Karen doesn’t flinch. “The projections were based on assumptions that did not materialize. The Valencia mill contract alone accounts for a payment structure that hasn’t been reconciled since before the divorce. There are inventory costs that were logged as assets but functionally represent unsold product in a warehouse in New Jersey. And the lines of credit Greg extended”—she looks at him for the first time—“were done without internal approval, using the intellectual property catalog as collateral.”
It’s like seeing a car accident seconds before it happens. Blinding lights. Screeching tires. The smell of rubber on road, escalating to smoke in air. But it’s too late. There’s nothing I can do except take it, hoping I survive the collision. The intellectual property catalog. My fabric names. My patterns. My designs. The language I invented—rusted dawn, coastal bone, mercury drape—pledged against debt I didn’t authorize, by a man I was married to, to keep a company running that he was quietly draining from the inside.
“How long?” I ask. My voice is steady because I’ve spent twenty years making my voice steady when everything behind it is collapsing.
“The irregularities go back at least two years,” Karen says. “Possibly longer. A full forensic audit would take six to eight weeks.”
“We don’t have six to eight weeks.”
“No.” Karen pulls up the next slide. Two columns. Two paths. “You have, functionally, two options at this point.”
My eyes glaze over as Karen explains in great detail the strategy of each plan, but the options as I understand them are clear.
The first: go public. Take on outside investors, open the books, inject capital. The brand survives in name, but I lose creative control. The investors would install their own board, their own creative director, their own vision of what my name means on a label. I’d be a figurehead. A face on a website. The woman who founded the company sitting in a corner office with no authority, watching strangers make decisions for her legacy. The payout would be noteworthy.
The second: declare bankruptcy. Dissolve the company. Sell my intellectual property piece by piece—the designs, the sketches, the contact lists, the name itself if a buyer wants it. Liquidate the remaining inventory. After debts are settled and legal fees are paid, I’d walk away with approximately two hundred thousand dollars cash.
Two hundred thousand. Twenty years of work. A dorm room sketch that became a brand that dressed women for galas and boardrooms and weddings and first dates and funerals. Twenty years of fabric swatches pinned to corkboards and red-eye flights to Milan and fitting rooms where women looked in the mirror and saw, maybe for the first time, someone worth looking at. All of it reduced to a number that wouldn’t scratch the surface of enough for retirement.
I stare at the screen. Then blink. But the numbers don’t change. Numbers never do—that’s the kindness and cruelty of them. They are so concrete. They sit there, indifferent, immune to the story you want to tell. I built an empire and the numbers say it’s worthless. The memories have no tangible value.
“Thank you, Karen,” I say. “I need the room.”
The accounting team files out. Karen squeezes my shoulder as she passes. The door closes.
Greg still doesn’t move.
“You knew,” I accuse.
“I managed.”
“You managed.” I stare at him, looking for any sign of remorse in his eyes but they are so empty. “You managed my company into the ground and you sat in this chair and watched me chase a fall line that was never going to save us because you already knew there was nothing left to save.”
“The fall line could have worked. If you’d been focused. If you hadn’t been distracted by?—”
“Choose your next words very carefully, Greg.”
He uncrosses his legs. Leans forward. The performance of sincerity, the one I spent decades mistaking for the real thing. “Going public is the smart play, Celeste. I have investors ready. People who believe in the brand. We can restructure, bring in fresh capital?—”
“We? There is no we. There hasn’t been a we in this company since you decided to leverage my life’s work against debts you accrued to fund whatever it is you’ve been funding. What have you been funding, Greg? Some other venture? The multiple homes I’m sure you’re hiding somewhere? The lifestyle you built on my signature?”
He says nothing. The silence is his confession.
“We can rebuild this, Celeste, the same way we built it.Together.”
Fool me once, Greg. But only once.
“Get the fuck out of my boardroom.”
He stands. Buttons his jacket. Walks to the door, unhurried, believing he’ll be back, believing all of this is temporary, believing Celeste Brinley will eventually do what she’s always done—absorb the damage, perform the recovery, build something beautiful from the wreckage while Greg Prescottwatches from a comfortable distance and takes credit for the view.
The door closes behind him.
I sit alone in the conference room for three minutes. I count them. Three minutes of silence in a room that smells like coffee and the staleness of bad news. I look at the screen. The two columns. The two futures. One where I lose my name. One where I lose everything else.
Then I get up and walk to my office.
Patrice is where I left her. Standing by the window in the half-finished gown, one arm slightly raised because I’d been adjusting the sleeve when Saylor arrived yesterday and I never finished. The silk catches the late-afternoon light and throws it across the wall in a ripple of amber that, in another life, I would stop to admire. In another life, I would see that light and think: there. That’s the color. That’s what the collection needs.
