The air conditioner inside my luxury Manhattan atelier murmured quietly, almost mocking the memory of the crushing Georgia heat I had escaped twelve years earlier.
I was fixing the detailed leather folds on the centerpiece gown for my runway collection when my assistant’s shaky voice came through the intercom. There was an unexpected visitor at the door, she said — a woman claiming to be my mother.
My pulse slammed against my ribs as the heavy oak door opened and Eleanor Vance stepped inside.
She looked older than I remembered. Her silver hair was loose and unkempt, and the faded coat hanging from her shoulders looked like something pulled from the back rack of a thrift store. In an instant, the clean, expensive scent of my office disappeared from my mind. I was back in our old front yard, surrounded by dust, cheap folding tables, bright yellow price stickers, and my mother’s careless voice cutting through the air.
“They were just taking up space, Chloe. It was only old paper.”
But it had not been old paper.
Inside that green canvas sketchbook were every handbag design I had created between the ages of seven and seventeen — every dream, every late night, every piece of myself I had poured onto those pages. She had sold it to a stranger for two dollars.
That same night, I shoved my life into one duffel bag and walked into the darkness. My father stood on the porch with a warm beer in his hand, watching his only daughter leave without saying a word.
Now, twelve years later, the woman who had traded my future for pocket change was standing inside the multimillion-dollar empire I had built from the wreckage.
I rose slowly, my spine stiff, the old wound turning cold inside my chest.
