“You wore that to Mom’s funeral?” my sister sneered, her diamond cuff nearly blinding me as she flipped her perfectly styled hair, and the contempt in her voice echoed through the quiet boutique where our mother once spent her happiest days. “I mean, I get it, times are tough for you, but couldn’t you have at least tried?”
I smoothed down my simple black dress with calm fingers while hiding a faint smile that would have stunned everyone present if they understood the truth behind it.
What she did not know was that I designed this dress with my own hands during a sleepless night months earlier, and she also had no idea that I owned the brand of heels on her feet, the boutique we were standing in, and the luxury company that had quietly canceled her modeling contract exactly one hour earlier.
My name is Victoria Harlow, and I learned long ago that the best revenge is served in couture.
The boutique sat on a narrow street called Linden Row in downtown San Aurelio, a city where glass towers pierced the sky and fortunes rose or collapsed without warning, yet this small storefront had once been the entire world to my mother and the beginning of something far larger than anyone in my family ever imagined.
My sister Aubrey Bennett folded her arms impatiently while glancing around the boutique with thinly disguised disgust and said, “Honestly Victoria, this place still smells like old fabric and forgotten dreams, and I still cannot understand why you keep pretending this shop means something important.”
I watched her carefully as she spoke because she wore a pair of heels from my company’s latest winter collection and she clearly believed she purchased them from an elite Parisian label rather than the corporation secretly owned by the sister she had mocked for two decades.
My brother Tyler Bennett leaned against the display counter with the tired confidence of a man who once believed he controlled the financial world, and he said with a short laugh, “Aubrey, leave her alone because some people cling to hobbies when real careers fail them.”
Their father, Gregory Bennett, stood near the door looking uncomfortable in his dark suit while he rubbed his temples as though the grief of the funeral had drained whatever patience he once possessed for family arguments.