weren’t tricked. You were picked, and you liked it. Go home.”
Merritt’s legal team moves faster than television. The advance was recalled in three days. Her lawyer dropped her by Thursday, and the sketchbook came back by courier, wrapped in a grocery bag. The loft lease was voided in five—Bree had never paid rent, because I never charged her. Her followers turned the second the livestream clip spread, and “Don’t you know who I am?” became the sound that ended her. Two endorsement deals dropped her by Sunday.
Derek lasted two weeks at his brother’s place, calling the studio and hanging up whenever Lucia answered.
Harriet came by on a Tuesday with tea and the morning paper. Page six had a photo of movers loading the last of Bree’s things into a van.
“You know,” she said, “your mother told me once that quiet hands build forever, and loud hands only borrow.”
“Did she mention the loud ones get evicted?”
“She would have liked to,” Harriet said, and laughed into her tea.
I promoted Lucia to head of the atelier that afternoon. Then I turned to a fresh page in the sketchbook and started the next collection. Aster is a flower, and flowers don’t care who talks about them.
For the first time in my life, I held the pen alone. And everyone was finally going to know whose hands built this.
