Chapter 216 ONE WEEK LATER

Chapter 216 ONE WEEK LATER
POV: Brittany

The rescheduled launch was seven days away, and the studio had become something between a war room and a sanctuary, everyone I loved moving through it with the specific focus of people building toward something that mattered enormously.

I hadn't slept properly since the funeral, not because grief kept me awake exactly, but because the studio had become the only place that made the grief feel useful instead of just heavy, every hour spent on the launch feeling like a way of honoring what Sophia had given the last of her strength to finish.

Daisy had claimed the far wall entirely now, press logistics mapped out in color coded index cards that somehow made sense only to her and Leo, both of them speaking a shorthand of deadlines and vendor names that the rest of us had learned to simply trust rather than fully understand.

"Final walkthrough with the venue is Thursday," Daisy said, not looking up from her laptop. "I need you there for exactly forty minutes. No more. I've timed it."

"You've timed my attention span?"

"I've timed everyone's attention span. It's how I keep this whole operation running." She finally looked up, exhausted but satisfied. "You're better after lunch. Less distracted."

"Noted."

Leo ran his final security sweeps more out of habit than necessity now, walking the studio's perimeter each morning with his laptop tucked under one arm, checking camera feeds that hadn't shown anything more alarming than a delivery truck in months. I caught him doing it on Tuesday and said nothing, because I understood exactly what it meant to a person who'd spent a year living inside walls to still need the reassurance of checking, even when the danger had long since passed.

Rosa stopped by that same afternoon with her brother in tow, dropping off a folder of final scholarship recipient interviews Leo had asked her to review, and the two of them fell into an easy, comfortable rhythm that still occasionally caught me by surprise, considering everything that had brought them together in the first place.

"You look tired," Rosa told Leo, setting the folder down on his desk.

"I look like someone who's read the same security log four times just to make sure nothing changed between readings."

"That's not healthy."

"It's efficient," Leo said, and Rosa rolled her eyes but didn't push further, the specific affectionate exasperation of someone who'd learned exactly which of his habits were worth arguing about and which weren't.

Bianca and Rosa's scholarship recipient, a quiet, precise young woman named Adaeze who'd flown in from Lagos three weeks earlier, worked side by side at adjoining cutting tables, making last adjustments to their showcase pieces with the specific intensity of designers who understood exactly what this particular launch meant for their careers, for their futures, for everything they hoped to build from this single foothold.

"The seam's still pulling," Adaeze said, holding up a sleeve to the light, frustration clear in her voice.

"Let me see." Bianca crossed over, examined the stitching with a critical eye that had grown sharper every week she'd spent in this studio. "Here. You're fighting the fabric's natural drape instead of working with it. Try easing it instead of forcing it flat."

Adaeze tried it, and the seam settled properly, and something in her face lit up with the specific satisfaction of a problem finally solved.

"You're a good teacher," I told Bianca, watching from across the room.

"I had a good teacher," Bianca said. "You. Though you'd probably deny giving me any credit for it."

"I wouldn't deny it," I said, and meant it, surprising myself slightly with how easily the words came now, compared to how impossible they would have felt a year ago, back when every conversation between us still carried the weight of everything unresolved.

Elena managed everything else with the same steady competence she'd brought to every crisis this family had survived, though I noticed her pausing more often now, standing quietly near the mood board with a cup of tea she wasn't drinking, grief moving through her in the particular slow way that grief moves through people who've spent thirty years learning not to show it, letting it surface only in these small, private, unguarded moments.

Grandmother Redman sat in her usual corner, offering opinions nobody had asked for and everybody valued, healthy and settled and entirely, gloriously herself, present for all of it in a way that felt like its own quiet miracle after everything her small body had survived this past year.

"That button placement is wrong," she announced to Adaeze, apropos of nothing, watching the young designer work with the sharp, unforgiving eye she'd applied to every garment in this studio since the day she'd arrived, and Adaeze, wisely, simply adjusted it without argument, having learned within her first week what everyone else in the studio already understood about my grandmother's design opinions.

I moved through all of it feeling something I hadn't let myself feel in longer than a year, a specific settled purpose that had nothing to do with survival and everything to do with building something meant to last, meant to outlive every single person currently working toward its completion. Every stitch, every color coded index card, every careful adjustment to a hem, all of it adding up to something bigger than any individual piece of the work, the way Sophia had always understood the collection would need to become before it could actually protect anyone.

The night before the launch, David found me alone in the studio at midnight, standing in front of Clara's finished gown on its dress form, running my fingers along the beading Sophia had spent her last weeks perfecting.

"Couldn't sleep either," he said, crossing the room to stand beside me.

"I keep coming back to look at it," I admitted. "Making sure it's still real. Still here."

"It's still here." He was quiet for a moment, studying the dress alongside me, his hand resting lightly on the back of the dress form the way it might rest on the back of a chair, careful and grounding at once. "Do you think she knew," he said finally, "how much this would matter? Finishing it, I mean. Not just to you. To all of us."

"I think she knew exactly how much it would matter," I said. "I think that's precisely why she spent the last of her strength on it instead of resting the way her doctors wanted her to."

"I keep thinking about the last thing she said. About the phoenix mark."

"We always come back," I said quietly.

"I used to think that was just a family motto. Something pretty stitched onto old jewelry." He shook his head slightly. "Now I think she meant it as an instruction. Not just a description."

"I have one final thing to show you before tomorrow. Something my attorney finalized this afternoon. Something I've been planning since the week the trial ended."

He handed me a folder, thick, official, the kind of document that had defined so much of this past year's chaos and clarity in equal measure.

I opened it slowly, scanning the language, and it took me a moment to fully understand what I was looking at, the complete legal restructuring of the Blackwell trust laid out in careful, binding language. Dissolved as a family holding. Reformed entirely under a new charter. Majority ownership transferred permanently to the Phoenix Line Foundation.

"David." I looked up at him, stunned, flipping back through the pages to make sure I'd read the figures correctly the first time. "This is everything. The entire trust. Do you understand what you're giving away?"

"I understand exactly what I'm giving away," he said. "I've had a year to think about it."

"It's not a gift," he said quietly, watching my face with the specific steadiness he'd developed across this past year, the steadiness of a man who no longer needed to hide what he felt. "It's a correction. Harrison built an empire on stolen work. I want what's left of it to belong, finally, to the people it was always supposed to belong to."