Chapter 4 - THREE MONTHS ON THE CLOCK
The chief financial officer was Adrian Holt, a careful executive who rarely appeared in photographs because he preferred to stand behind the people receiving awards, and Bellwether had been negotiating a private financing package when Olivia first entered Emily's workroom. If the company delivered a profitable proprietary launch by autumn, the financing agreement promised lucrative performance payouts to Ryan, Olivia, and Adrian, making the stolen collection worth more than applause beneath runway lights.
Nora discovered the incentive structure through documents Bellwether had filed for prospective investors, and she placed the figures before Emily without pretending they proved a conspiracy by themselves. The numbers mattered because Ryan's sudden eagerness to divorce, his promotion, and the company's rushed design schedule now intersected at a deadline: the runway launch would determine whether the executives received their payments.
Emily had three months before the show, and every week introduced a new form of pressure as vendors, publicists, and corporate representatives repeated Ryan's claim that he had helped his unsophisticated wife develop a few vague sketches. She could not stop the campaign by shouting louder, so Nora and Gabriel gathered evidence that could survive the colder examination of experts who owed allegiance to neither side.
Gabriel found original raw photographs from Emily's camera card, including files whose metadata matched backup copies stored long before the allegedly new collection entered Bellwether's system. Some of the garment forms were utilitarian and might fall outside copyright protection on their own, but the drawings' original artistic elements, the copied layout sheets, and the history of access gave the legal team several avenues to investigate.
A professor of fashion history named Dr. Simone Ellis agreed to review the material independently after Emily sent her a portfolio without mentioning Ryan or the lawsuit. Simone recognized a continuous design vocabulary connecting Emily's earliest sketches to the completed collection, and she wrote a careful report describing the development of artistic choices across numerous drafts rather than making the simplistic claim that every seam could be owned.
Meanwhile Ryan's public life grew louder, with glossy magazine interviews describing him as a man who believed ordinary American workers deserved high fashion, a phrase so close to Emily's early artist statement that she felt her throat tighten every time it appeared. Olivia posed beside him at charity events and spoke movingly about female creativity while declining questions about whether the women who made the prototypes had been credited.
Emily began rebuilding a workshop in a converted warehouse shared with other independent makers, paying rent with money she earned altering formalwear and with a modest loan Teresa helped her arrange through an ordinary community bank. She disliked needing help, but Teresa reminded her that accepting honest support was not the same as surrendering ownership, and the distinction became one of the lessons Emily carried into every difficult day.
She hired Grace part time and negotiated written agreements clearly defining who owned each new design and how collaborators would be credited. After years of vague marital promises, the simple act of putting mutual expectations on paper felt less romantic than trust and infinitely kinder than the way Ryan had used trust against her.
An important witness emerged when a sample maker named Rosa Alvarez contacted Nora to say she had been required to remove Emily's initials from the interiors of several garments. Rosa brought time-stamped photographs, work orders identifying the alterations, and notes about a production meeting in which Olivia had asked whether the marks might create embarrassing questions at the launch.
Rosa had hesitated because her husband was recovering from surgery and she depended on Bellwether's health insurance, but she agreed to give a statement after an independent attorney explained her options. Emily made no promises about a job she could not guarantee, choosing instead to thank Rosa for refusing to let fear rewrite what she knew.
At the same time Adrian quietly offered Nora an undisclosed payment in exchange for a broad release, proposed before the company had completed its independent review. Nora refused to discuss any settlement without proper documentation and reminded Emily that private compensation could not justify knowingly concealing evidence of wider misconduct if other parties' rights were implicated.
Emily grew frightened when she noticed a car idling outside her workshop on consecutive evenings, and Gabriel recommended documenting what she observed rather than assuming the driver was following her. The driver turned out to be a freelance photographer hired to obtain images for a hostile article about Emily's supposed revenge campaign, and Nora sent a letter demanding that the outlet correct several verifiably false statements before publication.
One night, as rain tapped the warehouse windows, Emily found a silk fragment caught in the teeth of her old sewing machine and remembered the exact afternoon she had cut it from her mother's final birthday dress. The woman who taught her to stitch had died before Emily finished Second Light, yet a photograph of her standing beside a loading dock had inspired the collection's broad-shouldered coat and hidden pocket designed to hold a worker's hands warm on an empty train platform.
Emily wrote that story for an upcoming independent designers' showcase, aware that explaining the work's personal origins would not substitute for legal proof but could restore meaning to it outside Ryan's publicity machine. For the first time in weeks she slept without dreaming of the cake, and the next morning an email arrived from Bellwether's independent investigator requesting an interview.
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The investigator, a retired federal prosecutor named Judith Lane, said she had found irregularities not only in design attribution but also in procurement approvals connected to the collection. Her message ended with an invitation to bring Emily's original source materials and a warning that Ryan and Olivia were lobbying the board to close the review before the runway event.
Before the meeting with Judith, Emily had received a voicemail from a former Bellwether intern who remembered being asked to recreate damaged design scans rather than request originals from an identified artist. The intern could not testify to the source of every image and refused to guess, but her notes showed how easily a workplace could transform questions about ownership into routine tasks assigned to people without enough authority to object. Emily passed the account to Nora without promising the young woman publicity or protection she could not provide, and wondered how many quiet warnings had been lost between departments because everyone assumed somebody above them had already checked the facts.
