Chapter 212 THE FOUNDATION LAUNCH APPROACHED

Chapter 212 THE FOUNDATION LAUNCH APPROACHED
POV: Brittany

Elena had opinions about everything, and I mean everything, from the exact temperature of the twins' bathwater to whether Clara Sophie's onesie collection was appropriately organized by size. I had never once, in two weeks, been more grateful for anyone's bossiness in my entire life.

"You cannot go back to the studio full time yet," she said, standing in the nursery doorway with her arms crossed, watching me the way she watched everyone when she'd already decided she was right about something. "Two weeks postpartum, and you want to be on your feet finalizing a launch."

"I'm not going full time. I'm going for meetings. There's a difference."

"There is no difference when the meetings run six hours and you forget to eat."

"That was one time."

"It was three times, and I have the receipts, because I am the one who kept bringing you sandwiches you didn't touch."

I didn't argue with that, so I let her win, the way I'd learned to let Elena win most arguments this year, because underneath her fierceness was always a version of love I'd stopped questioning a long time ago.

The studio felt different than it had before the twins arrived, less like a weapon being sharpened and more like something being built to last, the difference between fighting for survival and building toward a future. Daisy had commandeered an entire wall for the launch logistics, color-coded index cards mapping out press schedules, vendor deliveries, and the residency cohort announcement timeline in a system only she and Leo seemed to fully understand.

"We're at eleven confirmed residency spots," Daisy said, not looking up from her laptop when I walked in. "Bianca's in, obviously. Rosa's scholarship recipient is confirmed. We've got applicants from four different countries now, which is more international interest than I expected this early."

"Show me the strongest portfolios," I said, settling into the chair beside her.

We spent the next two hours going through submissions together, the way we'd spent so many hours over the past year, except this time the stakes felt entirely different. Nobody was trying to kill anyone. Nobody was hiding a conspiracy inside a folder of design sketches. It was just work, real work, the kind that built something instead of dismantling something else.

"This one," I said, stopping on a submission from a young designer in Lagos, the work sharp and confident and entirely unlike anything else in the pile. "Look at the construction here. She's self-taught."

"Completely self-taught," Daisy confirmed, reading the applicant's essay. "No formal training, no industry connections, learned everything from her grandmother and online tutorials."

"She's in."

"You haven't even finished the whole application."

"I don't need to. I know what I'm looking at."

Daisy made a note on her tablet, then paused, glancing sideways at me. "Can I ask you something?"

"Always."

"Do you ever think about how different this would look if Adam had never thrown you out that night? If none of this had ever happened?"

I sat with the question for a moment, turning it over the way I turned over most hard things now, carefully, without flinching from them. "I used to think about it constantly. Now I think about it less than you'd expect."

"Why?"

"Because the version of me who stayed with Adam never builds this," I said, gesturing at the studio around us, at the mood board, at Bianca's corner, at everything that had grown out of the worst night of my life. "She never finds Josephine. Never meets Margaret. Never gets the chance to give Rosa her mother's name back with any dignity attached to it. I wouldn't trade this for a version of my life with less pain in it, if the trade meant losing all of this too."

Daisy was quiet for a moment, then nodded slowly, like she'd needed to hear someone say it plainly before she could believe it herself.

Leo wandered over around midday, laptop under his arm, looking more relaxed than I'd seen him look in over a year, the specific ease of someone who'd finally stopped waiting for the next crisis to interrupt an ordinary afternoon.

"Portal's stable," he announced. "Ran a full stress test overnight. It can handle triple our current traffic without breaking, which given how this family attracts attention, felt like a reasonable safety margin."

"You're getting good at ordinary work," I told him.

"I'm getting good at not being terrified constantly, which turns out to make ordinary work a lot easier." He dropped into the chair across from us. "How's Bianca settling into her corner of the studio?"

"Slowly," I said. "She still asks permission before touching anything, even her own equipment."

"She'll get there."

Bianca herself arrived not long after, carrying a garment bag she set carefully on her own cutting table, the one with her name on the door frame that she'd finally, after three separate visits, accepted as truly hers.

"First finished piece for the residency showcase," she said, unzipping the bag to reveal a structured jacket, sharp lines softened by careful draping, unmistakably her own hand at work rather than an echo of anyone else's.

"Bianca, this is good," I said, and meant it completely.

"You don't have to say that."

"I'm not saying it because you're my sister. I'm saying it because I've spent my whole life reading garments the way other people read faces. This is good."

Something in her expression settled, a tension I hadn't fully noticed until it released.

My grandmother appeared in the doorway around then, cane tapping against the floor with the specific rhythm that meant she had an opinion and intended to share it whether anyone asked or not.

"That jacket needs a different button," she announced, before anyone had even acknowledged her arrival.

"Grandmother, you haven't even looked at the whole piece yet."

"I don't need to look at the whole piece. The buttons are wrong. Too plain for what you're doing with the shoulders." She settled into her usual corner chair, the one nobody else dared sit in anymore, and folded her hands. "Fix the buttons, and it's ready for the showcase."

Bianca looked at me, half amused, half genuinely considering the note, and I shrugged. "She's usually right about buttons."

"She's always right about buttons," Daisy called from across the room, not looking up from her spreadsheet.

For the first time in over a year, I found myself simply excited rather than braced for the next attack, sitting in a studio full of people I trusted completely, building something that would outlast every single one of us in the room.

Three days before the launch, everything shifted.

Elena found me near the mood board, her expression carrying a specific weight I'd learned to recognize over the past year, the one that meant something important was coming.

"Sophia sent word," she said. "The garment's finished. She wants to show it to you privately before anyone else sees it."

My chest tightened, half excitement and half something closer to fear, because Sophia hadn't mentioned the garment once since the hospital, and three weeks had passed since then, exactly the window she'd given herself. I'd noticed, without letting myself dwell on it too long, that her visits to the mansion had grown shorter over those same three weeks, her energy thinner, her afternoons increasingly spent resting rather than holding court from her usual chair by the studio fireplace.

"Is she alright?" I asked Elena.

"She's tired," Elena said carefully, which from Elena was never a small word. "But she wanted this finished before anything else. Go to her. She's waiting."

I found her in her room within the hour, sitting up in bed, weaker than she had been even a week before, her color paler, her hands trembling slightly against the blanket even at rest. A garment bag lay draped carefully across the foot of the bed.

"Open it," she said, her voice thin but steady, the same steadiness I'd come to rely on across every crisis this family had survived. "I want to watch your face when you see what your mother almost built."