Chapter 35 The Stolen Sketchbook
Brittany's POV
I set the contract down on the table.
I set it down carefully, squaring the edges against the surface, smoothing the fold lines flat with two fingers, and then sat very still with my hands in my lap, looking at the collection name printed at the top of the first page.
The Sovereign Line.
I had written those words in my sketchbook on a Tuesday evening in October, sitting cross-legged on the bedroom floor of the house I had shared with Adam, with a cup of cold tea beside me and three finished sketches spread around me on the carpet. I had said the name quietly to myself to hear how it sounded, decided it was right, and wrote it in the inside cover of the sketchbook beneath my name and the date.
I had never said it aloud to another person. Not once.
Adam had not come up with that name. Adam had never in five years of marriage demonstrated the capacity to come up with a name like that. The Sovereign Line was mine in the most complete and private sense, not just the designs but the language around them, the concept, the title, all of it drawn from the same interior source.
Which meant he had read my sketchbook. Had read it carefully enough to find the name I had written for myself on the inside cover and had put it on a legal contract two days after throwing me into the rain.
He had taken the sketchbook before I left. Had known what he was taking. Had understood its value precisely and had kept it deliberately, which meant he was afraid, because a man with nothing to fear destroys the evidence. A man who keeps evidence thinks he might need to use it, which means he is planning for a scenario in which his ownership of my work is challenged, and he needs a counterargument.
My handwriting was in that sketchbook. My dates. My signature. My margin notes and fabric references, and the specific private shorthand I used for construction details that was entirely my own and could be verified as mine by anyone who had seen my other work.
He was keeping my proof of his theft because he intended to reframe it as his own creative process documentation.
He was afraid, and his fear had made him careless enough to keep the one object that could destroy him.
I looked at Leo across the table.
"I need you to find out where he keeps it," I said.
Leo was already typing. He nodded without looking up.
I looked at Daisy. She was holding her tea with both hands, the bandaged wrist resting on the edge of the table, her eyes on my face, with the particular attention of someone waiting to understand what comes next.
"Rest tonight," I said. "Your wrist needs a real dressing, and you need sleep. Tomorrow you come to the studio and help me build something that will make everything he stole obsolete."
Daisy looked at me for a moment. "You're not going after the sketchbook first?"
"Leo will find it," I said. "And when we take it back, we take it back as part of everything else, at the same moment, in the same place. Not before." I picked up the contract and folded it back along its original lines. "Until then, the best response to him stealing my work is to build something so undeniably mine that the theft becomes its own evidence."
Daisy nodded slowly. "Okay," she said. "Tomorrow."
Elena appeared in the doorway of the sitting room with the specific quiet authority she used when she had decided a conversation was finished for health reasons. She looked at Daisy's bandaged wrist and then at the rest of us.
"She needs a proper dressing and eight hours," Elena said. "The rest of this keeps until morning."
Nobody argued with her.
The house settled into the night around ten o'clock. I heard doors closing and footsteps fading, and eventually the particular quality of silence that meant everyone else had gone to bed. I should have gone too. I was tired in the deep way that accumulates over weeks of disrupted sleep and sustained alertness, the kind of tired that lives in the bones rather than the eyes.
Instead, I went to the studio.
I told myself I would look at the mood board for 10 minutes and then sleep. I unlocked the door, turned on the lights, and stood in front of the board.
Ten minutes became twenty. Twenty became an hour.
I had brought four new sketches from the afternoon's work, the ones I had temporarily pinned to the edge of the board while I assessed them. Now I moved them into their proper positions within the collection's sequence, adjusting the spacing between pieces, reading the flow of the full arc from opening look to closing look, the way you read a sentence from beginning to end and listen for the rhythm.
My mother's pieces across the top. Mine below. Thirty years between them and no gap at all in the conversation.
Her opening silhouettes established a language of structured strength, shoulders that carried weight without being burdened by it, lines that were clean and certain. My pieces answered in the same language but pushed further, taking the foundation she had built and building higher from it, going to places she had been moving toward when the fire stopped her.
I was so absorbed in the arc of it that I didn't hear the door.
I didn't hear footsteps either.
I only became aware of David when he spoke, and even then, his voice was quiet enough that it landed softly rather than startling me.
"I couldn't sleep either," he said.
He was standing beside me, close but not crowding, looking at the mood board with an attention that was not polite or performative. He was actually looking, his eyes moving across the pieces in sequence, following something in them.
I didn't say anything. Neither did he.
We stood there together in the studio light, looking at the board. The silence between us was the specific, comfortable kind that only exists between people who have stopped performing for each other, and I was aware of it without knowing what to do with that awareness.
A long moment passed.
Then another.
David said, "Brittany."
His voice had changed. Something underneath the usual control had shifted, a different quality, the sound of a man choosing words carefully, not because he wanted to manage a situation but because what he was about to say mattered enough to get right.
"I need to tell you something," he said. "About the night of the masked ball."
I turned to look at him.
"Something I should have told you," he said, "before you ever signed that contract."